S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (Stalker) Thread

Foltest said:
I wish we get some more weapons updates.
I find the variations of weapons in comparison to the og stalkers to be lacking ( seriously, only like 4 handguns?) and i would have love more guns.
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The relative paucity sucks, especially since they've got the best upgrade and attachment setup in the entire series. I'm not certain but given that removeable attachments affect base weapon stats you might even be able to do caliber conversion kits like there are IRL using that system.

Hell, as poorly as it runs the entire thing offers a surprising amount of flexibility for people to mess around with even without tools, with the Skill Magazines mod doing things that would have been impossible in the older games like giving Skif a perma-buff that lets him sprint in exos without upgrades.
 
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I do also wonder what language people played it in. I played it with Ukrainian voice acting and I found it more suited for the setting as I had heard that the English VA was not good ( and not good in the cheese way the first three were).
 
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Foltest said:
I do also wonder what language people played it in. I played it with Ukrainian voice acting and I found it more suited for the setting as I had heard that the English VA was not good ( and not good in the cheese way the first three were).
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I played in Ukrainian for about 95% of my playthrough. Had to swap to english a few times briefly because there were some story-important moments that the subtitles didn't display correctly. Either I was too far away or they showed subtitles from the wrong npc while the main one was talking.

I miss the approach the original games took where everything important was in english with accents and everything else was in the original language. It was the best of both worlds for immersion and not getting in the way of gameplay.
 
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ParasiteSteve said:
The OG series had a very clear and unique style to them, the people making it wanted to show something with a specific tone and feeling, an emotional relationship, and they pretty much did it.

The 2 is just aping that, its just a copy of what was before.
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I think you might be underestimating how much the engine can sabotage your ability to capture a specific feel
 
Snekposter said:
Yeah, I actually really like some of the story beats.
Like when you meet Doctor at his house and there's tons of extremely well-done foreshadowing elements, like how he moves around like someone who has trouble seeing but it can be passed off as frustration and anger, knows a bit too much about Monolith in general and Strider in particular, possesses an unusual regret about killing Strider, plus the odd lamp on the basement generator that has the same strange blue-white frequency as psi equipment. You won't think too much of it the first time around but once you've done the Skif ending you can't unsee any of it.
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Snekposter said:
Degtaryov is also bro-tier since all he wants to do is try and keep as many people as possible from getting themselves killed in Pripyat, and when Monolith shows back up he and his dudes try and hold the line no matter what.
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They completely butchered the lore, I lined it all out in an earlier post in the thread.
 
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Foltest said:
I do also wonder what language people played it in. I played it with Ukrainian voice acting and I found it more suited for the setting as I had heard that the English VA was not good ( and not good in the cheese way the first three were).
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I admit i did the opposite. I just couldn't deal with not being able to understand anything if i looked away from subtitles.
 
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Thought it was relevant to drop this here, apparently, the reason why Stalker 2 came out the way it is is not only due to the tribulations during it's making but also because the company in and of itself were mismanaged and overworked.
https://vk.com/@-108967819-terrikony-tvorchestva-o-rabote-nad-stalker-2 Turn on auto translate and it should do the work fine enough.
TLDR:
  1. Apparently they brainstormed and pre-produced the game until 2020 and started hiring new staff to start development in 2020, meaning the game wasn't in active development until 2020, which would give it 5 years of development.
  2. Development is very haphazard with no consistent documentation on story or use of locations to guide designers in the making of the map.
  3. Many designers simply, came up with shit on their own because they weren't aware that there was gonna be shit at the place (pardon for the poor translation as it is google translating this) "Sometimes I missed the concept, but the concept is busy, – means I’ll make it myself (those same b/w sketches). There is no narrative at the location, but the narrative «smokes in the smoking room» or simply no one knows what will be there according to the narrative, they say, they haven’t arrived yet, — I’ll write it myself. There is not enough interesting gameplay — I will come up with it myself (concerns anomalies and archimanomalies and those mechanics that, alas, were not included in the game)."
  4. As development was parallel with the everything else in the game, the making of everything was running along with the making of the map, meaning that anything a person made today could be discarded the coming month of year as they work thing's out.
  5. In 2020-2022 were the years of sporadic and unbalanced development, often made by designers and developers who had to iron and work on stuff on their own as they had no direction from a design, from 2022-2025, as this designer says, was the era of "merciless cutting of content and its simplification".
  6. GSC was not happy with the individuality this designer showed in creating individual stories for his locations, this is very very usual for the industry.
  7. The designer expresses that the developers, designers and PR of GSC were always very frendly and welcoming, even helping him regain his job after he took a extended break from being burned out and welcoming him with big arms despite the company having grown substantially since then.
  8. Locations were worked on by a list of different artists and designers in small closed off testing areas that often could not be tested, many old designs were cut or thrown out, others have no reason to be kept in but were.
  9. The leaked build was inconsistent with release locks and work done because of the chaotic nature of working in GSC during 2020-2022, apparently, most of these documents were ironed out in 2022.
  10. Making the world coincide and make sense with the old world (the new map and the old map) was a "sore spot", which always ended in, this is a new game.
  11. Many thing's were changed "just because", if someone raised up a concern with this method or outlooks because of the old lore, they were told off.
  12. A lot was pulled from the old Stalker 2, this to say, Stalker 2012.
  13. They quite often consulted the wiki during development which often contains wrong or faulty knowledge about the games.
  14. The constant rewrites and revisions during development meant that the Stalker that the designer worked on was not the Stalker that came out, as a lot of his work was either redesigned or cut.
A lot of this is his own side of the story, he also wasn't with the team until the end of development, he left a month after the war started, but I feel like this is eye opening and tells us a lot about why the game came out the way it is.
I archived the follwowing website in 2 places, however it appears to have problems in both!
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/QM5yH
https://web.archive.org/web/2025030...ony-tvorchestva-o-rabote-nad-stalker-2#expand
For this reason, I will be posting a PDF screenshot of the website as well as the raw images to make sure that it stays archived, as well as a zip with the html code and the pictures, which should mimic the article perfectly.

I was not able to archive every image, namely, the images from the authors trip to the CNPP and the internal GSC Stalker multiplayer gamenight were not archived, however, most is here.
Sk2Fu_GlGxQ.jpg80PxBOzpRjA.jpgdpoEJlWIjWQ.jpgh61U5Ch7yFA.jpgG1UGkKnBS44.jpgWvQKm6Zjafo.jpgZ9_Hbzy9nIc.jpg1zXI6sZxvOE.jpgIHU3v5A5nW4.jpgPxZB-oto2vQ.jpg98tM24REo_U.jpgMiVFUjucrTI.jpgtfJ6Sd212gI.jpgbXjWzzkcd54.jpgHGBoKcDVFRk.jpgrYccOsvrZ3k.jpg4EL3sP5zGWE.jpg6l1BBgu2m_E.jpgqCuUfE6LtVA.jpg4BhFDstUuFc.jpgOPvQrFzhS_A.jpgqWtPnyEkRXg.jpgjQeSQC1OJJQ.jpgVVPcTRL7p3c.jpgxZrgoXgc0So.jpgkkBwdfT-rhc.jpgo9A5GxvAeDg.jpgSX16RLKwg4Y.jpg5E0oMMUG4vY.jpgt_hYZTPiloo.jpgzr2mKz5T9I0.jpg

Forgive me for any errors, either in translation or grammar, if anything else comes up I'll post about it.
 

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Battlefield42 said:
How the fuck.
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Steam's fucking up with the download sizes, they are still their normal size but appear much bigger in the download tab. For example I downloaded Helldivers 2 yesterday and it was under 100GBs but showed up as over 150 on the download tab. Nevertheless I was unable to update Stalker 2 until I turned my PC on today and this time it had no issues and updated immediately.
 
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Blackstar said:
Steam's fucking up with the download sizes, they are still their normal size but appear much bigger in the download tab. For example I downloaded Helldivers 2 yesterday and it was under 100GBs but showed up as over 150 on the download tab. Nevertheless I was unable to update Stalker 2 until I turned my PC on today and this time it had no issues and updated immediately.
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I assume this happens because steam, is now showing you the ammount that it processes, the way steam handles updates is they search for files that have been changed and only download and apply those, however, Unreal Engine from what I know doesn't pack files in a selective way, it's random, meaning that if the developer changes a script in a .pak file, that entire .pak file needs to be redownloaded to be reapplied, and that .pak file may have only that one script and the rest is either textures or has a lot of padding to add to that Steam when updating a game needs to replace these files and then it needs to validate these files, so not only do they apply the changes on large files they also add the entire game size to the processing pool to make sure they didn't fuck up.
If I said anything wrong here anyone is welcome to correct me, there isn't much information on the topic, but from what I can see having fucked up way too large updates is a consistent problem with every Unreal Engine game.
 
Frightened Rabbit said:
If I said anything wrong here anyone is welcome to correct me, there isn't much information on the topic, but from what I can see having fucked up way too large updates is a consistent problem with every Unreal Engine game.
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I've been wondering about that too. I've noticed updates that were a couple MBs but had much larger installs of those that had to be verify/install sizes. Too large of a difference to just be because of download compression.

But yes, some engines are shit and bundle tens of gigs per file and force a re-download of the whole file to update the tiniest part of it.
 
First restored cut content mod has been released:
  • This mod restores the cut quest with Noah "The Last Days" to the game. The scripts from the 2023 dev build were taken as a basis, they were transferred to the release version of the game. Many script fixes were made. Mechanics from the release version of the game were added.
  • Apart from localization files, this mod does not affect or change existing game files.
  • This Mod is translated into all languages available in the game
  • There is no voice acting for dialogues and animations
  • Made without SDK 💪
 
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