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

Silverhand's Arm said:
In your opinion, Is Stalker 2 patched and fixed or should I wait a little longer before buying?

I've seen and heard arguments for both sides so, I'm unsure if It's still buggy or at least now is playable and enjoyable.
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STALKER 2 is UE5 slop. Your typical UE slop. I watched a few videos about the last patch (1.4) and none of the performance issues were fixed it seems. It's UE5 so the issues will probably never be fixed because they are just part of the UE5 game experience it seems. I have it and it's not very good. The performance issues and it's just a not really a STALKER game. It feels STALKERish at times. But beneath that you can tell it's just a UE5 slop fest LARPing as a STALKER game. A life doesn't work flashlights don't cast shadows from NPC's there are no sniper scopes binoculars or night Vision devices in the game. It's a blrury mess with really bad ghosting and other issues because of the heavy reliance on TAA DLSS and frame gen to get even somewhat decent performance. If you have to get at least wait a while longer and get it during a steep sale. It's not worth what they are asking.

Otherwise just play the enhanced versions of the original games that are getting released in a few days. Then you can just go play STALKER Anomaly. If you want you could try GAMMA it's a mod for STALKER Anomaly. Anomaly with graphics mods looks way better than STALKER 2.
Blackstar said:
Comparisons of the original and enhanced editions, courtesy of reddit
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Looks pretty good. I just hope they didn't do what Bethesda did with Oblivion remaster and use UE5.
 
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Just saw on Twitter that the string "sid_sfx_item_DLC01_MQ10_B01_QD_VoroninOpenCNPPGate_1_72301" has been found in the game files, so DLC 1 will involve the power plant.
 
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Blackstar said:
Just saw on Twitter that the string "sid_sfx_item_DLC01_MQ10_B01_QD_VoroninOpenCNPPGate_1_72301" has been found in the game files, so DLC 1 will involve the power plant.
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DLC1 will involve the cut Duty and Freedom quests, TLDR is, Freedom and Duty were supposed to have questlines about how much they changed, wherein you could return them to their original state or solidify their image of Stalker 2, it's one of the good things they lifted off of Stalker 2012.

I assume that they will throw as much cut content as they possibly can into the first DLC, hopefully it includes the 3/4 of the quests in the leaked build that got cut because there was either no VA or the VA was in russian and they needed to get their VAs back in.
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Frightened Rabbit said:
I assume that they will throw as much cut content as they possibly can into the first DLC, hopefully it includes the 3/4 of the quests in the leaked build that got cut because there was either no VA or the VA was in russian and they needed to get their VAs back in.
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Where can I learn about everything that was cut? Appreciate it.
 
Blackstar said:
Where can I learn about everything that was cut? Appreciate it.
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The Vestnik leaks should still be up and seeded, if not tell me and I'll upload my archives somewhere.
Mind you there are 2 separate leaks, the first leak, is a leak of documents and art files sharing design documents to release locks, it is very revealing just how hap-hazard and mismanaged the development is as there is a lot of references and art for the game that is just, not used anywhere. Entire plotpoints missing. I heard that the writer died of COVID in 2020, I assume that is about when they decided to completely rewrite the story.

The second leak is an entire alpha build that got leaked thru torrent indexing. The story got poisoned thru a lot of mistellings and outright lies. The short version of it is that a build from QA got torrent indexed for whatever reason.

The entire facts are plainly that, a guy from a community called games.debugging, that crawls and decompiles alpha builds of console game, whose name was zecoxao found 5 stable validation builds which QA approved builds indexed on a torrenting website (this means that your torrenting software uploaded the torrent to a database in hopes of sharing it around, its an automatic setting in some torrenters).

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The guy tried to download them all but was only able to download one of them, specifically stable_validation_b49ee388, he looked it up at a glance, saw it had AES128 (basically, it uses a 128 character key that is used to decrypt it, without it it's virtually unbreakable) encryption and extracted the .pbd file and left it at that since he didn't care and it was tightly encrypted.

He took this .pdb file and shared it around his community as a neat thing, a russian kid (not kidding) who was in the group directly asked him what it was about, and he told him that it most likely was for Stalker 2, upon seeing this the kid immediatly went and posted about it to a VK group whose name is "Alpha-Beta-Build Maniacs", which got almost no attention but started a rumour. While the .pdb file is being spread around, Antischnapps, notorious russian sloptubber, goes and asks the kid where he got it from which leads him to zecoxao and directly to the leaked build, Antischnapps being a big russian youtuber, spread it around giving it loads of traction, however, he didn't post a link to it in his VK up until it is shared around RedPanda's discord server, a big place for the SoC-to-UE project and general X-Ray Modding.

Vestnik, without any of the knowledge of where it comes from, and how it got here, grabs Antischnapps folder and boosts it as "one of his sources", this is a 200gb block of encrypted files that gets passed around for days without GSC worrying too much, because AES128 is unbreakable without having the key
Misery however struck for GSC, because in a hilarious blindspot, the AES key was logged in the .pdb, probably when they were troubleshooting their encryption systems, which leads to the entire files being decrypted, here is one of the guys from the games.debugging group explaining it all.
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Here is my wild speculation theory: GSC were not hacked, neither were they dumb enuff to unwittingly let DHT on, a disgruntled emploeye who was discontent with the companies actions and the development of Stalker 2 purposefully grabbed all he could and indexed a raw .rar file to try and leak these files. Why? This has only come out recently but the development of Stalker 2 was a complete shitshow of mismanagement which is why it feels halfbaked, because they were running like headless chicken up until like 2020-2021 and then rushed to the finish line as soon as they possibly could, cutting and axing a lot of their planned content.

I don't currently have the organizational documents I made back when the leaks were fresh and me and my mates were chomping every bit and speculating what it was. I'll upload these later if I get them, maybe I'll make a megathread of cut content later, but fyi, yes, the leaked build did have not only binoculars, it also had thermal and night vision scopes.
 
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I am once again asking for mod recomendations
I finished OGSR rearmed (it becomes a fucking slog in the end) and I am looking for something more fun
 
harbringer883 said:
Did anyone else find STALKER GAMMA to be better than STALKER 2?
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I played a little of Anomaly and watched plenty of videos with GAMMA. I would say Anomaly especially with GAMMA is better than STALKER 2. Anomaly with graphics mods which I think GAMMA contains graphics mods looks way better than STALKER 2. If you want STALKER and eye candy just get Anomaly. Also just play the enhanced versions.
 
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BradeRunna said:
Otherwise just play the enhanced versions of the original games that are getting released in a few days. Then you can just go play STALKER Anomaly. If you want you could try GAMMA it's a mod for STALKER Anomaly. Anomaly with graphics mods looks way better than STALKER 2.
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Its really crazy what modders were able to pull out of the x-ray engine. That thing is pure Slavic mysticism code and they replaced it with fucking UE5.
Bunch of lazy hacks.
 
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Fruttasecca said:
Its really crazy what modders were able to pull out of the x-ray engine. That thing is pure Slavic mysticism code and they replaced it with fucking UE5.
Bunch of lazy hacks.
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  • Waste time and resources teaching a group of new developers how to use some obscure slavjank engine that's literally only used on three games.
OR
  • Hire a bunch of experienced developers that already know how to work on an established engine.

I would have loved for S2 to have been developed on an updated version of X-Ray, but GSC isn't a high-budget AAA studio that can afford to pay and train a bunch of programmers to use some obscure engine that they'll probably never use again in their lives. That's just unrealistic.
 
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Most Wanted Banana said:
  • Waste time and resources teaching a group of new developers how to use some obscure slavjank engine that's literally only used on three games.
OR
  • Hire a bunch of experienced developers that already know how to work on an established engine.

I would have loved for S2 to have been developed on an updated version of X-Ray, but GSC isn't a high-budget AAA studio that can afford to pay and train a bunch of programmers to use some obscure engine that they'll probably never use again in their lives. That's just unrealistic.
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Well the game is shit so there is that.
 
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Watching some videos about STALKER anomaly and GAMMA had me thinking if there was a way to remove the mutants and anomalies from something like Anomaly you could literally have a singleplayer version of Escape from Tarkov.
Fruttasecca said:
Its really crazy what modders were able to pull out of the x-ray engine. That thing is pure Slavic mysticism code and they replaced it with fucking UE5.
Bunch of lazy hacks.
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It's pretty amazing that anomaly with graphics mods managed to look better than STALKER 2. I understand why they decided to use UE5, but it was a bad decision. They should have scrapped the game instead of releasing the mess they call STALKER 2. It shouldn't have been released.
 
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