A PS5 port might come later. Microsoft execs have repeatedly (including recently) talked about bringing Xbox games to PlayStation - and it’s not just talk: Grounded, Hi-Fi Rush and Sea of Thieves were eventually ported over after some timed exclusivity. This doesn’t guarantee a port and there is no official word on this game yet, but still.
It might take a year though - or longer. The upshot is that by that point, most serious bugs should have been fixed. The downside is that you’ll miss out on the PC modding scene. Older games in the series have one of the best modding communities out there and I hope they’ll refine and expand this game as well.
Until then, you might want to take a look at Chernobylite. It’s a smaller title, but clearly inspired by the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games.
Don’t fret, it’s only a 3 month exclusive and it’s going to take them a minimum of 1y for the game to reach a state worthy of being sold. This is one for the patient gamers both on PC and the consoles.
Bummer about the bugs, but it sounds like the game is promising dispite them. Hopefully they’ll be able to squash the majority of them over the next few months.
It breaks my heart to read about all the bugs and performance issues. Not that they were entirely unexpected - especially since it’s a STALKER game - but I was hoping for a miracle. I really, really want this game to succeed and the game itself sounds like they hit it out the park. I just hope launching in this state doesn’t ruin the game’s reputation and sales.
Yeah the war has definitely affected the team a lot, and it’s very admirable they managed to release the game at all. Here’s hoping that with a few bug fixes and patches the game can be a solid entry to the series.
They are based in Kyiv and the team moved away from UA. If they were based in the Eastern part of the country, the game would have been in development hell forever.
My first hour of gameplay didn’t feel like as bad as the reviewers put it. I have a relatively beefy machine (5800x, 4070 and 32gb of ram), the game defaulted me to epic settings (with DLSS and frame gen) and I’m getting a pretty stable 50 FPS. The only bug I’ve encountered is the audio not playing, and I guess also the sun not reflecting correctly off of windows.
The first hour isn’t much but I was expecting a much worse initial experience. My biggest issue so far has been the default keybinds but I’m hoping to solve it when I have more time to tinker in the settings menus. I’ll update my experience when I’ve had more time to play. So far I’m happy.
I have a 7800X3D and a 4070TI, running the game at 3413x1920 with DLDSR on my 1440p monitor with everything on Epic and DLSS on Balanced. For the most part, I’m sitting at 65-85 FPS. However both frame drops and stutters are pretty bad, and performance tanks in the populated first town area (forgetting its name), regularly hitting 45-55 FPS. To note also, frame gen doesn’t seem to work for me. It works for a couple of minutes, then it starts behaving like a memory leak: getting me down to sub 10 FPS until it crashes or I reboot the game. This doesn’t happen with frame gen off.
On that subject though, I’m getting frequent crashes anyway. The first two hours yesterday were fine, but I’ve had 4 fatal error CTDs today. Very disappointing.
I guess I’ve gotten lucky. I have stable FPS, performance doesn’t tank in the first village, no crashes and the only stuttering I had was when I was killing everyone at the military base and I had about 20 bodies at the building entrance because they just kept coming.
Looking at the reviews and what others are saying I think I’m very much the exception here. I can attest that if the game works it very much is the STALKER experience and if STALKER is your jam then the game is worth playing.
My only negatives so far are the key binds (I checked, I can’t set them how I want to because some actions can’t be changed from the settings menu), there’s no overview of your standing with a faction or who belongs to what faction (maybe it unlocks later as I’m still in the first area, but I do miss that feature) and some mutants seem too beefy (would’ve never imagined running away from a pack of flesh, but I do run away because they eat buckshot for breakfast).
The keybinds are absolutely atrocious and I was staggered that so many were unable to be re-bound. Quick Melee is “V” and you can’t change it??
The beefy mutants are absolutely a problem and made me actually switch from Veteran to Stalker difficulty simply because those bullet sponges are not fun gameplay. Otherwise in the long sequence of inane design decisions the absurdly fast timescale (24h in game in a single real life hour!!!) is pulling me out of immersion a lot as well. I hope it can be modded without breaking everything because I just want to be able to savour these beautiful areas and weathers for a bit while exploring without weather changing and night falling every 5 minutes!
Lastly, and I haven’t gotten far enough to see much of it yet, but most importantly will be the A-life implementation and how much of it is actually fixable with patches. That was what made the other STALKER games feel alive, and the devs have at least acknowledged that it’s not working at the moment. Hopefully that means the engine for it is actually there though and can be patched. Unless they’re lying to save face, I suppose.
Mods are already out to fix it, but it’s not unlikely they tied a bunch of functions to timescale so that longer days screw up AI/Emissions/Quests etc.
It’s way better than any of the prior games were years after release. Granted, I do have a powerful computer (3090/5800X3D) but I haven’t had any significant performance issues nor crashes. A mild bit of jank but nothing that’s totally broken, just some occasional glitching corpses or debris.
Really, really enjoying it so far. Had a classic STALKER experience while exploring, got ambushed, found some really cool mega-anomaly, thought I was safe and got owned. 10/10 would die again
Skimmed through a few of these earlier and REALLY excited for later today (pre-ordered on Steam for the bonuses, will refund if it is a total trainwreck)
The scores are all over the place because this is a B-A game so it has to actually technically perform well (unlike AA-AAA games like Jedi Survivor that get a pass…), But the actual text is fairly consistent:
The world is amazing. The early-mid game balance is brutal and unforgiving and you will spend a LOT of time using AKs so degraded that they WILL jam. The emergent behavior from the storms and enemy placements lead to frantic struggles to reach cover. And the performance and bugs are all over the place and we all REALLY hope the day-one patch fixes things but nobody is that optimitsic.
And… as a STALKER fan who loved SoC and CoP (and didn’t hate CS…):
Just to add on a bit for people thinking “I’ll wait ten years for the community patches”. Yeah, that will be a less painful experience. But it is well worth looking back at how modders have handled the STALKERs over the years. Even as early as year one there were people who insisted on changing the game balance heavily and EVERYONE wanted to re-enable the cut repair features at merchants. Which made the game a lot less frustrating but also kind of defeated the purpose of the game.
Because the experience of stocking up on ALL the good 9x39 ammo in The Zone to take your VSS up against the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant? That involved using AKs and ARs to go from point A to point B because you wanted to save up that durability for when it mattered. And when it did matter? The fighting was so intense that you burned through ALL that ammo AND your gun was busted and there was the experience of basically throwing away a perfectly good gun that you spent your entire net worth on to sprint out from the cover of a burned out bus (that looked suspiciously like the same asset pack Metro and Fallout 3 used…) to grab an AK off a dead zombie to return fire before the RPG soldiers got a good shot.
Also… this is a Ukrainian as fuck game made by Ukrainians during a war for their very survival. Decide how much slack you are gonna cut for that and how much long term support you expect with the upcoming “wrinkle” of 2025.
I can’t believe Shadow of the Erdtree got nominated over Helldivers or Space Marine 2. It’s a DLC and it’s not even that good compared to the base game.
I haven’t got around to playing it yet, but what you’ve described sounds a lot like The Witcher 3 for me.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed it enough to finish pretty much everything (except all the Skellige question marks which thoroughly outstayed their welcome), and Hearts of Stone is better than Blood and Wine, but the gameplay was pretty flat throughout, and most of my enjoyment was in the cutscenes and dialogue and following threads to their inevitably grim conclusions. It’s not a game that I would ever replay.
Not because it doesn’t deserve to win at least one, it definitely does, but because the people who count for 90% of the vote were literally writing misinformation riddled hit pieces and for some reason think that Chinese gamers are only 3/5ths of a gamer or something (to discredit the large player count).
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