I saw this title a couple of times during conferences in the past years and I liked the general atmosphere and style, but I had absolutely no clue what kind of gameplay to expect.
Now that I seen it, it reminds me of The Division in a different theme. Was expecting a whole different kind of game for some reason. Can’t say the gameplay looks very interesting though, seems quite basic and bland, especially comparing to the Division games. Might still check it out since I like the style and theme.
You’re not mistaken actually, this game changed a lot and was apparently supposed to release in 2022 as a looter shooter. They delayed it, changed it to be a slower paced extraction shooter instead.
I thought I was going crazy, because I definitely felt like the impressions I got a couple of years ago definitely seemed more like a Destiny type of game.
Could still be fun but it seemed like a weird shift. But these kind of changes during development barely ever mean anything good for the final product.
Sticky Combo Points: The gist of it here is that Combo Points now remain after battle, giving combo moves a lot more use overall
This feels like a good change. I always felt like combos didn’t get much use outside of boss fights due to them resetting every battle. I’m not sure this entirely fixes the other problem wherein I almost exclusively used Mending Light, however.
I found a much better use for combo points: breaking complex patterns from enemies. Sure, mending light =s great, but live mana + a combo will do wonders agaihst some complex patterns later in game.
For my tastes, this is too deep a dive for a game whose entertainment value is going to come significantly from solving puzzles. I’m already sold on the game at this point.
There’s this theory that if an infinite amount of Bored Apes make games for an infinite amount of time at one point they’ll make a decent one. I don’t buy it.
I like watching Jauwn’s NFT game reviews. They almost feel like satire, with sarcasm, jokes, and criticism. They’re an interesting insight into the NFT game fad and its products.
In other videos it’s also sad to see they work as scams, leaving [naive] people lose a lot of money.
The old-school way, which is basically just overlaying an image with transparency over another one (in this case I also had to crop the template I found because it was the one with the 2 guys, and I used some online image editor tool but paint.net or gimp would have done the job if I had bothered to install them). I just searched “soyjack pointing template transparency PNG” in duckduckgo images search for the template.
Gamestar, the largest German gaming site, recently stated that they are very optimistic about the game and that the preview they got to play behind closed doors was excellent. Maybe it looks a bit outdated, but that was also the case for the previous titles when they came out.
So what kinds of gameplay differences would you have liked to see, that would not be “weak” and “mediocre” to you? What would you have them deliver?
One of the things that gets me excited about this game is the fact that the gameplay and visuals feel and look true to SoC. Which is exactly what most have been asking for, a “modern” S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game, and wow does it appear the have nailed it.
It just looks like a generic 2015 game or something. Gunplay seems very bulletspongy, weapons seem very static and weightless, general atmosphere is dull, AI enemies just run around like imbeciles and spray into the general direction of the player. In a game like this immersion should be a huge priority, but when it comes to shooting it just looks so incredibly generic.
It just makes it look like this game was made for the sake of having a sequel, without really knowing what they could add to it. It just looks like a Fallout game with all the interesting parts stripped out of it.
It is S.T.A.L.K.E.R… you compare it to fallout, is fallout not bulletspongy? This isn’t a PvP game, it is an open world RPG… There is various levels of armor, some of it is pretty strong, and there is also extensive differences between types of bullets and weapons. Without armor, you’re going to be dead in a couple quick shots. With armor, you will bleed to death without bandage or medkit. Some of the bullets will specifically be good for high armor penetration, some more effective for soft targets. If it is like the past S.T.A.L.K.E.R. titles, head shots are a 1 hit kill with any bullet, unless protected by armor. If you think S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is bulletspongy, clearly you’ve never had to try to run by the military base machine gun tower outside the cordon… Or the number of times an NPC gets a good headshot and BOOM game over, time to load from save, in an instant… You can get very far in SoC with the silenced pistol only by going for stealth and headshots to insta-drop enemies. So satisfying.
weapons seem very static and weightless
?? Attachment options, ammunition options, jams and equipment damage, upgrade-tree for every individual weapon… You can set up one AK-74 for sniping and another for close-up bullet spraying.
AI enemies just run around like imbeciles and spray into the general direction of the player
Have you ever played a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. title? SoC had literally revolutionary AI, where NPCs behaved in ways never before seen in video games prior, such as intelligently grouping, splitting up and flanking, scouring an area in a human-like-way instead of just walking to wherever you were and then giving up when you aren’t there, taking cover, reinforcing and covering each other, and applying grenades in actually useful ways. I mean yes, it was still a 2007 game, it definitely wasn’t perfect, and there was loads of wonkiness and weird NPC behavior that you could exploit, but at the time it was mind-blowing. Clear Skies took this idea even further and applied it faction-wide to the entire map, and suddenly you were dropped into a highly dynamic full scale war with shifting fronts and struggles over strategic objectives. Amazing AI is one thing that the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. titles are known for.
You can hear in the video ~1:24, an AI yells “Cover me, I’ll hide”. I’m guessing they included in this clip to hint and signal that this game will have the same kind of focus on great AI mechanics. In some of the indoor clips, you can see that the AI are actually taking cover during the fire fight instead of moving around. Even if they took the NPC AI code from Call of Pripyat and just directly shoved it into this game, it would 1) be nothing like what you just described and 2) be head and shoulders above NPC AI in even recent titles… I’d love to see some significant improvements and iteration still, though.
It just makes it look like this game was made for the sake of having a sequel
Hurray! Exactly what everyone was asking for! We just want more original S.T.A.L.K.E.R., yes, correct.
You can not like the atmosphere and environments, that’s fine, if so this game really is not for you at all. You can’t say it doesn’t look immersive, unless you’re just trolling.
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It just looks like a generic 2015 game or something. Gunplay seems very bulletspongy, weapons seem very static and weightless, general atmosphere is dull, AI enemies just run around like imbeciles and spray into the general direction of the player.
What is really ironic is that ^ describes fallout perfectly, EXCEPT for dull atmosphere…
I still can’t get over how “wrong” it sounds and feels to have native English speaking accents for the voice work instead of the heavy Ukrainian and Russian accents. This is one to play with Ukrainian VA and English subtitles for sure.
I noticed this, too. “FUCK HIM UP WITH A GRENADE!”, “Cover me, I’ll hide”; I need a Ukrainian language setting for these voicelines. I need that panic “Oh shit!” feeling of not really knowing what the AI were shouting about like I had in SoC, and then getting surprised when they had flanked and crept up around me. That was pretty core to my experience, while the accents built a lot of immersion and feel in the world.
I think Stalker 2 needs a mix and match option where we can choose the language of the dialogue line by line. Or at least a future “meme” language option where the best lines of every translation is used.
The development company is Ukrainian, I’m sure they agree with you but are working with some tighter constraints than typical for game development. Please give them some slack on feature requests.
Believe me, I have nothing but patience and slack to give them. I see how my tone could be read as more demanding than nostalgic in that message. I’ve waited like 14 years for this game, that I thought would never be made when the original studio dissolved, I wouldn’t even be phased by an additional delay.
Even where this game may have faults, I have faith that there will be incredible work done by the modding community delivering more than I can ask for, such as there was for SoC/CoP
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