4 Likes
Few things have made me as sad in stalker 2 as helping some poor fella fish his broās body out of an anomaly field, him gratefully telling me that he respects that I didnāt loot him and that heāll help me anytime I need because word is bond, then 5 mins later the AI director making him charge up the hill to try and kill me because heās a bandit and lol fuck you I guess.
8 Likes
this games obsession with reintroducing characters from the original trilogy so they can die or be executed by skif with little to no fanfare is hysterical. its so fan fictiony its absurd. im forced to judge this game like its a mod, its a not so good sequel to stalker but hilarious and decent by mod standards. i cant even believe some of this shit. imagine surviving a turd ass game like clear sky only to be killed off-handedly in a side quest doing some shit youāve done 1000 times because itās been 11 years since the game you were introduced in. amazing
5 Likes
Thereās a side mission to kill both sultan and beard because theyāre stuck living in the past
1 Like
Thatās about the level of subtlety Iāve come to expect from a stalker fan work
Whatās even funnier is that if you donāt kill them during that quest they both realize that itās the fault of a STUPID BROAD that they were pitted against each other and start jointly running skadovsk which is called skadovsk again.
3 Likes
theyāre gonna make you kill every old NPC except for Toad and at the end hes gonna be like āfinally, you cleaned up the zone for meā and turns the whole zone into a huge rookie village with the worst markup youve ever seen
(image by veronica of course)
4 Likes
Attack ships. On fire.
3 Likes
A sampling of the amazing dialogue from Vector of Alienation
also I donāt think I took a picture of it but at one point Barkeep said someone ādun goofedā
3 Likes
the songs on the OST for stalker 2ās (terrible) endings are named like mass effect 3 ending choices. lol.
3 Likes
Another patch today. Maybe itāll finally fix the Zalissya quest thatās been broken in a variety of ways since launch.
1 Like
Someone released a mod for the first Stalker that adds subtitles for a bunch of the incidental dialogue and cutscenes that the old closed caption mod missed, but itās not compatible with ZRP. (This is the mod if you donāt care about using ZRP.) So I took the cutscenes from it and combined them with the subtitles mod that is compatible with ZRP 1.07 R5. Now all the important stuff, besides Ghostās PDA I think, is subtitled at least. This might be helpful to someone, but only if youāre using a non-English dub
5 Likes
Has anyone tried this with a controller? Iām curious if itās a decent way to play it or not. Canāt imagine itās great.
I saw this a while ago and itās really funny because there is a stalker mod called Alternativa (which is actually pretty good and weird lol) that has a LOVE STORIES mod with fully animated sex scenes already. I canāt believe āS.E.X. Z.O.N.E.ā is a stolen concept, smh, russian modders canāt have shit anymore
2 Likes
Iām about done with stalker 2. Really glad I didnāt buy it. Besides like the billion bugs, which I expected, itās just really not that interesting. I had hundreds of every consumable items before I was even like, 1/3 done with the game. You can have too much shit by the end of the first area. And itās not a short fucking game either. I explored where the bandit base used to be in Dark Valley (itās in the Garbage now for some reason) and spent like 20 minutes walking around breaking all the crates and walked out with 40 of like bread, vodka, sausage, water, it was absurd. I was very confused as to why such a huge complex was empty and itās because at the time I wasnāt far enough in the main quest for the gang thatās supposed to be there to spawn. But the other bandit gangs in the Garbage are always there and you can just mow them down without any indication as to their significance. At least one of these bandit camps was half neutral half hostile to me, so there were guys loitering around in the middle of the fight while I killed a bunch of their allies. The fucking AI sucks, like even if we ignore the broken random encounter generator the game uses as āA-Lifeā they just act stupidly in fights. Facing the wrong way, getting stuck on shit, forgetting theyāre in combatā¦their biggest advantage is that they soak up tons of fucking bullets, like I remember people complaining about bullet spongy enemies in Shadow of Chernobyl but even with the peashooter at the car park those bandits have nothing on the fucking guys in STALKER 2. Thereās also a bug? where NPC armor/gear is tied to the playerās rank for some reason, which is now invisible to the player, so after SIRCAA you just start seeing tons of guys in exoskeletons etc and regular stalkers disappear. Real nice.
They want to have dialogues and stuff now but almost every choice you make doesnāt really affect anything. A lot of the time picking the more information style options fucks up the flow of the conversation and makes it awkward. Thereās a thing early on to show a PDA to people or not and the story is not affected in the slightest by who you show it to. If you show it to the Ward, you get a badge that makes dealing with them easier and a unique weapon. Thereās no benefit to withholding this info from them even though every NPC tells you to trust no one and chastises you for helping people because the Spark guys are dicks to you no matter what you do, youāre literally just choosing who you want to get the side quest you have to do next to progress the main quest from and it doesnāt affect the overall story. You get all these choice moments to kill people or not and very few of them actually have consequences. So many choices boil down to āsomething slightly different happensā in one of the bad Metro-style cutscenes and the flow of the story remains the same. Even the fucking āendingsā, if you can call them that, are all variations on the same theme. There is one ending. And all of them suck no matter the decision you make. It feels so much like a modern Bethesda game itās unbelievable. An NPC explaining a brainwashing TV to you and then immediately doing an idle animation where he stares directly at it while pondering it, or going āCanāt you see Iām busy??ā because you talked to them too fast after they said āHey Skif I need to talk to you.ā
The way they use the Monolith guys from Call of Pripyat, the recurring characters, all these plot points recycled again and again from the original trilogy, which already had a problem with two of the three games in the series doing this, sucks. Like sending me to rescue a guy from bandits at the beginning, the Sphere raid being like Agroprom, sending me to X18, I get it. Iām not a fucking idiot. How many of these can you make where you nudge me like āremember this??? remember when you did this???ā over and over again. The parallel structure might be interesting if they ever did anything substantial with it but they didnāt in Clear Sky and they donāt do it here either. Itās not like there isnāt an interesting story you could make out of the neo-Eggheads fucking with shit they shouldnāt be, either. It is a logical follow up to the original to take that angle. But their game is exactly what you think it is if you played the original, it spends an excruciating amount of time on a story that you can guess how itās going to play out, and much like the original two sequels it continues to shit all over the ambiguity that made the first gameās story interesting.
Part of the problem with this series is that we have now had three sequels that continue to stretch the one gameās worth of ideas increasingly thin. The two trilogy games were very much dependent on cut content and unused ideas, and now they made another one that more or less treads the same ground. Thereās a mod called True Stalker that came out last year and has basically the same aspirations as STALKER 2, itās funny how similar they are in some aspects. It goes for the cheap remembrances too and today most people in the community have very mixed feelings about it.
STALKER 2 is incredibly inconsistent in every area. And Iāve seen a lot of people in STALKER discords and stuff go āwell just wait a few years and itāll be good, like Cyberpunk!ā which is honestly an insane premise to ask people who paid a bunch of money for this game to follow. I like the anomalies and artifact art, I guess. They worked real hard on that.
I had to keep editing this post because I remembered new things that annoyed me about the game every time I thought about it
7 Likes
Thankfully Iām done cuz the new patch for stalker 2 is 115gb so if youāve installed all the patches since release you have installed the entire games worth of space again. Unreal Engine 5 fucking sucks. Not only do you have to wait for basic features from the 2007 game to get patched into the 2024 one slowly over 1-2 years you gotta deal with this shit. Miserable.
3 Likes
really looking forward to the new dev team ruining the PC versions of the original games for no reason by āupdatingā them with the console ports. you know, who wants to have access to 15 years of mods anyway, wouldnāt you prefer using our shitty mod.io integration that only supports texture mods
2 Likes
I finally played a couple hours of this and I agree thereās something uncanny and not very interesting about making a game that tries to be this authentic to 2000s jank except in UE5 for some reason. kind of the opposite of dragons dogma 2
3 Likes