S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl - coming September 5th

[ADL]

So how many DLCs/expansions do you think S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 will have?

Hopefully a lot.

So how many skins/premium weapons/etc do you think S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 will have?

Hopefully none.

 

[Baron Dupek]

That name ring a bell... played as one in some STALKER mods, mostly for Call of Pripyat.
Guess some modders were hired in GSC and left their mark?

 

[Takamori]

My hopes:
Just STALKER with a more stable engine and slightly pretty graphics, more THE ZONE story, a decent AI so you can have several organic encounters and adventures

My expectations/Fear:
Far Cry Slav edition, Retarded AI, Developers not getting the point of the previous game, no STALKER difficulty enemies will just be bullet sponges, MTX, retarded slav memes and forcing cheeki breeki because LE REMEMBER PREVIOUS GAME CHEEKI BREEKI AMIRITE GUYS XDDDDDDDD

 

[toro]

None.

Cyberpunk2077

 

[RhodokMasterRaceOfficial]

Play Anomaly

 

[Invictus]

Don’t really understand the angst about this one; Stalker 2 would be pretty fucking hard to screw up

Instead of a story driven experience as the Metro games we know we are getting an open world easter european sandbox with anomalies, emissions, factions (probably all the usual suspects) lots of sidequests and possibly an upgrade system for weapons and armor set in the Zone... UT is known for running very well, the shooting mechanics will probably be better than X Engine, and they will probably still have the emergent gameplay of the earlier games

Most of the “hardcore” aspects like food, bleeding and sleep are still up in the air, but guessing from Metro they will probably be an optional difficulty level so no issues there

So it looks like an Epic games and X Box exclusive at least for a year and well before that people will be modding the shit out of it, so I am surprisingly hopeful for it

 

[Lyric Suite]

Takamori pointed in what ways the game can fuck things up, and it wouldn't be difficult at all.

Far Cry is superficially like Stalker but fundamentally retarded and shitty, so you cannot rely on what's on paper we actually have to see how things end up in practice. Until they shows us something we cannot rule out decline.

 

[Takamori]

Like this is my pessimistic approach talking, can't trust anyone in gaming industry because its all smoke and mirrors pure marketing to get us hyped for the product buy it and then get people to cope with buyers remorse.
No idea what is going on the Dev side, do they have the old team? Thought they all fought between themselves and thats why we never saw STALKER being published sooner.

 

[Tacgnol]

So it looks like an Epic games and X Box exclusive at least for a year and well before that people will be modding the shit out of it, so I am surprisingly hopeful for it

Despite the dev claims, there is zero guarantee of any decent modding support.

The official UE4 modding support is extremely limited and the reliance on cooked game files is going to make the types of mods we got for the originals very difficult to pull off.

The only way this might be averted is if they've worked with Epic to modify the engine to use more open file formats, but does anyone really think they'll put that level of effort in?

 

[Invictus]

So it looks like an Epic games and X Box exclusive at least for a year and well before that people will be modding the shit out of it, so I am surprisingly hopeful for it

Despite the dev claims, there is zero guarantee of any decent modding support.

The official UE4 modding support is extremely limited and the reliance on cooked game files is going to make the types of mods we got for the originals very difficult to pull off.

The only way this might be averted is if they've worked with Epic to modify the engine to use more open file formats, but does anyone really think they'll put that level of effort in?

Jesus now you have me worried...
FFS it is almost the equivalent of TES game removing mod support; the main reason why games like Oblivion are still relevant on PC is because of the huge modding scene and Stalker even more because there are no official mod support tools for their games
Hell modders have improved almost everything about XEngine!
It sounds kind of crazy but I would have hired these modders to develop Stalker 2 and given them the go ahead to use the updated versions of the engine and go crazy with it to creat Stalker 2.... dammmit now I am worried; Unreal engine, Xbox centric development, and what they have show so far...

 

[Tacgnol]

So it looks like an Epic games and X Box exclusive at least for a year and well before that people will be modding the shit out of it, so I am surprisingly hopeful for it

Despite the dev claims, there is zero guarantee of any decent modding support.

The official UE4 modding support is extremely limited and the reliance on cooked game files is going to make the types of mods we got for the originals very difficult to pull off.

The only way this might be averted is if they've worked with Epic to modify the engine to use more open file formats, but does anyone really think they'll put that level of effort in?

Jesus now you have me worried...
FFS it is almost the equivalent of TES game removing mod support; the main reason why games like Oblivion are still relevant on PC is because of the huge modding scene and Stalker even more because there are no official mod support tools for their games
Hell modders have improved almost everything about XEngine!
It sounds kind of crazy but I would have hired these modders to develop Stalker 2 and given them the go ahead to use the updated versions of the engine and go crazy with it to creat Stalker 2.... dammmit now I am worried; Unreal engine, Xbox centric development, and what they have show so far...

They have worked closely with Epic so it is possible that something has been done in regards to modding capabilities, but I wouldn't get my hopes up.

The reason X-Ray was so moddable is all the data files were in an easy to edit format, the meshes and textures were easy to export and modify and the game's scripts were all open in a lua syntax.

I've not seen a single UE4 game that has had easy to modify data files, everything is cooked and hard to modify.

 

[normie]

we'll always have Zaton

 

[Malamert]

Army Warehouses master race.

 

[Tacgnol]

Regardless of STALKER 2, we'll always have a bunch of autistic Russians advancing the original X-Ray engine as well.

Oxygen and Open X-Ray are both way more advanced than the original engine at this point.

 

[Wunderbar]

I bet there's going to be some autistic project like Skywind, except about porting Stalker 2 into xray engine.

 

[vortex]

How much time they would have spend to update their older tech? I mean Unreal must be the best choice and there won't be loading times.

Spoiler

 

[Tacgnol]

How much time they would have spend to update their older tech? I mean Unreal must be the best choice and there won't be loading times.

Spoiler

As far as I'm aware it's running on UE4, not UE5.

It's also been in development for a while, so I doubt it's even the latest version of UE4.

 

[Israfael]

I would expect as much from STALKER 2 as compared to if the current Interplay decided to do another Fallout. The ship has sailed and the sailors are either dead or joined the other crews.

 

[cretin]

Stalkers future is with openxray and similar projects not nuGSC.

 

[Malamert]

Stalkers future is with openxray and similar projects not nuGSC.

Speaking of OpenXRay, does anybody know what happened to that other project, X-Ray Oxygen? It just pretty much disappeared off the face of the world. Its Github page is abandoned and so is the moddb page.
Played SGM 2.2 + STCoP + Atmosfear 3 on X-Ray Oxygen and it's a pretty good engine.

 

[Twiglard]

The official UE4 modding support is extremely limited and the reliance on cooked game files is going to make the types of mods we got for the originals very difficult to pull off.

The only way this might be averted is if they've worked with Epic to modify the engine to use more open file formats, but does anyone really think they'll put that level of effort in?

Or is it? Normally you can load things programmatically. Is that impossible in UE4? In the worst case you should be able to implement .OBJ (or use a library for something more sophisticated) and load the mesh vertices manually.

If anything I definitely don't want cutscenes that make trees fall dramatically.

 

[Tacgnol]

The official UE4 modding support is extremely limited and the reliance on cooked game files is going to make the types of mods we got for the originals very difficult to pull off.

The only way this might be averted is if they've worked with Epic to modify the engine to use more open file formats, but does anyone really think they'll put that level of effort in?

Or is it? Normally you can load things programmatically. Is that impossible in UE4? In the worst case you should be able to implement .OBJ (or use a library for something more sophisticated) and load the mesh vertices manually.

If anything I definitely don't want cutscenes that make trees fall dramatically.

I've no idea what GSC have cooked up with Epic, but, out the box, none of the stuff you could do with X-Ray engine would be easily to replicate in UE4.

One of the biggest things is UE4 scripts are compiled and cooked when the game is built. They aren't raw lua like in X-Ray.

It is possible that GSC have made modifications to the engine, but I'm not convinced they'd put that sort of effort in.

 

[Tacgnol]

Stalkers future is with openxray and similar projects not nuGSC.

Speaking of OpenXRay, does anybody know what happened to that other project, X-Ray Oxygen? It just pretty much disappeared off the face of the world. Its Github page is abandoned and so is the moddb page.
Played SGM 2.2 + STCoP + Atmosfear 3 on X-Ray Oxygen and it's a pretty good engine.

Oxygen is pretty dead because most people jumped ship to Open X-Ray. The latter is more actively developed.

CoC used Open X-Ray and Anomaly and other big mods based off CoC have continued the development.

 

[Twiglard]

Are they gonna add quests to Anomaly that aren't a total grind? Inventory management is even worse. The whole experience is insufferable.

 

[Tacgnol]

Are they gonna add quests to Anomaly that aren't a total grind? Inventory management is even worse. The whole experience is insufferable.

No idea. I often jump on Anomaly but get bored pretty quickly.

That said, it being popular and pushing development of the Open X-Ray engine is no bad thing.