S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl - coming November 20th

[Infinitron]

To all our players,

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl will now be launching on November 20, 2024, moving from the previously planned date of September 5, 2024. We know you might be tired of waiting, and we truly appreciate your patience. These two additional months will give us the chance to fix more “unexpected anomalies” (or simply “bugs”, as you call them).

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is shaping up to be everything we envisioned, with the launch nearly here, and we are incredibly excited to share more with you. To give you a taste of what’s coming, we’re thrilled to announce the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 Developer Deep Dive video, which will be released on Xbox media channels on August 12. This detailed update will include exclusive interviews, lots of new footage, and a full video walkthrough of one of the game quests. We can’t wait for you to see it and get a comprehensive understanding of how the game looks and plays.

We are always grateful for your ongoing support and understanding — it means the world to us. We’re just as eager as you are to finally release the game and for you to experience it for yourself.

With love and gratitude,
GSC GAME WORLD

 

[cretin]

It's amusing that all the actual gameplay footage - not the very obviously prerendered shit they've been peddling as "gameplay" for years - makes this, visually, look arguably worse than metro exodus, which is 5 years old at this point. I mean I don't really care, but everything else about it doesn't inspire confidence, particularly the UI and that it was obviously designed with consoles in mind first.

 

[motherfucker]

Who gives a shit when Anomaly is a thing? Let these assmad hohols do what they want, the real STALKER will always be there.

 

[randir14]

All the fanboys keep saying "well of course it's going to be delayed, they're developing a game while being attacked by Russia". No they aren't. They moved to Prague two years ago. And there was no war going on when the first three games kept being delayed and released full of bugs anyway. When November approaches you can be sure they'll announce a new 2025 release date.

 

[Surf Solar]

Who gives a shit when Anomaly is a thing? Let these assmad hohols do what they want, the real STALKER will always be there.

Anomaly has nothing to do with 'real STALKER'.

 

[jebsmoker]

Who gives a shit when Anomaly is a thing? Let these assmad hohols do what they want, the real STALKER will always be there.

Anomaly is *not* what STALKER should be, considering Anomaly is just endless rinse and repeat quests with a million and one guns and various ultra-hardcore busywork mechanics thrown on top that don't really add anything

Call of Chernobyl and its various flavors has been a disaster for the western STALKER community, there are many better custom story mods that you can play that actually have perfectly fine English translations now

 

[Ryzer]

Modders played SoC and thought after playing the game that picking the repetitive FedEx quests and stretching them for dozens of hours would make a good game. Thy name is Anomaly, absolute garbage.

 

[Fargus]

The only Stalker i've played was SoC - flawed but atmospheric masterpiece, but i don't really want to play it for the rest of my life lol. And i don't really give a shit about other stalker games, tried Clear Sky but got filtered somewhere in the swamps because the start was really boring. Tried a few mods and they were prosperized empty garbage voiced by schoolboys.

Anomaly despite getting so much bile and hatred here is great freeplay mod for atmosphere and immersion. If you just want to run as your own stalker instead of playing the same story as Strelochnik or whatever the fuck, you can participate in faction wars and survive in the zone while hunting for artifacts and enjoying the atmopshere. They added some fun stuff like stalkers behaving like typical codexers and having pda shitpost wars or commenting on current events. Contracts are indeed repetitive, they should add better variety of them because modding annomaly on your own is a pain in the ass and i just get essentials and QoL stuff.

 

[Gargaune]

As delay announcements go, that's pretty fucking excellent, I genuinely chuckled. CDPR might wanna learn how it's done for their next Cyberpunk.

 

[TheCumGuzzler]

Who gives a shit when Anomaly is a thing? Let these assmad hohols do what they want, the real STALKER will always be there.

Anomaly is *not* what STALKER should be, considering Anomaly is just endless rinse and repeat quests with a million and one guns and various ultra-hardcore busywork mechanics thrown on top that don't really add anything

Call of Chernobyl and its various flavors has been a disaster for the western STALKER community, there are many better custom story mods that you can play that actually have perfectly fine English translations now

People shit on GAMMA but it's a complete improvement over Anomaly, the base anomaly is just a task grind, at least Gamma adds a lot of elements and makes Anomaly fairly interesting (and hardcore)
Recently they removed a lot of the tacticool guns which is really nice

 

[Fargus]

Who gives a shit when Anomaly is a thing? Let these assmad hohols do what they want, the real STALKER will always be there.

Anomaly is *not* what STALKER should be, considering Anomaly is just endless rinse and repeat quests with a million and one guns and various ultra-hardcore busywork mechanics thrown on top that don't really add anything

Call of Chernobyl and its various flavors has been a disaster for the western STALKER community, there are many better custom story mods that you can play that actually have perfectly fine English translations now

People shit on GAMMA but it's a complete improvement over Anomaly, the base anomaly is just a task grind, at least Gamma adds a lot of elements and makes Anomaly fairly interesting (and hardcore)
Recently they removed a lot of the tacticool guns which is really nice

That's what i'm going to try instead of Anomaly next time. Heard it's good.

 

[deuxhero]

look arguably worse than metro exodus, which is 5 years old at this point

And this game is 6 years old at this point.

 

[ADL]

I'll excuse it looking a little worse than Metro as long as it isn't as static as Metro. I'd imagine A-Life 2.0 (if it exists lol) eats up a lot of compute similar to Dragon's Dogma 2.

 

[jebsmoker]

Who gives a shit when Anomaly is a thing? Let these assmad hohols do what they want, the real STALKER will always be there.

Anomaly is *not* what STALKER should be, considering Anomaly is just endless rinse and repeat quests with a million and one guns and various ultra-hardcore busywork mechanics thrown on top that don't really add anything

Call of Chernobyl and its various flavors has been a disaster for the western STALKER community, there are many better custom story mods that you can play that actually have perfectly fine English translations now

People shit on GAMMA but it's a complete improvement over Anomaly, the base anomaly is just a task grind, at least Gamma adds a lot of elements and makes Anomaly fairly interesting (and hardcore)
Recently they removed a lot of the tacticool guns which is really nice

i would consider trying Gamma if if tries to implement actual interesting quests, with interesting stories to back them up, but if it doesn't then it's probably not for me tbh

 

[motherfucker]

Anomaly is just a base game you can mod and configure however you like. GAMMA is just a modpack, you could have the exact same experience by installing each mod individually long before GAMMA became a thing, same with escape from pripyat. Don't like the freeplay, want new quests? There's mods for that, too. Everyone who's shitting on Anomaly here is just outing himself as a retard who couldn't figure out the config menu. Or a retard who repeats common criticisms without realizing they were originally aimed at Misery and Anomaly never had most of those issues in the first place.

 

[jebsmoker]

Anomaly is just a base game you can mod and configure however you like. GAMMA is just a modpack, you could have the exact same experience by installing each mod individually long before GAMMA became a thing, same with escape from pripyat. Don't like the freeplay, want new quests? There's mods for that, too. Everyone who's shitting on Anomaly here is just outing himself as a retard who couldn't figure out the config menu. Or a retard who repeats common criticisms without realizing they were originally aimed at Misery and Anomaly never had most of those issues in the first place.

or maybe people don't like endless fedex or 'go here and kill this' quests repeated ad infinitum until you become bored

 

[motherfucker]

Anomaly is just a base game you can mod and configure however you like. GAMMA is just a modpack, you could have the exact same experience by installing each mod individually long before GAMMA became a thing, same with escape from pripyat. Don't like the freeplay, want new quests? There's mods for that, too. Everyone who's shitting on Anomaly here is just outing himself as a retard who couldn't figure out the config menu. Or a retard who repeats common criticisms without realizing they were originally aimed at Misery and Anomaly never had most of those issues in the first place.

or maybe people don't like endless fedex or 'go here and kill this' quests repeated ad infinitum until you become bored

I just said you can mod in new questlines you dumbfuck nigger. There's also a shitload of story mods for the originals, although many of them are exclusively in Russian.

 

[jebsmoker]

Anomaly is just a base game you can mod and configure however you like. GAMMA is just a modpack, you could have the exact same experience by installing each mod individually long before GAMMA became a thing, same with escape from pripyat. Don't like the freeplay, want new quests? There's mods for that, too. Everyone who's shitting on Anomaly here is just outing himself as a retard who couldn't figure out the config menu. Or a retard who repeats common criticisms without realizing they were originally aimed at Misery and Anomaly never had most of those issues in the first place.

or maybe people don't like endless fedex or 'go here and kill this' quests repeated ad infinitum until you become bored

I just said you can mod in new questlines you dumbfuck nigger. There's also a shitload of story mods for the originals, although many of them are exclusively in Russian.

the western modding community has had years to implement new and interesting quests for Call of Chernobyl or whatever

very few, if any people have bothered to do this, most people just wanna add stupidly complex repair mechanics or a million and one AR or AK variants instead of actual good quests and suffer from severe modder's syndrome

 

[motherfucker]

Anomaly is just a base game you can mod and configure however you like. GAMMA is just a modpack, you could have the exact same experience by installing each mod individually long before GAMMA became a thing, same with escape from pripyat. Don't like the freeplay, want new quests? There's mods for that, too. Everyone who's shitting on Anomaly here is just outing himself as a retard who couldn't figure out the config menu. Or a retard who repeats common criticisms without realizing they were originally aimed at Misery and Anomaly never had most of those issues in the first place.

or maybe people don't like endless fedex or 'go here and kill this' quests repeated ad infinitum until you become bored

I just said you can mod in new questlines you dumbfuck nigger. There's also a shitload of story mods for the originals, although many of them are exclusively in Russian.

the western modding community has had years to implement new and interesting quests for Call of Chernobyl or whatever

very few, if any people have bothered to do this, most people just wanna add stupidly complex repair mechanics or a million and one AR or AK variants instead of actual good quests and suffer from severe modder's syndrome

True enough, but slavs got you covered. Check this one out, for instance. Keep in mind it was made for the first game, before the second one even came out, so shit might feel dated.

 

[Gerrard]

Why add gameplay content when you can just make the player spend half of their game time in their inventory?

 

[Deadass]

Who gives a shit when Anomaly is a thing? Let these assmad hohols do what they want, the real STALKER will always be there.

Anomaly is *not* what STALKER should be, considering Anomaly is just endless rinse and repeat quests with a million and one guns and various ultra-hardcore busywork mechanics thrown on top that don't really add anything

Call of Chernobyl and its various flavors has been a disaster for the western STALKER community, there are many better custom story mods that you can play that actually have perfectly fine English translations now

Such as? I only know true stalker and that one was very mid imo

 

[jebsmoker]

Who gives a shit when Anomaly is a thing? Let these assmad hohols do what they want, the real STALKER will always be there.

Anomaly is *not* what STALKER should be, considering Anomaly is just endless rinse and repeat quests with a million and one guns and various ultra-hardcore busywork mechanics thrown on top that don't really add anything

Call of Chernobyl and its various flavors has been a disaster for the western STALKER community, there are many better custom story mods that you can play that actually have perfectly fine English translations now

Such as? I only know true stalker and that one was very mid imo

goldsphere is good, spatial anomaly is also good

 

[Ol' Willy]

Who gives a shit when Anomaly is a thing? Let these assmad hohols do what they want, the real STALKER will always be there.

Anomaly is *not* what STALKER should be, considering Anomaly is just endless rinse and repeat quests with a million and one guns and various ultra-hardcore busywork mechanics thrown on top that don't really add anything

Call of Chernobyl and its various flavors has been a disaster for the western STALKER community, there are many better custom story mods that you can play that actually have perfectly fine English translations now

OLR 3.0 is the patrician choice, in fact, it is the first mod that has actual full fledged A-life working in it

NLC for the other, more persistent types of people

 

[Dark Souls II]

This will be shit. It will probably not be as bad as Cyberpunk 2077, but it will still be bad. You cannot make a game like the original Stalker in the current year. Fortunately, vanilla SoC (with ZRP) is still a stellar experience even today, and then you can always play Misery, Gunslinger, Misery+Gunslinger, and of course Anomaly, which allows for almost endless possibilities. Start as a bandit, get a hatchet, and survive on just vodka and mutant meat while living in the woods and murdering random passerbys. What the Stalker games were always ultimately about - the genuine Eastern European experience.

 

[actor]

"endless possibilities"

yall need to learn to read and browse moddb because there are so many mods that have actual creative content and not just repetitive smart terrain respawn farming like anomaly.