S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl

[Dark Souls II]

There might be full blown A–Life system deep in the game's codebase which, by the look at it, is disabled by now, but it looks like devs might work on it and enable it in recent patches

"Guys, the emperor might not be naked! By the look of it, the clothes are disabled now, but it looks like they might be enabled sometime in the future!"

 

[Konjad]

 

[Odoryuk]

There might be full blown A–Life system deep in the game's codebase which, by the look at it, is disabled by now, but it looks like devs might work on it and enable it in recent patches

"Guys, the emperor might not be naked! By the look of it, the clothes are disabled now, but it looks like they might be enabled sometime in the future!"

All I'm saying is that looking at a config file doesn't make you aware of the codebase of the game, by any means it does not. But you're pretty biased (and, frankly, not very bright) so you're seeing that as an endorcement and defending of the game I haven't even played yet

 

[PanteraNera]

Anyways, I installed Shadow of Chernobyl and after trying out a couple of mods I decided to play vanilla. Damn is the game fun.
Stalker 1 just feels so much more alive it is crazy. As I said before Stalker 2 is not bad, has a lot of things going for it, but SoC just feels so much better. And I haven't played the game in the last 10-15 years, nor any other game from the series, nor any mods or that Anomaly thing. Nor am I really a huge fan of the series.

I think it is hilarious having a top notch rig and playing mostly old games and indie games on it.

Well I am outta here enjoying SoC and than probably the other two games. Maybe when I am done with that, Stalker 2 is in a better shape. From playing S2 for 12 hours I can tell one thing for sure, they have to change a lot of things that Alife 2.0 feels anything near what it feels like in SoC. I highly doubt it will be "fixed" as they are clearly different approaches, there is currently no simulation of the world going on in S2 and honestly, it feels like a design choice!

 

[Harthwain]

I highly doubt it will be "fixed" as they are clearly different approaches, there is currently no simulation of the world going on in S2 and honestly, it feels like a design choice!

Or it was done as a bandaid/stopgap measure, because they knew they couldn't get it done before the release and hoped it will do before they'll fix it (somehow). It wouldn't surprise me.

 

[baba is you]

What is certain is that GSC is hiding something. They said they would patch it next week, but they are not going to fix the most urgent A-life bugs. This is a sign that the A-life problem will last for more than a month, so it is better to just forget about it for a while.

 

[V17]

This is a good reminder that buying games before you know what you're getting is idiotic and there's no good reason to do so.

Also, from the documentary they released it was clear that the game was going to be unfinished. They talked about how they had to use a hail mary build for the first public playable demo at some game expo and didn't know till the last moment if it's going to work out. There was no chance to go from that to a finished game before release. I think it's most likely that A-Life is half done and was scrapped for the release to spend more time fixing more immediately visible surface-level bugs.

Despite that I'm quite optimistic about it turning into a great game eventually. I just think there's no way it's going to happen in a month, more like a definitive edition in a year, and may require community doing some work too, Bethesda style, unfortunately. But the reception most often seems to be "this is a great base game, it just needs to be finished" and the sales are good so far, so it's at the very least not entirely out of the question that they do keep working on it long enough.

Btw, the peak players number is 119k and the sales were recently announced as being over 1 mil, so the ratio of "X peak players on steam very roughly equals 10X sales on all platforms" that was talked about in the Veilguard thread I think holds again.