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

[ghardy]

Is there anything about the engine Unreal 5 that precludes such a thing as A-Life?

 

[TheKing01]

Not too many UE5 open-world games of the same ambition to compare it with.

I will say, giving them some modicum of slack, it is harder to do NPC persistence ect. when the world is not segmented. I'd imagine we really haven't come that far from the technical hurdles of Skyrim and it's flawed Open Cities mod.

Which would be excusable, if they hadn't advertised the game as something it's not. GSC really did kind of shot themselves in the foot making A-Life 2.0 one of it's biggest selling points (if not the actual biggest), because now it's going to always be the main point of scrutiny no matter what they do.

 

[Inec0rn]

not at all, braindead AI and heavily scripted events are one of the hallmarks of UE5. In most UE games the player can't even interactively open doors.. you hold X and watch some BS animation. Another thing missed by most gamers is just how piss modern AI is in FPS games, it really hasn't improved at all in decades and I don't think most games even reach F.E.A.R and HL2 level of AI which was smoke and mirrors but still a shit load of fun.

 

[Brickfrog]

I'll write a brief review cuz I can't sleep.

What I like:

• Environment/Graphics
  The zone looks how it's supposed to look to me (like shit, mostly). The graphics are comparable to what we've come to expect from big budget games. The anomalies and weather effects in particular really stood out for me, at least when the latter wasn't crashing my performance. It looks like a AAA game to me, which is all I expect.
• Sound Design
  The gunfire, anomalies, weather effects, atmospheric noise and ukrainian VO's sounded pretty good to me. I wasn't as impressed by the mutant sounds, and the English VO is ass. Also, I like the music that's found in camps. The songs you find playing on radios sounds exactly like the dogass europop that I hear when I watch streams from east europe. This was immersive to me but your mileage may vary.
• Combat
  Combat is... serviceable. A lot of people have praised the "feel" of the guns and I agree. The animations look good and the recoil feels right to me. There's some "weight" to the firearms and it feels closer to Tarkov than CoD. Many have mentioned that there are issues with the AI. But when the combat AI is working, it works. Enemies will take cover, flank, throw grenades, etc. Aside from whatever guns you bring in your two primary slots and single pistol slot, you also have grenades and consumables. The lack of variety in items here doesn't really give you a lot of tactical depth to work with. The gunfights in stalker 2 are fun for me when they're dangerous, but a few design decisions and bugs seem to get in the way of that. I'll talk about those issues more later.
• Exploration
  The map is big and there's a lot of stuff in it. Hunting anomalies is still fun. I had a good time just wandering around, seeing the sights and looking for better weapons/artifacts. The excellent environment and sound design did a lot to keep me engaged. There's some weird, cool looking stuff to find in the zone. The issue is that aside from weapons and artifacts, there doesn't too much else to actually push you along in progression.

What I didn't like:

• Combat AI and Spawner Bugs
  The mutant AI seems fine. Human enemy AI will be silly and ineffective at times but works more often than not. What made me put down the game was the spawner issue that everyone reading this is probably already aware of. Enemies will spawn near the player on a timer. Some people seem to not care that much, some have installed some mods to try and work around the problem, but for me it destroyed immersion.
• Consumables
  There are four kinds of consumables from what I can tell: One each to recover Health, Stamina, Radiation, and Hunger. The problem is that the most basic versions of each one seems to be all you will ever need. The least expensive medpack will bring you close to full health in about 2 seconds. This can really trivialize combat and suck out a lot of the immersion of a survival game. Drinking an energy drink will only give you one bar of stamina back, but they're so plentiful that it hardly matters. Radiation and hunger are also a non-issue because the solutions are plentiful and inexpensive. Another funny thing is that there is a bleeding mechanic, but the basic bandage both ends the bleed *and* gives you like 50% health back in 2 seconds. There's basically nothing to think about here when it comes to the survival elements compared to the popular mods for stalker 1.
• Progression
  There are guns, upgrades for those guns, as well as upgraded ammo. There are also various armors and their associated upgrades, as well as artifacts and improved versions of your artifact detecting equipment. Without the more punishing survival elements that require you to scrounge for equipment or risk getting irradiated/dehydrated/starved/bledout/etc there just doesn't seem to be much threat, and consequently I'm not feeling the "zero to hero" character progression.
• Loot Variety
  As I've already kvetched about, there isn't a whole lot of stuff to find aside from weapons, armor, and artifacts. If you're coming off a GAMMA playthrough to get in the mood for Stalker 2 then you might find the world full of rather meaningless loot.

To sum it up I think it's "fine" in it's current form. There's nothing really terribly wrong with it except the spawner imo. The questions that really matters to me are "how robust will the dev supported mod tools be" and "will stalker 2 have a mod community as active as the previous titles." If the answers are "good" and "yes," then I think we're gonna get a lot of value here in the long run. Modders have been posting homebrew "fixes" since day one, so that's a good sign to me. I'm looking forward to picking it back up when they've fixed the spawner, and then hopefully Stalker 2 GAMMA down the line.

 

[Brickfrog]

Not too many UE5 open-world games of the same ambition to compare it with.

I will say, giving them some modicum of slack, it is harder to do NPC persistence ect. when the world is not segmented. I'd imagine we really haven't come that far from the technical hurdles of Skyrim and it's flawed Open Cities mod.

Which would be excusable, if they hadn't advertised the game as something it's not. GSC really did kind of shot themselves in the foot making A-Life 2.0 one of it's biggest selling points (if not the actual biggest), because now it's going to always be the main point of scrutiny no matter what they do.

I was thinking about this. The original had the benefit of being level-based and didn't need to keep track of that many npcs. I don't know much about code but I assume that must simplify things a ton compared to an open world.

 

[Dedicated_Dark]

Not too many UE5 open-world games of the same ambition to compare it with.

I will say, giving them some modicum of slack, it is harder to do NPC persistence ect. when the world is not segmented. I'd imagine we really haven't come that far from the technical hurdles of Skyrim and it's flawed Open Cities mod.

Which would be excusable, if they hadn't advertised the game as something it's not. GSC really did kind of shot themselves in the foot making A-Life 2.0 one of it's biggest selling points (if not the actual biggest), because now it's going to always be the main point of scrutiny no matter what they do.

I was thinking about this. The original had the benefit of being level-based and didn't need to keep track of that many npcs. I don't know much about code but I assume that must simplify things a ton compared to an open world.

I don't know.. Unity allows additive Async scene loading, by that logic everything can be its own section. Unreal should have that too. There are already genuine loading pauses when moving from one area to another, so it's not like they are running the whole world..

I think it was a matter of priorities and this is a console game primarily.

 

[ArchAngel]

Is there anything about the engine Unreal 5 that precludes such a thing as A-Life?

Well there are mods already that turn on alife that is in the code and it seems to noticeable impact performance of the game

 

[baba is you]

Is there a mod that makes a-life work?

 

[kites]

You can't base a theory of how it could affect game performance on mods that are fucking with broken/incomplete code compared to what it actually is or could be. I just don't believe it exists in the state people are picturing build-wise. Their examples given in pre-release interviews were all spawn-based.

I don't see how a riff constructed from the old approach couldn't work in this game; an off-line text-based "journal" system running in the background calculating dice rolls of a few hundred stalkers roaming the wider zone once in awhile and summoned into your current world-space when you enter the same area. It doesn't even have to be as complex as what was initially envisioned of them learning and growing etc. Just give them a basic formula of goals to achieve (travel to this hub, plunder this anomaly, attack this camp, go to this landmark etc). The map is already split into zones and it often makes you traverse through specific chokepoints to cross into another; if it's so taxing only work out the NPCs in zones that are touching the one you are currently in at the time. Or at the very least when you are occupying an area other stalkers should be spawned-in and exist in that space or your radius. Not just random summons 100 yards away that are transient.

 

[Inec0rn]

a-life mods

 

[whydoibother]

Is it that hard to do?

At this point you are just asking for a story you dislike to be changed to a story you like, based on your own tastes. Which is to say, you aren't talking about what we were talking about.
I'd rather the donkey in Shrek was a dog instead, but I don't call Shrek NATO propaganda.

 

[Odoryuk]

Is there anything about the engine Unreal 5 that precludes such a thing as A-Life?

This is not how engines work

 

[baba is you]

LOL. I managed to defend and protect a certain area, but as soon as I left, it fell and the NPCs were slaughtered.

Yes, it's clearly a worse script than CS.

 

[Drakortha]

a-life mods

This is precisely why games are in the state they are in at release and require mods. By installing mods you are giving developers the green light to pull this kind of shit. If everyone intead refunded games and held developers fully responsible for their shitty releases, then these kinds of mods wouldn't have to exist in the first place.

If you are a PC player who's playing STALKER 2 with mods right now I have only 3 words for you; FUCK YOU, ASSHOLE.

 

[baba is you]

The more I finish the game, the more it feels like a scam.

Area protection event is something that gamers who have played the trilogy will know what this means. Yes, A-life should be considered to have been removed even from 1.0

 

[ArchAngel]

LOL. I managed to defend and protect a certain area, but as soon as I left, it fell and the NPCs were slaughtered.

Yes, it's clearly a worse script than CS.

I read that this part of the game is broken and untested. That gamers should take the very slow approach to Stalker 2. Also once you get into Clear Sky there is no going back so be warned.

 

[baba is you]

LOL. I managed to defend and protect a certain area, but as soon as I left, it fell and the NPCs were slaughtered.

Yes, it's clearly a worse script than CS.

I read that this part of the game is broken and untested. That gamers should take the very slow approach to Stalker 2. Also once you get into Clear Sky there is no going back so be warned.

Well, this seems to be a sign that A-life won't be coming back even if it's a bugfix.

CS's faction war is definitely based on the trigger (quest completion), but it wasn't spawned everywhere.

 

[kites]

I read that this part of the game is broken and untested

It's weird because it happened right after a broken main quest for me (had to noclip), and you run through that defense area to continue the MQ. All the enemies were stuck in a building but the firefight SFX was playing. Not enough QA or something. With the balancing/economy/bugs it's like they never played their game through before going "gold".