Stalker 2

[DAPUNISHER]

I think the economy needs fixed. Weapons should not require so many coupons to repair.

This is my most wanted game patch. What's the point of getting a special gun, if I am going to need to spend the next 10 hrs grinding for enough credits to afford the repairs, because it's at 10% when given to me? The viper and UDP with the silencer the game gives you are my main loadout. I could afford a few upgrades, they degrade slowly, and they are cheap to repair.

How much the guide wants for travel is also "too damned high". If they wanted to give you that "I sold my soul to the company store" vibe, they nailed it.

 

[sze5003]

This is my most wanted game patch. What's the point of getting a special gun, if I am going to need to spend the next 10 hrs grinding for enough credits to afford the repairs, because it's at 10% when given to me? The viper and UDP with the silencer the game gives you are my main loadout. I could afford a few upgrades, they degrade slowly, and they are cheap to repair.

How much the guide wants for travel is also "too damned high". If they wanted to give you that "I sold my soul to the company store" vibe, they nailed it.

If you did one of the first side missions from the lesser zone, you get a long barrel shotgun which comes in handy with the boars and mutants. It cost 1400 to repair once it was in the yellow. Right now I'm running the same load out as you as that's what I've found most effective.

I noticed you don't want your weapons to degrade past 40% because past that repairing them becomes extremely expensive.

The enemy spawns are kind of ruining exploring for me. Not sure what triggered it more now because the first 2hrs I played they were not this bad. They just constantly and randomly appear behind you or off on the side. It may not be so bad if they didn't spawn in set to aggro you immediately.

I also think this ties into the non existent stealth because they see you through walls or obstacles since they spawn in aggro'd on you already.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

This game sucked me in. I keep doing 5hr sessions. Then coming back for 2-3hrs later that night. Some of the puzzles are hard; I had to look one up because I could not solve it myself.

Spoiler

You have to get on the roof, and shoot through a blacked out little window to break the wood bar holding a door closed to get the stash.

 

[sandorski]

System needs upgraded, both my CPU/GPU are Low/Mid settings. 5700x3d and 7800xt hopefully will suffice.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

System needs upgraded, both my CPU/GPU are Low/Mid settings. 5700x3d and 7800xt hopefully will suffice.

Keep an eye out, the 7900GRE has been getting very close in price. I think I saw an ad with one for $480 yesterday? They will have more performance patches soon too. With a VRR TV the game has been silky smooth.

 

[Shmee]

System needs upgraded, both my CPU/GPU are Low/Mid settings. 5700x3d and 7800xt hopefully will suffice.

Keep in mind that you may also want to upgrade to 32GB of RAM. Luckily an identical 16GB DDR4 kit should be available as one of the cheaper upgrades, compared to CPU and GPU.

 

[sandorski]

Keep an eye out, the 7900GRE has been getting very close in price. I think I saw an ad with one for $480 yesterday? They will have more performance patches soon too. With a VRR TV the game has been silky smooth.

GREs are difficult to find in these parts. Almost bought one a few months back, but waited too long. Performance isn't much different, I'm going to be impressed either way, GRE doubles and the 7800xt is <20% of that.

 

[sze5003]

I actually got shadow of Chernobyl yesterday and installed the zone reclamation project mod, weapon texture mod and reshade so I started comparing some of the AI abilities of the enemies and NPC's in the zone to Stalker 2.

There's definitely a big difference with how you just walk around and see activities happening. The dogs in SOC don't just attack you right away, unless you are in their direct line of sight.

You can see npc's far off in the distance on patrols or fighting. Same with mutants fighting dogs or other NPC's they don't just immediately aggro you.

I don't want to progress too far into stalker 2 until they get some patches in. One should be coming this week that will help with performance and memory optimization and it should also fix some of the later story missions. Those by mid game currently are soft locked and bugged out from what I've been reading in their official discord.

Really not a fan of the AI behavior in Stalker 2. Cleared out a building of enemies to grab some loot. I go outside and across the yard and the enemies spawn behind me outside the house. Waste more ammo taking them out and collect their loot which was trash red weapons.

Walk out of the yard again to go to the main road and 2 bloodsuckers spawn right next me on the left side. Wasted all the ammo I had gathered and basically went back to town with nothing but one yellow rated viper5 and a broomstick which I sold for like 400 coupons.

They need to do something about the spawn system.

 

[Racan]

I’m not going to buy this game until some major patches are released. First and foremost, they should address the CPU bottleneck. I’ve heard they’re using an early version of UE5, so maybe they could update it to a more recent version that offers better CPU utilization.

 

[sze5003]

First major patch is out for PC. https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1643320/view/4455844537830474602

 

[DAPUNISHER]

First major patch is out for PC. https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1643320/view/4455844537830474602

30% reduction on all repairs does not fix the economy, but it improves it. Some artifacts sell for 60% more now. Armor is improved by 12.5%. Mission are paying out 2-3x now. I am tempted to start a new playthrough to leverage all this with everything I've learned about the game... I can probably get back to where I am now in a 10th of the time.

 

[sze5003]

30% reduction on all repairs does not fix the economy, but it improves it. Some artifacts sell for 60% more now. Armor is improved by 12.5%. Mission are paying out 2-3x now. I am tempted to start a new playthrough to leverage all this with everything I've learned about the game... I can probably get back to where I am now in a 10th of the time.

I'll be starting over too. I only have about 4hrs total. There is another patch that dropped today, 1.02. It fixes several quest related bugs that stop progression without that patch.

I'm glad they nerfed the bloodsuckers health too. With how random enemies spawn near you, now maybe I won't mind as much if I can waste less ammo taking them down.

Also in the beginning of the prologue before you scan the third spot, drop all your gear. You can go back and get it afterwards. Accidentally did that the first time and realized they expect you to not do that.

 

[Stg-Flame]

Sorry in advance for the formatting but doing this on mobile with barely any data is difficult.

One of the developers commented on what's going on with A-Life and why it's not working and what they're doing about it during an interview with IGN.

Spoiler: The most concise quote from the interview

“This system to work properly requires a much larger area for spawn NPCs, and it requires much more memory resources," Ievgen says in English, which isn't his first language. "We were fighting with optimization. To optimize, you have a lot of things that need your resources, and you try to cut things from different directions to properly optimize the game well.

“But to make it work we had to optimize some things, and they make A-Life work in many situations not as it should. Also, we created some bugs not long ago before release with NPCs spawning in the air and dropping back to the bottom. They should actually spawn in the terrain. Why it happened, I don’t know! And also we had some bugs with AI behavior.

“So, all these things connected make it look like it's very broken and not working. But we are now continuing working on the optimization part to bring more resources for the A-Life system, to increase the range where A-Life is actually visualized.

“There are NPCs outside of the range of the player and they are in offline mode. And when the player reaches some distance, they are going to online mode and they pop back up. The distance is dictated by our optimization range, where we stream the real world and not real world with all the collisions. It was tough work, and because of these optimization problems and bugs, it's become broken.”

“For now we committed to players to make it work and it can be done from directions both optimizing, giving more resources to A-Life, fixing bugs, making it work properly, and then putting more efforts to make it more advanced,” Ievgen says

Stalker 2 Dev GSC Game World Explains for the First Time What Went Wrong With A-Life 2.0, and Why It Was Removed From the Game’s Description on Steam - IGN

Stalker 2 developer GSC Game World explains for the first time what went wrong with A-Life 2.0, and why it was removed from the game’s description on Steam.

www.ign.com

 

[DeathReborn]

Sorry in advance for the formatting but doing this on mobile with barely any data is difficult.

One of the developers commented on what's going on with A-Life and why it's not working and what they're doing about it during an interview with IGN.

Stalker 2 Dev GSC Game World Explains for the First Time What Went Wrong With A-Life 2.0, and Why It Was Removed From the Game’s Description on Steam - IGN

Stalker 2 developer GSC Game World explains for the first time what went wrong with A-Life 2.0, and why it was removed from the game’s description on Steam.

www.ign.com

So do we blame the Series S, 8GB VRAM or 16GB RAM for the lack of resources? All of them maybe?

 

[sze5003]

So do we blame the Series S, 8GB VRAM or 16GB RAM for the lack of resources? All of them maybe?

None. The old games had A-Life working on much older hardware. They needed more time to get everything working but instead released it without one of the most critical components of Stalker. Without it, you are pretty much playing another fps looter shooter. Far cry enemies don't even spawn as quickly and as randomly as they do in this title.

Here's to hoping they can get it working at some point.

 

[Stg-Flame]

The old games had A-Life working on much older hardware.

The older games were also instanced into smaller maps segregated by loading zones. I haven't played this game yet, but everything I read thus far mentioned they have a true open world with no loading zones. If that's true, then the additional load is to be expected and would cause a lot of problems for optimization. Games like Red Dead Redemption 2 which have completely open worlds can get massive lag spikes in certain areas if your hardware isn't up to the task or you can notice little micro-stutters when a new event is being loaded in the distance.

 

[Artorias]

They should have went early access, really needed 6 months more development time to iron out the issues.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

They should have went early access, really needed 6 months more development time to iron out the issues.

- Yeah it isn't 2007 anymore and people are burned out on buggy releases. Not really a charming quirk anymore.

 

[EXCellR8]

Still playing, glad they tweaked some things like the economy and addressed some of the bugs. I haven't experienced any indoor area crashing in a little while, but I'm sure it'll happen at some point. I think I'm about 30+ hours in, most of it just wandering around. I've gotten into some pretty intense firefights and skirmishes--which is the main reason I want to play. The map is really cool, even if some of it feels a bit empty and under-cooked. Tons of guns in my stash, and trying my best not to look up spoilers.

Also, pre-patch Controller fight at the waste facility was absolute bs. I haven't been that frustrated with a game in awhile... if you know, you know.

 

[WelshBloke]

The annoying thing about [Compiling shaders, please wait...] is that while doing it it doesn't seem to use much of my system. CPU is at >50%, GPU is at 30 to 45%. Make it go faster!

 

[sze5003]

Even watching the Nvidia metrics while playing the game is barely using my CPU. Varying percentage also in GPU usage although you see it spike up when entering an area where there are NPC's.

Hoping there is another patch before the holidays. I know it won't fix any of the enemy spawns but hopefully they got most of the hard stop late game mission bugs.

 

[Sam25]

I'm nearing the end of the game now and the enemy spawns are getting more frequent because now the missions involve a lot of gunfights. Also, being stealthy is very unrewarding in the game as even over large, dark terrain or a big rooftop an enemy will spot you out of nowhere and open fire!

 

[DigDog]

oh god .. should i wait for A-Life patch? (if thats what it's called)

 

[sze5003]

The GSC community manager posted on Reddit that there will be another patch which will be pretty big that will include some A-Life bug fixes.

Hopefully whatever fixes those are will do something about the crappy spawn system. I'm holding off on progressing the game until I see what happens.

So many times I clear an area, open the PDA or look at my inventory and then once I'm done I have to clear another round of enemies which gets old fast.

 

[sze5003]

Patch 1.1 is out. "fixes the issue with spawning NPC's behind the players back" Finally yes!

I may actually start over again because it's a huge update and it looks like they introduced A-Life so the zone should feel more balanced and alive.

I was just annoyed with how random the spawns were and yea I think this addresses that and much more.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl - Major Patch 1.1 is here! - Steam News

Over 1,800 fixes and adjustments, including the first iteration of A-Life fixes.

store.steampowered.com