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

So, I love this game and I love GSC, I've been with them since Cossacks: European Wars. This game however needs some serious polishing. + Great framework for a Stalker game, I can already see tons of possibilities for DLCs, mods and overhauls. + Graphics are really pleasing, even if you don't like Unreal Engine 5 aesthetics. + Quests are written nicely, they give you proper narration as well as enough Ukrainian-style profanities and cussing, to make things believable. + There's some role-playing involved as you are forced to make decisions. It's nothing fancy like in cRPGs but it's really nice to have these little things affect the world. + All in all the atmosphere is unmatched: the soundtrack, aesthetics, dialogues, narration as well as worldbuilding and luddic narration – all these things make Heart of Chernobyl immersive. However... - The game, as of today (22.11.2024) is sadly plagued by awful optimization. It's best to cut some slack to your PCs guys because no matter what kind of guts yours have, it won't run this game smoothly. So there's that. - Bugs and glitches – some of them are slightly game breaking but nothing over the top that haven't been found in the Stalker franchise. - Incomplete A-Life system that made the previous installments so immersive and believable. - Broken AI at times – enemies forget to shoot or they act illogically. - Irrational, mean AI of some pack mutants – dogs will run away from you and hide behind obstacles if you jump on a car or have the high ground over them. - Busted balance: some enemies are bullet sponges, repairs are too expensive and stuff like that. - You can't loot mutants to sell their parts. - There are NO binoculars - There are NO night vision devices - Enemies spawn behind you at times. Will it be patched? Probably yes. Is it going to take some time? Very likely. Should you buy it? Yes, if you don't mind having unstable framerate, glitches and messed up balance, you'll love it.

Think I've played enough for first impressions. It looks great, it sounds great, it has great atmosphere and at the core it's a solidly built open-world shooter. It's a worthy successor to original trilogy, but there are 3 cardinal sins that NEED to be fixed: 1. Performance, as everyone under the sun stated. I can juice 50fps out of my minimal system requirements rig, but at the expense of visual clarity. Makes it hard to see enemies. They have no such issue tho. 2. Combat balance. The bullet sponge is so much worse than previous games, there were 2 mods rebalancing difficulty within 1 day from release. They are both a must-have to make high difficulty challenging but fair. Bloodsuckers tanking half-a-dozen shotgun buckshots to the face while killing you in 2 hits is bullshit. Humanoid enemies also eat bullets for breakfast, but at least those have high enough headshot multiplier. 3. NPC spawning points. Too many times I reload and randomizer decides to spawn a human patrol or mutants near me. Then they kick my ass, I reload, and they are not there. There's no consistency between saves, and those spawning points are active too close to my position. This design can work as bandaid in absence of A-life, but random spawns have to happen like 300-500 meters away from the player, and everything closer has to be kept consistent between reloads. Hide the overreliance on randomizer for open-world encounters by making it work out of player view, else it breaks immersion. I don't even care about AI inconsistencies or physics engine glitching out. Just these 3 issues need to be fixed ASAP.

Playing Shadow of Chernobyl was great, I get that it had alot of "gaps' in content and poor pacing , poor gunplay, underplayed survival mechanics, and a poorly presented story mostly through a journal. What that game had that I now know as the A-life system, so I'll try to explain like so many others have how that impacting your experience. A-Life made it so that NPC's across the game world were persistant, you meet a stalker in the field picking up some loot off a body and adding it to his inventory, you go trade with him he has that loot, you meet him farther up the road and he got punked by some dogs and you revive him now your best buds and he will defend you if he ever sees you in trouble. The game world was broken up by large open design levels, and if you traveled to them you could very well meet your new friend there doing whatever, you could also make enemies same deal, mutants roamed from area to area dragging bodies around to eat them. This was the critical element in the game that kept it interesting, of course gearing up was fun but without A-life the game would've been dull after you finished the few set piece missions. STALKER 2 A-life went through trouble, I guess it has to due with resources because once again a dev team decided a game must be a seamless open world at the expense of the far more important stuff. So now they have randomized spawns around you poorly simulating the first games spawn method, this also adds to the frustration to player because the ai is spawned right near you at aggro ranges. So the games come with alot of the same problems and missing a critical element, we do have a better presentation with sound, acting, story but it means diddly if it is boring. list of negs -ai is aimbot accurate -ai spawns in 60m area around you -empty world -bad flashlight -bad time compression -ai has no persistance or is meaningless as rep and levels aren't tracked -more to list but I'm tired of editing

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I have no choice but to give the game one star at the moment as it's not in a state that can be even played, let alone enjoyed. I was happy to get around 60fps in the initial area on Low preset with Perf. DLSS (4k display, rtx 3070, 5900x) which was along my expectations, and wouldn't have minded completing the game with lowest fidelity settings. The problem is terrible frame drops and crashes. After my first death and save load, the fps dropped to 3 with something like 1000ms latency, requiring restart. This happened multiple times at different points. Finally, upon entering water for the first time, the game just crashed. Essentially every time I tried to play, after a couple minutes I needed to restart because the game was breaking. After like 3 tries I run out of patience. I'm looking forward to playing the game when it's fixed, but for now - avoid.