S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2: Heart of Chornobyl - PC/Xbox/GamePass

[hudson]

Played for a couple of hours last night on my (ahem) Series S. It's doesn't run too bad to be fair. Seems to be around and maybe even above the 30FPS mark. It doesn't look too bad either. The game features a fair bit of jank, mind. My understanding is that the jank or more specifically 'Eurojank' is a feature.

The game is pretty brutal. Dare I say, like the Dark Souls of FPS games. From what I played, I liked it.

One major issue for me though is the lack of dead zone for the controller sticks. There just seems to be none. What should look like a moment where you are idle/pausing to listen etc, any slight lean on the sticks causes unwanted movement. Or when you ease off the sticks, slight movement will persist. This is probably because holding the sticks with your thumbs provides a little expected pressure which FPS games usually combat with a bit of dead zone to prevent this.

Don't let the prologue (the start of the game - night time) put you off. Once you get to day light, the freedom begins.

[MartyG]

Yes, the controller config needs some work for sure, I was getting some weird movement stuff going on.

Can't say I find the combat much fun tbh, a lot of the time you've no clue where you're getting hit from, and two/three hits later you're dead and have to wait ages for the checkpoint reload, if you can get past the combat then I reckon this could be a decent game, but I'm finding it just kills the exploration part for me, so I can't see myself playing much of this.

[Cepp]

The intro was cool but harsh, the first enemy kicked my arse. It's an unforgiving tutorial but teaches you what you need to know. I'm in the day time now and exploring. I'm not far into it yet, but it feels like returning home with the weapons, systems and so on.

It's quite demanding, and the mouse is laggy in windows borderless mode. Setting it to full screen helps although there's still a slight amount there.

I tried playing it in English, and it seems decent enough, but found the Ukrainian more engaging.

So far so good, its 2024 Stalker.

[Cepp]

Put some more time in today. Loving it, and yeah it´s a little jank. I had a large group of dogs and people attacking each other and me at one point. It was cool, and I was just about surviving, so had to make a slight retreat to heal while dealing some of the dogs. Then the fighting stopped and all of the people and dogs still alive had despawned. I was also fighting a fleshy at one point, and when I killed it I think another one spawned and died with it at the same time to my left. It wasn´t there before the fight, but it was dead on the floor afterwards. Rooms are often too dark, and sometimes take a second to show the correct amount of light during the day.

I managed to lure another fleshy into an anomaly killing it, and helped some stalkers fight off a bloodsucker which was intense in the evening rain. There was also a pseudodog which kicked my arse, and at one point got I struck by lighting and died . I have a bad habit of completing quests, getting the reward and then killing the quest giver. They could be returning characters so I´m holding off on doing that now.

It´s tough going at first, weapons are weak and everything is expensive, but things are improving. My only real issue is having to return to base to sleep and my character´s carry weight. Mods are already coming out to reduce carry weight, allow you to sell badly damaged items, make the days longer and so on, but no sleeping bags yet. I´ll keep it vanilla for my first playthrough; I did find an artifact with a slight boost to carry weight and armour will increase it later on.

[Cepp]

The game is getting constant updates, including a 20GB update today. Lot's of bugfixes and adjustments. Most of it seems good, although mutants have gone from being a dangerous threat to a minor annoyance which I'm not a fan of; they're too easy to kill now.

The simulation aspect is a bit lacking, and GSC confirmed yesterday that A-Life has a lot of issues that they're working on.

Ievgen offers a technical explanation of what happened. In short, optimization issues ahead of launch forced GSC to shrink the area around the player in which A-Life 2.0 works. It is supposed to extend much farther in virtual distance terms than it currently does, but to get Stalker 2 into a decent place performance wise across PC and Xbox Series X and S, the developers had to reduce this distance. Then came the bugs on top.

“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.”

You do sometimes get enemy NPCs spawning close to you, although I've never seen them appear directly in front of me. I don't mind fighting them in the day, but at night it can feel like they have aim assist when you're moving around in cover with your flashlight off and they consistently land direct hits.

[Cepp]

Finished it now. There's multiple endings and routes but that will have to be another time.

The game truly is massive, I had to abandon finding all of the stashes eventually, I would have been in game forever. I sided against the Ward, so never got to visit the Chemical Plant base but saw just about everything else.

It's super fun and highly recommended. It's also the buggiest game I've played since Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. It would crash occasionally with a particular anomaly and sometimes when a Controller used their ability against me. I had to rush one during a story part of the game to kill him before he could use it. Otherwise I would have been softlocked. Pre-caching is bugged, or might be fixed now with the latest update that came out yesterday. I used console commands to skip it.

Highly recommended, but with caveats.