STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl

brady12

Anyone playing ? Played the first 90 mins on series X and loving it so far despite the jankyness and the frame rate isn't the best but kind of gameplay loop I love .

_CreeD_

I'm about 3 hours or so in, only a few main missions in and primarily picking up stashes and exploring at the moment so I can't speak to the story. It's janky, performs worse than it should for the horsepower and while it looks good it's not stellar. It is for all of those things 100% everything I love about Stalker, bugs included as they're just kind've a given. The gunplay is good and brutal at the start, even on medium/normal difficulty you will die relatively frequently which is a refreshing change from most games these days. The atmosphere is where it shines again if you like the Stalker universe it hasn't diverged at all, no goofy vanilla pixar blx here - it's nicely tuned wasteland misery with enough action, horror and interesting puzzles to make you lose yourself in it.

I'd agree with some of the better reviews I've seen in that if you are a Stalker fan and know what to expect with the jank get it now, if not wait for a few patches.

Kiith

Seems like its exactly what you'd expect from Stalker…janky as ****, performance is ****, but its a unforgivingly brilliant game.

johnny_ultimate

Most of the reviews I've seen have described it as straight up broken and unfinished as opposed to merely janky. While allowances absolutely should be made given the unique circumstances of its production, I'll certainly be waiting for an extended patching cycle to knock it into shape before giving it a go.

Retr0gamer

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122864700#Comment_122864700

Well you know what they say in Poland, one person's straight up broken game is another person's eastern European open world shooter masterpiece.

Cordell

And that's exactly what this is, the "eastern European open world shooter masterpiece" we've been waiting for. It's STALKER, with all the good and the bad, and I'm happy it is this way.

Retr0gamer

Id like to see some more reviews from the likes of Eurogamer. The original game was a buggy unfinished mess yet was one of the best gaming experiences I ever had. The dodginess around the dev team tells me to be cautious.

brady12

What dodgyness ? You love Eurogamer 🤣. Have you Game pass try it for free and see ? The you tubers i listen to for reviews slated Dragon age for its gameplay and I tried it and ended up liking 😅

Retr0gamer

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122865263#Comment_122865263

Eurogamer I'd regard as being really good in terms of reviews. In the mean time I checked metrogame central who I also like and they love the game.

As for the dodginess, what I mean was the developer pushing NFT and blockchain in the game. They removed it due to backlash but it left a sour taste in my mouth. Pretty sure that was an idiot in upper management that pushed it but not a good look either way and soured my confidence in the dev team.

The Dragon Age Veilguard... Bullshit, (I wouldn't call it a controversy as that's giving it some actual significance) is the usual conservative nonsense about the game being woke and DEI or some other nonsense. It's an invented non issue so nothing like the issues I explained above. I'd be getting new reviews/YouTubers to get opinions from of they had those issues with Veilguard.

johnny_ultimate

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122864714#Comment_122864714

Yes, jankiness comes with the STALKER name (no harm with the odd t-posing corpse or inexplicably chaotic emergent gameplay), but the reports of major, atmosphere-ruining visual, audio and gameplay bugs does suggest a game that isn't quite there yet even by Eurojank standards.

The patches / mods will come promptly, and the game will inevitably become 'better', so no harm waiting a month or two rather than leaping in on launch day IMO.

brady12

They weren't giving out about the politics in the game it was the gameplay loop . And I usually align with their gameplay tastes but not on that game . Gameplay loop in it is fun.

Never heard about the NFTS. Feel like it's kind of game that will get better and better with patches would imagine it will be a good package by time gets to ps5 pro .

brady12

Started it on Series X over my 3060ti hope I don't regret that mods etc . Just sick games not running well on pc and having keep tweak everything .

Retr0gamer

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122865709#Comment_122865709

For context:

https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/16/22840488/stalker-2-nft-metahuman-gsc-web3-canceled

riffmongous

I haven't played it, and won't anytime soon for time/financial reasons (unless game pass makes it a cloud game) but I did watch a playthrough of it last night by Hollow, who isn't a great gamer, and it looked very good I thought. The graphics seemed nice, there were no outrageously bad bugs and it did have the feel of a Stalker game. That we even got a new game after so many years in the wilderness is quite an accomplishment.

The English accents were much more off-putting and immersion breaking (one early quest has clearly Irish and Scots Stalkers) than anything gameplay related, but Call of Pripyat also had that issue and I believe now you can also playing with Ukr dub and english subs?

The A-life does look like it needs lots of work though, as the spawn system seems messy and broken. I think if they can get that fixed the game will be doing very well.

I will say though that I'm not a fan of relying on modders to fix things and to get a "real Stalker experience" like some say. If you pay for the game you should be getting a properly functioning game. It's great that the series has a vibrant modding community but really having SoC and Clear Sky requiring mods to be a decent gameplay experience shouldn't have been accepted back then and it shouldn't be acceptable now for Stalker 2.

_CreeD_

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122865849#Comment_122865849

So just to be clear. Their temporary and idiotic ride on the NFT train that they pulled back on is grounds for labelling the dev dodgy in perpetuity. But a significant amount of the reviewer and playerbase finding Veilguard boring, vanilla and cartoonishly goofy (i'm not going to include the DEI noise as that tends to be way too subjective and extreme on both sides) in a franchise that has always leaned dark is 'an invented non issue' and should lead to anyone who thinks differently sub'ing to different reviewers for both. Pretty odd priorities imho but each to their own.

Anyway I think a lot of reviewers were working with pre-day 1 patches, quite a few stated this. So while yes it is Janky it's nowhere near as bad as some of the review experiences I've seen. The main thing for me is I remember well playing the originals each on release, and then again just a few months back with close-to-vanilla mods for graphics/weather etc. only. And as soon as I got into Stalker 2 I felt like I was right back there. It's not remotely a perfect game but so far is for me a perfect sequel, bugs er anomalies included.

Retr0gamer

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122867869#Comment_122867869

No those are your assumptions. I'm actually hoping the game is good and the metro game central review has me very interested. I was just cautious before release because the NFT thing meant there were idiots on the dev team. Anyway seems those idiots were just the upper management money men which is the best possible outcome.

As for Veilguard I mistakenly thought the issues with Veilguard were conservative nonsense as there's been a lot of that online about it. I didn't even consider there could be gameplay issues. That's on me just seeing way too much conservative nonsense, the same stuff came up with dragon quest 3 of all things, and jumped to my own conclusions.

brady12

Think I have game breaking glitch in mission behind several seals . objective re appears after completing mission and won't go away 😅

knobtasticus

Having a great time with it so far. Like the atmosphere a lot. Traditional AA seems to be borked on PC though and it seems to need DLAA/DLSS to sort the shimmering. HDR isn’t too badly implemented either. The thing eats RAM too. Had to root out a spare set of slower 16GB sticks I had and fire them in to sort out the hitching. Playing with the Ukranian voiceover is an absolute must. The ENG voice acting is trash and a bit jarring.

Cordell

DLAA or DLSS is superior to any other kind of AA especially temporal AA so if you have it there's no good reason to not use it.

I just found out again that there is no reward for killing mutants, so unless you really need to do something there better run than waste good ammo and medpacks.

knobtasticus

https://www.videogamer.com/news/stalker-2-devs-announce-a-life-2-0-patch-to-fix-poor-ai-spawning-issues/

Good to see it formally acknowledged and a patch in the works. A-Life 2.0 was the big marketing push for this release so the fact it’s completely broken probably makes the entire game now a wait-to-play. I’m still enjoying the atmosphere and the overall presentation but after burning another couple hours at it this morning, the blatantly scripted nature of the spawns - and the ‘pop-in’ spawns that are egregiously reproducible - have started to drag.

_CreeD_

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122868492#Comment_122868492

It has serious memory leak issues on PC. The only real game affecting bug I've run into now in 8 hours plus is with Frame Gen on as soon as I reload a save it starts a leak on the GPU/VRAM, slowly incrementing over time regardless of further reloads. After about an hour it'll go from about 11GB to 24GB and my game is a sub 1fps stutterfest until it clears enough for the current level again, or really just give in and restart the whole thing. With FG off it's been fine, though obviously not as smooth. I've read reports of similar for system RAM but I've not seen mine go beyond 32GB overall usage, about 16 for the game directly.

Some mods I'd recommend for QoL, none make it directly easier rather improve your mobility overall either through weight management or with Stamina updates. This does in a way ease the survival aspect only in that you are less likely to be caught without consumables you might otherwise leave in the stash but you still have to fight for and collect it all to begin with.

• https://www.nexusmods.com/stalker2heartofchornobyl/mods/45
• https://www.nexusmods.com/stalker2heartofchornobyl/mods/48
• https://www.nexusmods.com/stalker2heartofchornobyl/mods/52
• https://www.nexusmods.com/stalker2heartofchornobyl/mods/84

Cordell

Can it play STALKER?

wayne040576

So my system is a 3900x with a 7800XT and 64GB ram.

I put some settings down, the usual offenders that I find cause performance hits (Post processing, shadows, lighting). At 3440x1440, movement in the worlds seems okay. But I'm finding the combat is quite weird. Like a slow floaty movement to the gun and shooting doesn't seem to have lot of impact. I don't play a lot of modern FPS so maybe I'm out of touch. I'm used to games where the gun movement on screen matches the mouse move precisely. I'll have to mess around with the settings again tomorrow.

Cordell

Make sure you enable Nvidia Reflex

_CreeD_

Also disable VSYNC if on and mouse acceleration (yep, like motion blur for some reason some devs still turn this on….)

https://www.reddit.com/r/stalker/comments/1gvy5sx/mouse_input_lag_fix/

Excerpt:

Game pass version:

"C:\Users%username%\AppData\Local\Stalker2\Saved\Config\WinGDK\Input.ini"

Steam version here:
"C:\Users%username%\AppData\Local\Stalker2\Saved\Config\Windows\Input.ini"

paste

[/script/engine.inputsettings]
bEnableMouseSmoothing=False
bViewAccelerationEnabled=False

Cordell

Me dying for the nth time here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-gTcObqVus

-angry noises

My wife: is this the game you've been wating for 15 years?!

Me: YES!!!!!!!

Dcully

Absolutely loving this on PC.

Yes it has issues but nothing mods cant fix, all mods are tiny and easy to install.

Runs great on my PC and looks absolutely incredible,gunplay,atmosphere,sounds,massive open world,rpg elements,gear and weapons loot, yes this is my kind of game.

Cordell

Unless I'm doing something wrong the loot economics needs some more balancing, I'm spending pretty much all I get on loot to repair my weapons and armor, and the deals I get for loot are just too low. Also, broken weapons can't be sold, and the repair cost is too high, too often you get a cool broken weapon that's actually worthless. I don't remember so much hustle to get money in the original trilogy - I got the buried in coins monolith ending before getting to the true ending.

As for performance on PC it's not so great for me, it's definitely CPU bottlenecked. 10850K + 3080Ti and it's difficult to get a consistent 60fps@1440p in busy areas especially in the hubs.

brady12

I am having same problem with loot / repair cycle/ cost .

Dcully

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122887628#Comment_122887628

I seem to be the only one not having performance issues, ive just recorded some gameplay in the known notorious fps killer starting town and i never dropped below 100fps , max settings 1440P.

I will upload to YT and link it in here.

Also there is a mod will balance out the bad economy so you get more cash for what you sell , also one that reduces to cost of repair.

The nice part is there are numerous versions for each mod where you can reduce the cost by a percentage instead of a huge chuck to keep it immersive.

Just uploaded vid, worth noting YT sucks the quality away but you can see the fps top felt corner.

https://youtu.be/a16zGTZavj0

Cordell

Do you have frame generation enabled?

Dcully

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122888346#Comment_122888346

Im running everything maxed out apart from post processing which i have set to low as i dislike most PP in games @ 1440P

DLSS is set to quality and frame gen is on with little to no input lag at all, i find once your 90 fps or so introducing some FG doesnt add much input lag at all.

If i turn off FG i sit between 85-100 fps, turn of DLSS and its 70-85 fps.

Grayzone Warfare is another game people really struggle with but ive always got 130+ fps in that game similar settings.

Markus Antonius

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122864195#Comment_122864195

Cant wait to play this. First Stalker is one of my favorite games and glad to hear the "brutalness" has made it into this game. Just thinking back to how long it took me to clear out that little house of bandits at the beginning of Shadow of Chernobyl.

What's up with the miss spelling of Chernobyl tho? Was puzzled by that.

Cordell

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122888354#Comment_122888354

So if you turn off FG, keep DLSS quality on, you still get over 80fps in the starting village?

Dcully

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122888430#Comment_122888430

Yes , about 85.

Dcully

This guy is very good at what he does and he just uploaded his latest vid might be worth a look.

Scroll to his optimized settings and give them a try, im gonna do the same to gain some more frames.

https://youtu.be/814y2OPLsX0?si=0FbuTZRpcGclAr2O

DeSelby83

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122888387#Comment_122888387

Apparently it's the Ukrainian way of spelling as opposed to the Russian way which we are most used to seeing......I think

Cordell

Lots of fixes:

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1643320/view/4455844537830474602

_CreeD_

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122901733#Comment_122901733

Thank Jebus. I just ran into this one last night as my first true game breaking bug (basically under certain conditions you can't 'win' one of the better side missions, if you can even progress to the end it will tell you that you've saved everyone, then when you leave that zone it reverses to they're all dead).

• Fixed multiple issues in the On the Edge mission, including idle NPCs, stuck doors, and the Monolith attack progression.

_CreeD_

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122901774#Comment_122901774

Righty after the massive patch this mission is better but can still bug. There are meant to be 2 distinct phases and in between some side objectives. Pre-Patch the sides were borked and would show complete, then not and then lose progress etc. just a total mess. After the patch I reloaded before I entered the Lesser Zone to trigger it, progress was much better but at the end of phase 1 (talk to Gaffer) I went out of the town and got the trigger for phase 2 but it basically never happens. There's a post on steam with multiple reports of the same thing. So this mission is still borked. And again from my perspective if you care about the immersion this should be considered a Main so be warey if you start it before it's properly fixed. Spoilers will include how this happens.

Spoiler Warning

So after the Monolith are, well, re-monolithised if you travel back towards Zalissya (common as you will likely be near if not full inventory and what you think is the intermediary shop is not anymore) you'll get a call for help to defend the town. This is a great role playing mission, or well should be. SAVE before you enter the Lesser Zone until you know this is fixed. In v1 there was an emission as you entered which borked A-Life by having the scripted Monolith enemies run to cover with the NPCs you have to defend…complexity and breakage ensues. In the first patch it appears those Monolith insta-die if this occurs, better. But now when you complete the first phase and it's subs and then attempt to leave it calls you back to the town to defend it and no-body attacks. If you leave, just like in V1, regardless of being told you succesfully defended the town it will then kill them all and Zalissya becomes a dead town.

Cordell

New patch out:

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1643320/view/4455844537830474746

…claiming to fix that mission

Grumpypants

Started playing on Xbox Game pass. I had gotten to the "bolt" part at the start at launch but hadn't gone back. Had been tired and messing on my phone so had no clue what to do. Restarted the whole game and I'm now really enjoying it.

Just got to the first friendly village so doing some side missions here to get to grips with things.

Can you fix the broken guns? I keep picking them up and then drop them as I've gone overweight.

Grumpypants

Never mind just met Lens.

Cordell

Weird water bottle - 100% radiation protection (from both radioactive areas and artifacts) and 120 carrying weight, slight downside is that you're permanently drunk. Well, it's the zone, where vodka treats radiation poisoning. I've even got an achievement for getting a headshot while drunk.

This is my GOTY.