[S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 · Heart of Chornobyl] - S.T.A.L.K. T.A.L.K. returns to The Zone!
IceBurner
It's cold and there are penguins.Registered User regular
It's cold and there are penguins.Registered User regular
Official site.
Official support page.
What is S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKO4PL8XzikS.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is a jaw-droppingly atmospheric Unreal Engine 5-based adventure set in a warped, crumbling, post-disaster regional relic of the former Soviet Union, masterfully crafted into a dark, haunting atmosphere like no other. Offering incredible graphics, sound design, and experiences--both in pursuit of the story and emergent from simply playing--S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 may take place on Earth, but that won't stop it from drawing you from your seat into an alien world.
Created by Ukranian developer GSC Game World, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series explores the mysteries and horrors of a homegrown East-European, fantastical modern-era setting. Each game is a blend of FPS, survival horror, immersive role-playing, and emergent sandbox simulation of a fictional version of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Zone of Alienation; "The Zone". Following the original disaster in 1986, everything went even more wrong after a mysterious and sudden 2nd disaster in 2006. Now riddled with horrifically hostile mutants, dangerously inexplicable anomalies, lucratively powerful artifacts, radioactive hot spots and debris, and guarded by the local military, uninvited trespassers seek survival, fortune, or freedom in the hostile, irradiated lands of The Zone. These Scavengers, Trespassers, Adventurers, Looters, Killers, Explorers, and Robbers; they're all S.T.A.L.K.E.R.S, each having come to The Zone for their own reason. S.T.A.L.K.E.R., why have you come here?
In acknowledgment for its strong history of often-amazing fan mods, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 officially supports mods.
Do I need to play each game to enjoy the narrative in the next?
No. While you can certainly get cool extra tidbits and references from playing them all, each game offers a complete stand-alone adventure in The Zone. The main reason to consider playing them all is because they're pretty cool games with a unique setting, incredible atmosphere, and each a story to explore.
Does this game have DRM or NFTs?
No to both. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 released Nov 20, 2024, DRM free on Steam, GOG, Epic, and on XBox Series in 3 packages. There are no vendor-specific differences.
- Standard Edition - S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2.
- Deluxe Edition - S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 + 6 unique weapon variants, 3 unique armor variants, a bonus side quest, digital artbook, and digital soundtrack.
- Ultimate Edition - S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 + 10 unique weapon variants, 4 unique armor variants, Season Pass good for 2 planned expansions and any future DLC, digital artbook, and digital soundtrack.
GSC Game World did plan and announce promotional NFTs outside the game with no gameplay connections, but fan feedback was so swiftly and thoroughly negative they canceled those plans next day. The cancellation was posted on social media but not emailed to their mailing list like the announcement was, so that news was not quite as far-reaching.
Can I play this on Steamdeck?
Not as of launch. The dev is working with Valve to get S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 certified Steamdeck compatible.
What post-release support can we expect?
In addition, 2 expansions and Multiplayer are planned for a post-release updates.GSC Game World Team wrote:In the first days after release, we’ll be working with hotfixes, rolling them out as precisely as possible, but as frequently as we can. Then, we’ll switch to larger updates that include constant improvements. There will also be free in-game content — we’ll share its roadmap later in December.
Future DLC is also on the table. The expansions and any DLC are both covered by the game's Season Pass.
What about the previous games?
The previous 3 games from 2007, 2008, and 2010 are available on Steam, GOG, PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. Trailer. We discussed them at length here. See the past threads for tons of tips, troubleshooting, and modding advice.
Hello S.T.A.L.K.E.R.! Thinking of placing an order?
Wait a sec...S.T.A.L.K.E.R.?
"I said come in! Don't just stand there!" (S.T.A.L.K. T.A.L.K.)
"Let's drink to him once more. He was a good S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
What you want is here, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Come to me.
My information might well be of use to you, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
One last thing for veteran S.T.A.L.K.E.R.S. curious if all is as it should be in The Zone. The most minor of spoiler warnings.
Chiki-briki is back!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nv2SGrXtREM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nv2SGrXtREM3DS: 3024-6114-2886 | NNID: Rabites | Steam: IceBurner
PSN: theIceBurner, IceBurnerEU, IceBurner-JP | X-Link Kai: TheIceBurner
Dragon's Dogma: 192 Warrior Linty | 80 Strider Alicia | 32 Mage Terra
PSN: theIceBurner, IceBurnerEU, IceBurner-JP | X-Link Kai: TheIceBurner
Dragon's Dogma: 192 Warrior Linty | 80 Strider Alicia | 32 Mage Terra
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The difference is very important, especially to the devs.
So this may be back on my list.
The game absolutely feels like a refinement of and improvement on the older games with a slew of new surprised. The lighting system is fucking amazing with both old and new anomalies. There are both regular thunder storms (which absolutely can blast your ass with lightning, as I found out) and emissions, both of which look like different kinds of hell when they happen. The nastiest anomalies thus far are subtle; they definitely have telltales, but the telltales are such that you can easily run facefirst into them before you realize you're in trouble. The Zone is piled with rusty piece of shit buildings and vehicles. Old mid-80s CRT monitors and whatnot are still all over the place, with the Ukrainian wilderness working hard to bury everything in green. Crackling underbrush can be wind. Or mutants. Or anomaly signs. Or bandits. Or paranoia. The stealth system is moderately improved; you can reasonably stealth your way through a camp with a silenced weapon, but it isn't easy. Enemies attack based on where they think you are so if you can break line of sight and move, they'll go after the spot they last saw you attack from. They've got good reflexes, though.
The mutants are definitely here, new and old. I've encountered a couple new ones and thoroughly appreciated their nastiness, plus some old ones have been turned even nastier than ever. In particular
The game is also Stalker as fuck in that it seems to be rather poorly optimized. It is a huge visual upgrade, sure, but this is still a STALKER game and there is still STALKER jank even running on Unreal 5. I'm playing on a 3070 and things look great, except ultra-wide causes problems. I fully expect patches for this stuff, but be aware of them right now. I turned on the highest difficulty setting and just found it annoying; the player doesn't have much in the way of movement options, so it's just not entertaining to get slashed to ribbons by a Bloodsucker after you've dumped a dozen point-blank shotgun rounds into it. The normal difficulty is a good level of challenge, enough that you get hurt bad but not so much that combat is stupidly one-sided. Every human enemy has some armor, so headshots are important. Human AI is also better than before, with human opponents always running for cover first, throwing grenades, trying to approach or flank you, etc. Zone transitions seem to be gone now and seem to be one huge contiguous environment.
Controls have also been optimized somewhere. There are four quickslots available, now mapped to Q and E and accessed through a short press or long hold of each. The old lean system has been replaced with an adaptive system (stand at the edge of cover and ADS and you lean automatically) in order to free up Q and E. There's also a radial menu, presumably to be controller-friendly. It's fine and functional, even for PC users. Oh, and you can add/remove attachments realtime now without menu-diving, so no more having to pull out the backpack inventory to pull a scope off something. A small but very nice improvement.
One of the big things they've preserved is an un-game-ified environment. For that, I use the Fallout games as a comparison: these games virtually always have some game element pointing you to a "secret" find or it's just an outright mission with an objective marker. Most things are not just out there in the wild, they have to be activated in some way to show up. With Heart of Chornobyl, you can blow right past big big finds and the game won't spare the shortest moment reminding you. By sheer chance of examination, I found a scientist suit tucked away in the corner of a room blocked by two different anomalies and in a pile of fallen lockers. I've found more than one stash without a marker for it, so there is stuff just waiting out there for curious players to find. A door that conspicuously has a padlock on it can very likely have no story whatsoever associated with it, it's just waiting for somebody with a sharp eye to find it.
And the way stuff is placed makes all the difference. A stash isn't just laying in the middle of a room, it's tucked in a corner under a beam. There are all sorts of minor helpful items like bandages around, but they're often sitting on shelves like any other item in the world. No ransacking container lists, just what you see is what you can take.
Overall, I'm way into the experience and getting in deeper. There's enough familiar to make you solidly remember where you are, but enough new to constantly keep you on your toes. My particularly favorite nasty thing thus far is
EDIT: Good to hear that something like a mod for Bloodsuckers being bullet sponges is already out. I turned down the difficulty directly after my second Bloodsucker fighter because they're just a race between how much damage you deal versus how many first aid kits you have. Don't apply a kit fast enough or run out and you die, keep them flowing and keep reloading quickly enough and you win. Even on the default difficulty they're over-tuned. Same goes for Poltergeists; I wasn't even sure they could die in this game after trying to kill my first one, then I turned the difficulty down and my second one died after like half the damage I'd put into the first one.
Welcome to the Zone!
Alas, I cannot go throw bolts at things until end of December due to work but at least that gives time for a patch or two to roll out.
I've still yet to play OG Stalker, my first experience was Clear Sky and then Call of Pripyat, the latter of which ran a LOT more stable and consistently for me. I've also put a little time into the Anomaly fan project that mixes all the areas together, but by and large that game lacks in direction for me enough that I usually just wander off and get killed before I can figure out my own goals
I imagine this game will be a blast once it's better optimized and stable enough that the bugs and such are ironed out
PSN ID : DetectiveOlivaw | TWITTER | STEAM ID | NEVER FORGET
However. It does have new STALKER game jank such as is traditional for STALKER games. I've already hit bugs like a vanishing UI, a flickering UI, and one CTD from handling the PDA. Plus it has definite room for performance optimization and ultrawide support is reportedly not great right now. So waiting a couple patches is not at all a bad idea for anybody thinking of that.
I have to say that GSC has done a fucking amazing job of porting the feel of the world from the original engine into Unreal 5, though. The way physics objects move around, the way things break, the foliage in general are all things that you could swear were running on the old Xray engine GSC cooked up but nope, it's all on Unreal 5. Probably my favorite graphical upgrade at this point is reflections in water, they look so damned good and it adds a ton to the feel of the world. And the player body is rendered! You have legs and a torso when you look down! And when the shit all comes together and rain is hammering down around you in the middle of a rainstorm while you fight your way through the crumbling remains of some decrepit Soviet factory at night with lightning and muzzle flashes shining through broken windows and glass bricks, you can practically taste the radiation of the Zone.
EDIT: Oh, and the graphical glitch where stuff at the extreme edge bottom of the screen would get weirdly stretched or distorted is finally FINALLY gone. That thing plagued the entire franchise until now. I don't even know if it bothered anybody else but it always annoyed me.
PSN: theIceBurner, IceBurnerEU, IceBurner-JP | X-Link Kai: TheIceBurner
Dragon's Dogma: 192 Warrior Linty | 80 Strider Alicia | 32 Mage Terra
In the time I've played (on PC), I haven't run into any major bugs or crashes. The closest thing to a bug I've seen is the a-life spawning system can be too aggressive and new things can pop up in closer proximity to the player than is probably intended. There's certainly some design jank that could be improved on, particularly with certain parts of the UI, but that's not the same as bugs. Otherwise it's been smooth sailing from the start for me.
And sometime it is a cat, a dog, and a rat hiding in a shed with the stash waiting to pounce you while the fighting draws the bandits out of the bushes behind a fence where they were sitting around a fire just out of sight.
. . .game for sure should have released in Early Access to get hundreds of thousands of eyes on the game to identify what was and was not working.
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/stalker-2-devs-reassure-players-yes-a-life-2-0-is-in-the-game-no-its-not-working-right-and-yes-fixes-are-on-the-way/
tldr Shits fucked, devs know it, fixes on the way
My favorite crash so far as been me trying to get to somewhere when a bloodsucker jumpscares me and slaps my shitso hard that he just crashed the game.
Gosh I love this game so much. Also I murdered Squint or whatever his name was after I did his quest in the windmill. Then I saw him again and he said HELLO friend. If I could shoot him again I would have, but I couldn't in the friendly area.
Steam: pandas_gota_gun
So if you hit the Slag Heap and performance suddenly bombs, know that it's a bug but there's a workaround.
I'm going to turn the difficulty down from Veteran to maybe see if that helps with the spawning issue but I doubt it. It just doesn't make sense: I haven't played the original, but these enemies do not feel like they are meant to be tutorial or "early game" enemies. If they are, it really stinks because any interest I have in going out in the world for fear of having to waste resources on a bullet-sponge. Like if they didn't take so much ammo to kill, weren't able to two-shot you if they engage you from behind or didn't have some sort of stunning effect (that I've yet to see where it comes from) - then sure.
. . .it just doesn't feel "punishingly fun" at all.
One way to handle them
This game has so many small details. Some of the optional things you do end up as campfire tales. Places and dead bodies from the original trilogy are all over. There are some really creative ways to deal with anomalies. I'm having a blast so far. I'm on the lower end of the requirements, so I'm super lucky it runs great on my machine. Really sucks that a lot of people are having performance/bug problems. Hopefully they throw out some patches quickly
I really want to like this game, hopefully a couple of patches can sort it out.
. . .more, it just breaks up my exploration too much. Like spawn some bandits or enemies commiserate with the area. Why spawn these mutants that I feel like should be rare and dangerous.
I kept hearing about this mod for the original called GAMMA and having checked out this video I think I'm going to try that out with some controller mods. Like I want to play exactly this kind of game, and wanted to play the modern day version of it, but just doesn't seem to be the right time for that.
As for shaders, there's a mod that removes the pre-comp step and I had zero issues running the game (I legit think it actually ran BETTER; I as getting pretty solid frames in towns where before could dip into the 30s).
For HoC, I'm definitely disappointed in the lack of being able to harvest mutant body parts for sale. Yeah, collecting dog tails or whatever didn't pay much, but it at least covered the cost of the ammunition you spent fighting them. Hopefully that's something that gets modded back in; if it's going to take me twenty shotgun shells to kill a Bloodsucker then dammit, I want to be able to chop off its face tentacles and sell them for at least the 2k monies I spent shooting it.
King of the Hill spoilers plus bug description
So I just shot the asshole in the face and took the info off his corpse. Problem solved.
Otherwise, I've not been experiencing most of the bugs others are reporting. From some examples above, I did not have that character levitating above the bed in my game, he was laying on it normally and I haven't experienced any performance degradation issues with the Slag Heap despite I'd estimate 15 visits in a single game session yesterday. I've yet to need to restart the game for performance issues at all.
Edit: Anomaly is the free version of the game that was built from the original game's source code the company released when they went under years ago. You do not need to own the original games to play it. It combines the maps of all 3 games, but they are still separate areas you teleport to, not seamless. It also strips out all the story content leaving just a survival sandbox.
GAMMA is a curated collection of 350+ mods for Anomaly that includes a download manager to keep everything sane. Many of the mods have difficulty settings that can be adjusted in-game to tweak things to your preference. It adds back in most of the story missions as well as some additional 3rd party story content to provide some activities beyond just survival. Be aware it changes the game into a much more hardcore survival sim than Stalker ever was. For example, vendors don't sell guns at all, you must scavenge everything including stripping parts off found guns to repair your own, you'll be cooking food from mutant meat because you won't be able to afford the prices vendors charge for food, etc.
In some places, you can see a PDA directly beneath a Stalker. You can't interact with it and it stays centered underneath them while they walk around and changes facing according to their orientation, so you might see a PDA at their feet skimming through terrain. I figure that, in code terms, these are "special" PDAs are actually the NPC Stalker entities and the body we see is all the game-side stuff for the player. So the game doesn't track Stalkers, it tracks PDAs and Stalkers are just pinned to the top of these PDAs as they slide around the game world interacting with things, the NPC body hovering above and doing all the animations and whatnot.
Sound like just a rendering bug. When NPC's pull out their PDAs, it's a rendered object. When they put it away it's supposed to just disappear. It sounds more like when they put it away, the game fails to stop rendering it for some reason, but does relocate the object to the 0,0 coordinates of the NPC object, making it appear at their feet. You see similar bugs in other games where objects that may or may not supposed to be visible will randomly attach themselves to parts of characters at weird angles or floating in the air.
At least in the previous games, the "offline" representation of NPCs is just a non-rendered bit of simulated data, it's not moving smaller, actually rendered objects around the maps as that would be needlessly expensive computationally. There was a setting that controlled the distance from the player that the game would switch the NPCs from non-rendered simulation to fully rendered "online". I assume they are using the same approach here. And having that activation distance set too small (for performance reasons?) could explain some of the odd spawning issues seen. You'd see similar spawning problems in the original game if you set it too low and major performance degradation if you set it too high.
I fired it up again with the no shader compiling mod and it was running nicely for the hour I played, big thanks!
I might just still give it a go as I have nothing better to play. The wise decision is probably still to wait 4-5 months before diving in though....
Yes, the difficulty is very very adjustable. As always, the mods are way too over-eager with part wear and tear, which was my primary source of grindy frustration. However, you can not only reduce part wear rates to a fraction of the original rate (something I consider essential to enjoying the game), you can set the rates for the minimum wear level of parts on different kinds of enemies. This allows you to dump a TON of grinding by just setting a basic minimum for all enemy drops that ALL parts are functional when you find them (rather than the default settings, where enemies are somehow fighting perfectly well with guns that are rust and scrap).
But without linked stashes, it can still be a pain in the ass to collect parts for upgrades and repairs like you want. You can have the barrel you need in one region, the trigger assembly in another area, and raw materials in a third area. You can pay guides for fast travel but that can be quite expensive. The game also has a LOT of guns and that means a lot of different parts in each category, which also reduces the drop rates for stuff you want (simply because so many guns means that barrel you need has to spawn on an enemy first and then also be available when the enemy dies).
Anyway, IMPORTANT tip for Heart of Chornobyl: the yellow stash boxes (which are the player's stash) are linked! I'm completely down with the limited fast-travel in the game (guides can take you between bases you've visited, for a fee) but holy crap does a shared stash inventory across all locations save a LOT of shoe leather. So don't be at all shy about dumping excess artifacts, ammo, healing goods, food, weapons, etc in the yellow player stashes because you'll be able to access them from pretty much any place with traders and/or a mechanic nearby. And any actual base should have a player stash, often by the bed area or the major vendor for the location.
And then there's Stalker Complete for the original game, that ALSO adjusts all the balance to make it harder, and I just wonder where the hell one goes if they want to play Stalker without THAT much fuckin' cruft!
PSN ID : DetectiveOlivaw | TWITTER | STEAM ID | NEVER FORGET
Analog stick dead zone and a-life fixes to come in future patches.
STALKER does something to people's brains where you play it once on normal and then have the weirdest urge to play it on Master, and then get the innocent thought of "but what if it hurt me even more" and then the next thing you know you're browsing army surplus stores for old Russian army gear to wear while swilling vodka and eating weird canned meats
This post is potentially autobiographical
The shared stash is my favorite QoL improvement they've added. This is the first game in the series I haven't been looking for a carry weight mod within the first couple hours to stop wasting hours schlepping back and forth across the map at a quarter walk speed just to migrate your home base items from one region to another as the story progressed.
Anyway, GAMMA did have ways to tune the difficulty among its many dozens of tunable options; pretty sure you could even dial in different aspects of the difficulty, from damage to enemy sight/awareness. And generally things get considerably less awful once you can get something with decent bullet resistance; then you both stop dying to a couple bullets and stop bleeding your guts out all over the bushes when a bandit glances your way. The downside is that GAMMA and ANOMALY stretch that timeframe out a fair bit on default, you can struggle with the stupid unbalanced damage for a while. And again, you can also turn the survival stuff way down so it's more an atmosphere than something crippling you.
I will say I'm getting tired of the HoC flashlight being another anemic piece of crap built around a bulb ripped out of the glove compartment of some shitbox Eastern bloc economy sedan in the 80s and the car was already 20 years old at that point because who the fuck could afford a new shitbox economy sedan in the 80s Soviet Union when Chornobyl went up? Shitty flashlights in games drive me crazy, this shit does not add to the atmosphere, it just pisses me off because I want to be able to see to the end of a dark room instead of somehow every room ignoring the laws of physics and making light stop no more than fifteen feet from the source.
The best thing I did with GAMMA was write my own "realism" mod to adjust the drop rates for items that NPCs carried. I've never gotten past that in Stalker military/mercenary squads were going out into the field with apparently no more than 6 bullets, 1 box of crackers, and 3 credits between them, yet somehow were happily squeezing off about 600 rounds during a fight. When you can find a full mag or two, a few hundred credits, a few other supplies, a weapon, and clothes/armor on a body as though that person had actually been prepped to be out in the Zone for the day dealing with the same mutants, bandits, and predatory vendors as you do it simply makes that world feel more realistic and thus more enjoyable to me.
I've played all the games multiple times, and have a few hundred hours in on ANOMALY.
I finally got to get to STALKER 2 today. I'm 100 minutes in (god oh god I wish I had more time right now).
IT'S SO GOOD, GUYS. It's like taking a warm bath, it's so comfortable being back in the Zone, in a modern-ass game engine no less.
I'm gonna go through S2 once vanilla, and then check back in with the mod scene.
1. Load Stalker 2
2. Crash on shaders
3. Change shader cache in Nvidia control panel to unlimited
4. Keep Crashing, search internet, internet says upgrade MB bios because I have a 12th gen intel. Sounds stupid.
5. Upgrade MB BIOS. Totally fixes my issue loading the game. WTF?
6. Change keys to arrows. Works fine until I hit a ladder.
7. I have to use w,s for ladders while using arrows for everything else, can't remap.
8. Wait on patch. I played about an hour, now waiting on patch jealous of people playing it.
The knife melee range is, unlike most games, actually at arms reach, so when an ammo box is on the ground you can't hit it without crouching first which is a bit annoying honestly.