marelooke

I promised a more comprehensive review once I completed my playthrough of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl, and since I recently finished the game for the first time, siding with the Ward, here we go. Of note, it took me 191hours and when the credits rolled the game was on patch 1.1.4 (1.2 came out very recently) To get this out of the way early: I still would not recommend this game to anyone who has not already played the previous entries, and even to those who have I'd wait for some major patches. At the rate patches are coming this game may be in somewhat of a finished state by the end of the year (well, I started writing this before 1.2 dropped, so some of these may end up finally being fixed...). The first, and biggest issue is that the game is still a buggy mess. Early parts are mostly fine, but once past SIRCAA things started falling apart rapidly. For one there were regular CTDs, for another there's issues with NPC literally blocking your ability to enter areas. I quite literally had to rely on a mod enabling the Unreal Engine console so I could noclip into the safe area in Pripyat because NPCs body-blocked me out for 90% of my time spent in Pripyat (from my arrival until the very final missions start). Being a packrat I also managed to break my Stash: items started overlapping, sections appeared empty but weren't, etc. Looks like some sort of overflow issue. Thankfully it didn't actually seem to corrupt the contents, but it made using the thing a right pain. Then there's the gameplay issues. For starters, equipment maintenance and upgrading is prohibitively expensive. This expense has a rather negative impact on gameplay; for one you end up dragging everything you can back to a vendor, which gets old rather fast, for another getting into a fight is less of a "Oh no, I may die!" type of deal and more of a "Oh no, this may bankrupt me." One of the results is that I stuck to "known good" items rather than experimenting, and that I stuck to lower tier items rather than upgrading to the best gear available to me. Throughout the entire game I used four sets of armour, including the starting one, and the majority of the time I used the standard Ward armour. Only once I hit the "point of no return" I started using an Exoskeleton as upgrading/repairing them is just so ridiculously expensive. Exacerbating this is the whole enemy spawning situation. Unlike in earlier games most enemies don't exist in the world and wander around (there's some now, since the first major patch 1.1), the vast majority gets spawned onto you by the game if it thinks you haven't been fighting enough recently. Additionally there are spawn triggers in the world that will (re)spawn enemies once you get too far from them (or too close to them), which in a lot of cases means you get to fight the same enemies multiple times while you're exploring an area. This is extremely aggravating when it concerns tougher/more annoying enemies, like Poltergeists ("I'm three floors up/down but still trying to murder you by throwing furniture at you"), Psuedogiants (aka "Bullet Sponge Prime"), or Burers ("Hope you like getting shot with your own gun") especially when you're trying to figure out some puzzle. Not to mention that getting attacked at times or places when reasonably speaking you couldn't be is rather immersion breaking (eg. when going back outside right after an emission) Then there's weapon balance, or what passes for it. The tl;dr is that choice of weapon quickly boils down to how common the ammo is, how much "penetration" it has, and how expensive it is to repair, aka cost per kill quickly becomes the defining characteristic given the repair costs. There's more here, like weapon balance being rather out of wack (one of the best guns in the game isn't a modern AR, those mostly suck, comparatively, but a variant of the AK...). What each weapon state, or upgrade does, is also very hard to measure and very badly explained. Personally I never liked the upgrade system that got introduced in Clear Sky and Stalker 2 hasn't changed my opinion on it, rather the contrary. The world also doesn't make a whole lot of sense, enemies barely carry ammunition, yet never run out, but there's so much common loot spread around the world that it's absolutely ridiculous. Additionally each time you go into a situation that seems like it'd be a tough one you get thrown so much stuff at you that preparing for anything is just a waste of time. The endgame missions are a prime example: in SoC you'd prepare by picking your favourite loadout, making sure you bring enough ammunition or healing items etc. etc. In Stalker 2 the endgame areas are full of stocker armouries and they toss a couple of some of the best armours in the game at you to boot. Stashes are often intricate puzzles with more often than not extremely disappointing contents for how difficult they were to access. There's also the issue that some of them are literally impossible to get unless you picked a specific side for certain parts of the story. Mutants are overused, quickly eroding any sense of fear they may have instilled otherwise. Meeting your first Bloodsucker in SoC was a memorable experience. Alas, not quite the case in this entry. The anomalies overall were great, I liked how they made them more interactive by having the bolt disable certain ones for a limited amount of time. I will say I strongly dislike the (new) "bog poppers" anomaly though (aka "the flashbang"...) Story wise the game is good, that is, the overarching story, though it pretty much explains everything so I'm not quite sure how they're going to continue this franchise because there doesn't seem a whole lot of mystery left. But the storytelling, I'm very much not as much of a fan. For one you're forced into joining a faction, there's no option to go at it alone at all. To make matters worse, neither option is particularly appealing and while I initially ended up with Spark as I tried to play "independent" I quickly flipped my allegiance to the Ward once I met and realized it'd be a binary choice between Ward and Spark. You're also forced into various dumb decisions, I mentioned being forced to kill friendly faction soldiers after having talked to a returning character that the PC doesn't know at al before. The game goes out of its way to not give you any other options, and even if you finagle it so you don't actually kill anyone, it still assumes you did. To me it seems as if this mission was written for Spark and just lazily recycled for the Ward because they ran out of time. Another peeve of mine is the use of cinematics, which, while well done, absolutely take away your sense of agency, often forcing situations that I guess they couldn't figure out how to create in a more organic. In the same vein the game likes to cut off your way back by locking doors behind you during story missions, which feels kinda cheap and/or immersion breaking. Another thing I personally wish they'd never bring back are the bossfights, they feel extremely out of place for the type of game Stalker used to be, and I can't say I enjoyed any of them as they're almost all bullet spongey gimmick fights. Hell, sometimes you literally drop into an "arena" that's so obviously an arena that you might get some Borderlands flashbacks. All in all my conclusion is still that this is a game that tries to look and feel like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and initially succeeds, until you get further in and all the cracks start becoming apparent. It's a decent open world game, and may even become a good one once it's less of a buggy mess, but as a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. sequel it's a frustrating experience as it's so easy to see how great this could have been. As it stands it's not clear to me whether the game is even fixable as some of the limitations may just be due to the engine choice (eg. night vision is apparently hard(er) to do with RT, and well, fancy graphics were more important, apparently. Similarly draw distance may be a console or UE5 limitation). Once they start making structural fixes to the game (spawning, night vision, etc.) I may revisit it, but as it stands one playthrough was quite enough. Earlier I gave this game a 6/10 and I stand by that.

Eh, I've seen a few that are far more neutral and they're like "Meh", here's one: Game seems to have turned out kind of how I expected. Will probably play it, but for 70EUR it's definitely on the "wait for a discount"-list.

Doesn't seem to be loading for me... There's an event going on so I grabbed some patience and bugspray and finally headed to Pyro... Undocking with the jump gate in the background... On approach... Here we gooooooo... You can see some of the inside of the jump tunnel, those "pillars" you actually have to navigate around. Aaaand we made it! Some atmosphere shots from inside the Pyro system: First encounter with space cows

Forcing myself through the story in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, they clearly ran out of time and just half-assed the latter half once you start making "ending choices". Instead of having multiple missions depending on earlier choices there's only the single one that makes absolutely no sense for 50% of the choices you may have made before. Things got so on my nerves I actually put the game down for a few weeks. I'm talking about "Dangerous Liaisons": The lore is intriguing, but the storytelling is abysmal. I'd have taken less cinematics (that have lots of issues on their own) and better storytelling over what we got. If you're going to give players choice, better make it makes sense or it's just going to feel even worse than getting no choice at all (much more to say there, but will reserve that for when I get to the end) No patches since the last one, so AI and spawning issues are still the same as they were after the first big patch.

Not sure anyone would really want to claim that one at this point...

It will probably be a few more generations before hardware path tracing is at the level we need for it to be usable everywhere without tanking performance and/or quality at any resolution higher than Full HD. Just fingers crossed my RX 6800 XT can last me that long (and more fingers crossed Intel will be able to provide some higher end competition by the time this card starts falling off) On the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 front I can say the big 1.1 patch definitely improved the Zone's feeling. Enemies no longer pop up behind you fully aware of your location and they do seem to wander around on their own. That being said, the game still clearly spawns NPCs based on triggers (I had to kill the same pack of Blind Dogs three times while exploring a location...) or, at least to my feeling, "activity" (if you are jogging around too long, per the game's estimation, without a fight the game will spawn you a fight) Apparently the major showstopper I ran into was fixed, but it's hard to say as I managed to get past it before the patch dropped. I did run into major performance issues during the boss fight though, fps dropping to the single digits each time I targeted the boss. Feels like I'm nearing the end of the playthrough, so far it's clocking in at 100 hours, which puts me at about 1death/hour (though I'd say about 70% of those are probably attributable to the game being in a "state"...) At this point I'd say I'd score it like a 6/10. It's decently playable at this point, and you probably won't want to uninstall within the Steam refund window if you're not a hardcore S.T.A.L.K.E.R. fan (but assuming this type of game is your jam, of course...)

AAA went up 20EUR in only a few years as well, first trying to convince us that the console prices that were 10EUR above normal PC pricing of 50EUR were "standard" for PC as well, and then tacking on another 10EUR for inflation...

It also has an image quality impact per the folks at Hardware Unboxed:

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl patch 1.1 is out with an enormous amount of fixes, but, most importantly for me (aside from the bugfixes) major improvements to the spawning system

Eh, they're not exactly releasing them often enough for how broken the game is. The longer I've been playing the more major bugs I've been encountering, from quick items not working (animation plays, nothing happens), to outright crashes to desktop, my 2nd weapon magically getting swapped out by something I didn't even have in my inventory, and now a progression stopper bug that's been there since release. So guess I'm setting the game aside, because I'm not exactly left with any other choice. On top of that as time went on general design issues are just becoming more and more apparent, from weapon balance (such as it is) to just mission, world, and progression design. The game may look like a duck, but whether it quacks like one...

That was apparently a requirement from their publisher, they were afraid the game would feel too empty if not enough was happening so they dialled the number of enemies way up. Kinda ironic that they're doing the same, in a worse way, in HoC, though it seems like after the first patches it's less obnoxious now, but I haven't gone back to any of the egregiously obvious areas to verify. It may just be that Garbage is less affected. Ran into my first major bug, you're tasked with "finding" one of two items in Garbage, but when I return with only the one they just take it and act like I didn't complete the mission, so I gotta do both, and hope it works I guess, if not I guess I'll just kill everyone. I'll find out in the evening what it's going to be.

Well, I've completed my part of the Save Stanton event, and the Intergalactic Aerospace Expo has come and (mostly) gone, so I've got more to share from my favourite screenshot generator (alas, I forgot to turn off the debug overlay way too often, ruined some really nice shots )

Yeah, not sure it can easily be fixed, if at all. The review touches on one of the core problems: the game immerses you and then brutally shatters that immersion in quite a lot of ways. I've been going off the beaten path now that I'm out of the starting area, just sightseeing, finding, and revisiting areas from the previous games (mostly SoC, which I have easily the most hours in) and this Reddit thread kinda sums up the experience. Just to add a few stories of my own: Ended up in the Chemical Plant, walked right in without issues, no word from the guards, no hostility either, until I got to the other side, where the gate guard told me Stalkers weren't allowed in. Of course I already was "in" and wanted "out"... The game just didn't anticipate players coming from that direction (and both sides have roads, not like I jumped a wall or did anything else "weird", like jumping over a fence) Another one happened today. I found the Military Warehouses and started exploring. Got ambushed by what I believe is a Pseudodog (the one that create clones) and a few Snorks (at least they fought each-other as well). Deal with them and start exploring the otherwise entirely empty place. After checking for hostiles outside I start going inside buildings to start looting. I come across stuff that's clearly intended for later use (doors requiring keycards), so I loot what I can and go back outside. Only to find three bandits waiting for me that came out of nowhere. So I shoot them, only to get blasted by a bunch of other NPCs from some military faction that also suddenly appeared (presumably alongside the bandits, which they entirely ignored...). So after I deal with those, barely, and I start looting I get a bullet through the head. Turns out snipers had also magically spawned on top of the guard towers... So I re-load, take out the snipers, and get back to looting, only to get jumped by four Snorks... Kite them into an anomaly, and I finally get to loot without interruption, only to discover that one of the towers that had a sniper doesn't have a way to get up at all, just to shatter any illusion of them getting there organically somehow. (also: bye bye to that loot) When I did my 1.000 experiment and installed from DVD I couldn't turn everything all the way up without things stuttering (there's some additional sliders under "Advanced" that aren't maxed out even on the highest quality profile). Curious to know whether you managed to max those out without issues (always possible later patches fixed performance)

There was also the issue where (human) enemies wouldn't take damage while in an animation (like stagger from getting hit). Not sure if the newer games also had that, but after the first one I just went for one-bullet-one-kill headshot-only sniper-type builds with a side of shotgun for dealing with mutants. Anyway, played some more and made it to Cordon (not where I was supposed to go, but nostalgia!). Once again ran into an issue where I almost got murdered by enemies spawning where I just came from. On the graphics side, and this became really obvious after playing some SoC for comparison's sake, shadows are not working properly, which is one of those things that blows my mind given that dynamic shadows and tessellation were the two things that set SoC apart from its contemporaries, graphics-wise. Not sure where to put this, but I also changed the voice acting to, what I assume is, Ukrainian, because the English voice acting is just terrible to the point I couldn't stand it anymore (especially the player character). At this point I have no idea why this game gets such high praise/scores when none of the things that made the originals stand out are there, and that is on top of all the technical issues people appear to be having. Cyberpunk 2077 got panned hard for, arguably, less. Hell, the gaslighting on Reddit is through the roof, so many people claiming things weren't in the originals, when they were, or were added by mods, when they were in the base game (like hunting mutants for body parts), that it's not even funny any more, just sad. Not sure if they're just idiots that never played the originals, or hardcore fanboys with a severe case of toxic denial. As a sequel to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. I'd be giving it a 4/10 with what I've seen so far, with an option to decrease that even further (eg. I've heard night vision isn't even in, which would probably result in me docking more points if it turns out to be true). Disappointed doesn't even come close to summing up my thoughts on Heart of Chornobyl. More of the same was all I wanted, ffs. Anyway, since the Intergalactic Aerospace Expo is on in Star Citizen, and Stalker 2 is a bust, I've gone back to that mess of an alpha (which at least doesn't pretend to be anything more) to check out some of the new ships and participate in the "Save Stanton" event. Shame they decided to ruin flight, combat with a capital ship should've been epic, now it just felt very "meh". Oh well, maybe I'll end up finishing Baldur's Gate 3 after all...

Eh, it worked fine in Shadow of Chernobyl on release, maybe didn't do everything they promised but it didn't spawn enemies around you out of thin air (only places I recall NPCs just "popping in" was on zone transition points, specifically Garbage -> Cordon, which I attributed to enemies moving across zone boundaries). To confirm I dug up my Shadow of Chernobyl discs and played through the intro missions in unpatched 1.000 SoC, including some side missions (until you get sent to retrieve the papers for Sidorovitch) and what I found kinda confirmed my memories. Enemies do interact with each-other, they don't spawn out of thin air, and places you just cleared stay cleared until NPCs eventually wander in, not until you either turn around, or pass an arbitrary spawn trigger. Hell, human enemies spawning in like that would've been extremely noticeable in SoC as the PDA tells you how many NPCs are present in your immediate surroundings (guess there's a reason that functionality is gone...). Didn't try the higher difficulties (played on "normal" aka "S.T.A.L.K.E.R." difficulty, and playing on middle difficulty option in Stalker 2) but mutants felt far less bullet spongy as well, three, or so, pistol rounds to the head, or two shotgun blasts, take down a Boar . I'm actually curious about Bloodsuckers now, as in Stalker2 those are extreme bullet sponges. Hmm, maybe I should do another SoC playthrough until they sort out the new game...

Like this? https://packaged-media.redd.it/egcskpmbdg2e1/pb/m2-res_480p.mp4?m=DASHPlaylist.mpd&v=1&e=1732298400&s=151a2ebed849322880390d60a67db5deadb1883b

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2. The tl;dr: cannot recommend at this time unless you're a hardcore fan. Game is just plain broken, and no, I don't mean all the complaints about performance or crashes (haven't experienced any of that, the game runs just fine for me). It turns out the system that makes The Zone come alive ("A Life 2") is just not functioning properly (as confirmed by the devs), so NPCs just spawn out of thin air, often pretty much on top of the character, rather than organically wandering in and interacting with each-other, and the player. Given that this is the system that makes S.T.A.L.K.E.R., well, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. that's kind of a big deal... (not to mention that a military patrol spawning on top of you is ... not a good time early in the game) There's some other things I'm not too fond of, but nothing that's a deal-breaker, at least that I've found so far. The game very much feels like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. so when they eventually get The Zone working as it should I'm expecting to put in many, many hours.

Right, I'm aware of those last two as they were all over the net, was bit hard to miss, even though I tried () as I don't tend to follow games I intend to play at a later date very much until I do actually get to them (Avoiding hype saves on disappointment. Which is likely why I didn't mind CP2077 as much as most seemed to) Personally I wasn't a terribly big fan of how the origins worked in D:OS2 so I kinda skipped over them, creating my own character in BG3 and I just assumed M&H were origins as well... Mea culpa. In retrospect I guess that'd have been quite the feat to pull off storytelling-wise so I probably should've figured that one out... It does really seem M&H weren't intended to be in the party together, it is rather noticeable in Act 2 as Minthara takes Halsin's spot in the camp, displaying him, which sticks out as a sore thumb because... There's at least one camp site where she's just standing inside a table too, so yeah... Honestly, from a story pacing perspective Halsin doesn't really make much sense to begin with, most of the Act 2 he's just chilling in camp, and by the time he decides to get off his arse and join you Jaheira is basically right around the corner. If they wanted a druid companion I feel they could've potentially done something interesting with Kagha, depending on how that got resolved.

Phew, at least the last ME games were great successes that were clearly better handled than the Dragon Age games. Can't wait to see what the next one brings!

More Baldur's Gate 3. Getting to the end of Act 2. Combat generally isn't a problem anymore, and with the higher levels, better gear, and after turning karmic dice off I can get through a couple of encounters at least without everyone being near death and/or "long rest"-spamming. Thankfully, as there is a lot of combat given how persuasive my Wizard is... Some thoughts: Build suggestions for the builds the companions start out with would have been nice for those of us that want to stick with these thematic builds. Someone at Larian has a hard-on for chaining increasingly difficult dialogue checks, either just harder and harder ones (usually Persuasion) or ones relying on totally different attributes. Bonus points for the only significant outcome being achieved by passing all of them, and failing any of them leading to combat. Dialogue/storytelling in Act 2 is kinda...disappointing in a few places. Major Act 2 spoilers: The two last "Origin story" companions you can pick up feel severely undercooked as companions, at least so far in Act 2. They often don't have dialogue for significant events other companions do comment on, and seem to not react in any way to many actions you can take during the Act (meaning no comments, nor approval/disapproval). Why does the druid just chill in camp for half the act before becoming an actual companion? The above two companions also make going back to Act 1 areas annoying as hell as they will just drop most of their inventory in a bag on your player character, even when they're not in your active party at the time, as if they are permanently leaving the party. Thankfully when going back to Act 2 areas they're still just in camp, but you get to re-equip all of their stuff. Annoying. That "other skill tree". Bringing the Paladin into the party... Really liked the interaction between Withers and that one NPC. Do wish we'd have more conversation options with the guy chilling in our camp though.

Hmm... Honestly wouldn't surprise me in the least. Then again, buying games on release is just gambling anyway. We'll see in a few months where the opinions land.

It's also full of content that avoids at all costs to express an actual opinion in fear of losing viewers, access to preview copies, or because they don't want to sound "negative", or whatever else may be the case. Does one have to be rude about it? Obviously not, and personal attacks are obviously a no-go. But if a game is bad, or strictly a downgrade to its predecessor, then it's not doing anyone a service (least of all the people actually building the game) by clutching to every single bit of positive news and spending as little time as possible on the negatives, or trying to turn negatives into positives just to avoid being seen as "negative". With regards to Mort, I don't watch him, so I can't speak to his general tone, but from what I've seen of Veilguard it further simplifies everything about Inquisition (narrative, combat, companions,...), so him calling it "the best Dragon Age ever" (or something to that extent) makes his opinion questionable, at best, from the perspective of someone that enjoys RPGs. Then again maybe he's just not much of an RPG player. Did he review Baldur's Gate 3? That could be interesting to contrast if he did...

Been making my way through the Underdark in BG3. Gotta admit, combat indeed picked up after hitting level 5.

Man, must be nice to have such low standards, at least, based on other long reviews I've seen it's just further into "offline MMO" territory from DA:I. If he's into that sort of thing, more power to him, I guess...

Yeah, so they changed the whole flight system after that announcement and are still massively tweaking/balancing it. I do not for a moment believe Squadron 42 was actually feature complete last year. In fact it almost seems CIG is turning quite desperate as they seem to have thrown out most of their ambitious plans for Star Citizen and appear to be settling for "first person EVE" (no "sov" though) with a slowed down "mode switching" flight system instead of the rather fluid system they had before, just so they can get something out of the door before we all die of old age (or, more likely, before they get into major trouble with their investors)