I bounced off Stalker 2 at launch because of bugs, but revisited earlier this year and had a ton of fun with the 90% of the game that is open world scavenging, stealth and combat. The only thing that sucks are some of the boss fights.
Nothing takes me out of being a sneaky, resourceful Stalker more than being forced to drop into an arena, or have a door magically lock behind me, and not being able to advance the story without either beating some bullet sponge or reloading a save from an hour before to change my load out/get more ammo etc and redo it.
I wish they would take more of a Deus Ex approach, where you can action hero your way through if you want, but with some clever/thorough playing you could significantly nerf the boss fights. The game even pretends to do this, but ultimately your choices have no bearing on the bosses.
I honestly can’t wait to get back in the zone. I had my fun around launch with a first playthrough simply because I’m a huge fan, but the game was not in a great state then. I’ve been following the patches, and I am so looking forward to trying out all the improvements along with the new DLC. Limansk is some quintessential STALKER and those new levels look very interesting.
Did they fix A-Life? I never bought it because the reviews were complaining about NPCs just randomly spawning in front of them, and it didn’t have the background simulation of Stalker which was one of the major reasons it was so great
I mean, sort of. Yes and no. Also, this is all from second hand accounts - I played it on launch when Alife was nonexistent and had to be emergency fixed with mods to not spawn on top of you, and have been putting off a second playthrough until at least the DLC drop.
Alife is still neither as good as previous games, nor as good as what they promised in pre-release material. But they have gotten it much better, and the spawn-in garbage of the release version should be gone. I think the final hurdle is that there is a very limited bubble around the player where NPCs are actually online and active in the world as objects as opposed to simulated offline, and that is the final hurdle to truly make it feel like it should.
I recommend Cheeki Breeki’s anniversary video, it summarises the patches so far and the state of the game (though it’s a few months old now).
I’m a huge stalker fan, probably have played the trilogy for around 5000 hours. That being said, I decided to not buy Stalker 2 due to bad launch, but I gotta say, they seem to be dead set on fixing this game, so who knows, I might still buy it.
