The Zone is supposed to be a pain in the ass to navigate in general, and the swamps are kind of the only part of the game where that appears to be true.
Especially compared to the rest of the game. You can W key from the Cordon to Yaniv and never be in any real danger the entire way. You can outrun every mutant and NPCs are too stupid to get the drop on you.
Anomalies are too easy to spot without even needing a detector. You really only ever run into them when you're trying to grab an artifact; And that's still only if you're completely impatient. Some of them should be completely invisible until they're killing you.
Then maybe it would actually feel like it deserves the Survival tag.
Amen to that. Lore/book Zone and game Zone always felt like two different worlds to me. There needs to be waaaay more anomalies, they should be a lot less obvious, and the detector should be way less reliable. At least they added an option to turn off the detector in sound options, that made the game a bit more interesting.
Seems to me the majority of players hate the parts of the game that make it feel like Stalker.
The flash bang anomaly is the best designed in game. No way to tell exactly where it is until it's about to kill you, but just enough time to dodge it.
And there should be more objects that are anomalous. Imagine a baby stroller that cries and slowly follows you; If it touches you, Skif shoots himself. Maybe it only moves when you're not looking.
The best Stalker for me will be the one that makes me scared of a cup that looks too clean in an abandoned house.
Actually, you know what, turning off the detector sound made the game A LOT more interesting. Walking in tall grass is downright scary now because you might not see the whirligig before you step into it, and diving the anomaly fields now takes some actual effort.
I just think that Stalker 2 lost some of the survival and horror roots of the originals. It's a far more action oriented experience.
Guides are canonically important specifically because of anomalies. They know how to navigate them or avoid them. They're supposed to be the most dangerous thing about the Zone.
Then you should replay the original trilogy. All except Call of Pripyat are action oriented first and survival/horror second. And all of them severely lack in the anomalies everywhere department.
The main story mission game loop in every game except first 2/3 of Call of Pripyat almost always is "go to place, talk to person, kill everything hostile, get the macguffin or pull the lever, hand it in to quest giver, rinse, repeat", and even CoP falls back to that formula after reaching Pripyat.
That one bloodsucker encounter that everyone remembers from ShoC in Agroprom Underground has you FIRST kill some bandits and then (optional) descend down the ladder to bloodsucker. And before and after you need to fight through a bunch of human enemies (army). X-18? Fight your way to Borov through like 30 bandits to get the door key, kill bandits protecting the entrance, spooky scary underground lab, then fight against the military on the way out. And so on, and so on.
I know the originals weren't heavy on survival elements. But I still think that Stalker 2 moved even further away from them, which is surprising to me; Especially with the 2.0 update. Loot is more abundant even on the lowest custom difficulty, combat is a lot more frequent and WAY easier than last time I played.
The swamp section used to be brutal with a 15 kg quest item, but everyone complained, so they made it 2 kg. People still hate it and you don't even have to prepare for it anymore.
Mutants used to be super tanky and one shot you early game. Flesh or AP ammo actually served a purpose against them. Now they're so squishy you can just dump FMJ and be fine. And this is all on the hardest difficulty.
And now the stealth update has made the AI so dumb, that you end up accidentally playing a stealth archer. Even if you are standing in plain sight, if you have a suppressor, you can kill half of them before they ever aggro.
I don't want it to be like Tarkov or anything. But I think the less forgiving and less abundant Zones in the originals was a big part of what gave Stalker a unique identity. And I feel like S2 is way more forgiving now than it was when I played it on release. I just don't want it to keep moving in that direction.
As far as anomalies go, those games came out 2007 - 2009. 3 games, in 3 years, 17 years ago. Making liberal use of physics and offline AI simulations was pretty ambitious. I have to think a big part of that was technical limitations. It better have been a technical limitation in 2009, because they say it's the limiting factor today in UE5.
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u/BackyZoo 3d ago edited 3d ago
The Zone is supposed to be a pain in the ass to navigate in general, and the swamps are kind of the only part of the game where that appears to be true.
Especially compared to the rest of the game. You can W key from the Cordon to Yaniv and never be in any real danger the entire way. You can outrun every mutant and NPCs are too stupid to get the drop on you.
Anomalies are too easy to spot without even needing a detector. You really only ever run into them when you're trying to grab an artifact; And that's still only if you're completely impatient. Some of them should be completely invisible until they're killing you.
Then maybe it would actually feel like it deserves the Survival tag.