radialdrift

One word best describes this game and that is LAZY. its been 17 years since the first game in the series came out and STALKER 2 is very poorly designed game that is living in a world that was 2 decades ago. Technically it is a mess, from dumb A.I to sub 10 frames a second on a fast PC. I pity anyone that bought this game for full price, as I got it via Game Pass and feel a lot less ripped off about a product that is not fit for consumer release. Beware, you are paying to be the QA testers for this product. It is not close to being in a finished state. For a game that has come out in 2024, there is zero innovation in terms of gameplay mechanics, immersion and interaction. This game feels and plays like a 20-30 year old game. You are playing a STALKER, a so called solo survivalist gun slinger, that has no idea how to maintain a gun, and there is no gameplay for the player to learn how to maintain your weapons. You have to pay a vendor ridiculous amounts of money to fix your guns. What's even better is that if you want to add a scope or upgrade your weapon it has to be in 100% working condition before the tech will work on your gun. This is in the game to just slow down progress. So you are telling me in a game set in a Nuclear wasteland only a handful of people know how to fix and mod weapons. What a load of bull crap. The game doesn't let you take armour from dead enemies, and 99% of the time you pick up a weapon from a enemy you just killed, the gun will be not functional, how convenient, and will cost 8, 10k to fix it. What's even better is that vendors will not buy a gun that is below 50% wear, which makes zero thematic sense as this is a part of the world with limited resources. The lazy slap and paste that these designers have employed is at its worst when you find a gun vendor and he has 10 cool guns behind him on a wall for sale and a lock up caged area with 50 guns, zero of which you can buy, All you can buy is a half broken handgun and a useless sworn off shotgun. The laziness extends to combat and in particular the lack of new enemies to fight in the zone. The original game had its issues but it had fresh ideas and fresh gameplay loops, this is just a recycled lazy pile of crap pretending to be a sequel to the original game. Wait 1 year till it actually a functional product and don't pay more than $30 or just get game pass for one month.

When Todd Howard speaks, his words must be examined to look for hidden meaning or subtle mis-information. Starfield is far from what Todd said this game was going to be. 1000 explorable planets, well 1/3 of them are Gas planets which you can't land on and another 1/3 you can land on but have no points of interest, the remaining 1/3 have repetitive design elements which means exploring is not engaging. Exploring in this game equates to, scan some iron ore, do that 11 times, scan a blue tree, do that 13 times, and bam, you have surveyed an entire planet apparently. What makes this so called exploring thing even more lame is that you can scan a planet from space, which tells you what the mineral makeup is, then you land and scan the same things for reasons only known to the people that developed this lame mediocre so called exploring game loop. FFS its 2023 and this is all Bethesda could come up with, a game mechanic that has been done 15 years ago. Bethesda don't create worlds or new ideas they just recycle over used concepts and somehow make them less engaging than the original mechanics they are copies from. You can spend hours making your own ships, yet you don't really fly them, you can't land or take off, its all done via cut scenes, when in space you are locked into a small node, in fact the entire game is small nodes linked via way too many loading screens. Every time you go into a building, in a handmade area, you get a loading screen. It's 2023 and the technology in this game is 20 years old. The A.I in this game is the worst I have ever encountered. I am playing on the hardest setting and killing 30 NPC's in a base is easy, they walk towards you and don't shoot, when you shoot they run away. The space combat A.I is a lot better, but most of the game is based around FPS / ground combat, so to see such lazy effort put into NPC A.I scripting is pathetic. Look at Fear from the early 2000's, it still has close to the best A.I ever made in a FPS game, and Bethesda come up with this mediocre NPC A.I. The game isn't all bad but, it is not what was promised, it is not innovative and the overall structure of the game feels 15-20 years old. There are lots and lots of fetch quests, because Bethesda can't come up with an original idea, way too much grinding for a single player game, and you can get locked out of finishing missions because you didn't take the correct skill. At its heart it feels like several unfinished concepts that have been thrown together in hope that somehow that will make up or mask the lazy effort that has gone into this game. The game isn't really sure what is wants to be as it is not good at any one thing, its just average at everything.