@@Vampnyr and then day 14, and again and again until 2 years later. They have released the actual game as it was supposed to be. and then they'll call it it 2.0
No.. the biggest thing is that the game is empty and the story sucks, just like Cyberpunk. Bugs are unrelated to this. It will never be "as it was supposed to be" unless they make a ton of new quests and environments in the style of the old games. This game is just Far Cry 3.
I'm rooting for the game, and I'm sure they'll find ways to improve it, but it's also pretty worrying how many glowing reviews it got considering those reviews were written by people using a game in considerably worse shape than the release version right up until the deadline.
I usually trust German magazine Gamestar/Gamepro on that, who straight up said that it was unplayable up to the release patch and they therefore could not give it a rating. The review also put the issues front and center, although it noted a number of strengths as well. Gamestar currently has its rating at a total trash-tier 57%, yet also a good deal of positive coverage. Such as an article debating why the community (and some Gamestar reviewers) are accepting of such issues that would be a complete knock-out punch against games by most other studios. The 57% is made up of a 15% penalty for the technical issues (which can be revoked when it runs properly) on a 72% base rating. 72% is still not a good score. 80%+ is "good", 85-94% is for truly great games.
I think alot of the reviews are taking the circumstances and development of the game into context before completely trashing it. Obviously, people blindly buy the game without seeing reviews may be disappointed seeing the bugs, and theres an arguement to be made whether the game should be able to stand on its own regardless of the context in which it was developed, but regardless, from what I've seen it looks incredibly ambitious and the team seem committed to getting the game playable without relying on the community to fix it *cough* *Bethesda* *cough*, so I'm hopeful that sooner or later, the game will live up to its reception on a technical level.
@@bilalsadiq1450this. I think the criticism is valid, but the insane schizo takes I’ve seen online has hurt my soul. People believe this is like, a Ukrainian scam. Like wtf. Bethesda releases Starfield and the reception was “meh it’s Bethesda” at first. People are so weird.
If gaming journalists cared about technical aspect of games, Elden Ring would never win Game of the Year award. Besides bias to some developers, that is the reason I don't read reviews from mainstream gaming outlets.
That is far from ideal situation but once you review the game is not that you have to start from scratch when a huge patch is released, you already know where the problems are and you can check if the issue still there
Then updating from UE 5.1 to UE 5.5 should also be doable? But I assume they currently prioritize gameplay bugs, since those are more important to fix than the performance which is already okay in quality mode (30 FPS).
@@_fluffypuppy_ Oh a custom version. I assume Unreal Engine on its own isn't really optimized for open world games. I remember Finally Fantasy 7 Rebirth also using an old version of UE (some UE 4 branch). Likely they also had a lot of custom code inherited from FF7 Remake. At least that would explain why they didn't upgrade to a new version of UE. (Epic does make Fortnite, but that's not really an open world game like Final Fantasy or Stalker.)
@@_fluffypuppy_ E3 2021 in June showed Stalker 2 in UE4. August 2021, GSC announced Stalker 2 is updated to UE5. Now it's in UE5.1, which came out in November 2022. They have updated the engine versions at least twice now. Besides if they can't update the whole engine, they could just update parts of it, like the Lumen and Nanite. Unreal Engine is made modularly like that.
@@PaintsAreOp Yeah, it doesn't really matter how modularly it was made, any software dev can tell you that upgrading a major dependency is absolute hell. It can literally take months to bring stuff back to a working condition after an update like that, and I assume GSC have a lot of other work on their plate at the moment. Edit: also, the first Stalker 2 E3 announcement was all the way back in 2018, just to make the timeline a bit clearer.
Except most people don't talk this way. They sound very unnatural while speaking. Especially John and Oliver with their phrasing and Alex seems to have a speech impediment. lol Everyone just loooves John's writing in his content, but I find it awkward and cringe at times. (PS Triple) Don't get me wrong I enjoy these for the most part. Just playing Devil's Advocate because I instantly thought of their weird phrasing.
publisher wants the game out, even if it's not necessarily completely ready. The developers continue working on the code even though it's close to the announced released date to fix the things that won't be ready to put in the release version with the intention of releasing a patch as soon as possible.
My guess is someone decided that they had to release by November 20 for holiday sales and this is what happened. My guess is that it really needed to be delayed to around the start of 2025 or so. An extra couple months.
@@louisstanwufrom what i have hear basically everyone agrees that we rather wait for a complete game than get a broken mess a few months earlier. Dont think i have heard of a single person who rather get it broken, but earlier
I think it also comes down to the Game Pass deal. My understanding is that Microsoft supplies decent cash to the studios that put their games on Game Pass and I think this might have been a push from their side if anything else, but all we can do is speculate. I am not condoning the state of the game, however I still think this was the best state the game could have released in. Businesses dont have infinite cash to burn.
We are still going to need 7-8 more “day 1”‘patches to make this game an immersive and complete experience. Such a shame. Will check back with Stalker 2 in 6-8 months. As is the norm with most AAA game launches these days
I really hope that Stalker 2 makes it that far. But the potential seems to be there. Other than with Cities Skylines 2, that did not just have a disastrous technical launch but had also messed up the fundamentals of the simulation. Within a few days, the community had realised that the new simulation is basically pointless.
it's fine, should be better, but nowhere near as bad as others games at launch.. it's totally playable right now, with very few bugs in between each other..
Stalker 2 is fast becoming my GOTY 2024. It runs ROUGH on my 4070 laptop. But I can’t stop playing it. I really blame Unreal Engine 5 for the performance and AI issues. I’ve written at length about it elsewhere, but Unreal 5 has not been developed with open world deep simulations in mind. It hammers modern CPUs just to calculate Lumen (global illumination), let alone adding dozens of complex NPC interactions to the background. UE5 doesn’t support many fallback technologies that perform better. But, GSC’s ambition is going to help push Unreal into a better state for future games. Like it or not we’re going to get a lot more of UE5. At least GSC are trying to build a proper game (instead of just a cinematic tech demo) and overcome UE5’s performance limitations. They’re committed to this and they have my support.
Yeah. Hooray for pre-orders and people who think "it's their money and they do what I want" paying every single game in advance so they can always afford to just throw out whatever and fix it later.. maybe.. if they get around to it.
@@stephenhall2980 I do remember playing Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl on day 1 with a DirectX 8 graphics card. Man was that thing buggy 😂 Constant crashes and many doors didn't render and often the weapons didn't either.
It's probably a huge task to do so, but I would agree that upgrading stalker 2 to the latest version of Unreal Engine would be an absolute treat. Early versions of UE5 seem like a beta compared to where Epic has moved it now.
Stalker 2 is self-published, at least according to Steam and GOG (for everywhere but Asia, which I expect to be just a publishing deal without further involvement). My guess is, they simply ran out of money and the thing had to release now. The deal with Microsoft might gave them a couple of more months, but you can't push back a game endlessly.
@@Moon_Presence what ? How ? How old are you? Do you know that the thing like 'money' exists in this world? In order to develop the game you need workers and you need to pay salaries to them. You can't have infinite development time because you don't have infinite money
@@Moon_Presence People need to be paid man. Studio costs money to rent/lease. Advertising deals cant just be adjusted freely. Etc. Some developers have a lot more freedom/clout to delay games, but most dont.
On one sidenote, the developers have said in their discord server that they're giving complete support to fix the bugs and a new update is underway this week. And also plan on fixing a life in more further patches.
Yes, motion blur should be a MUST in every game that has a 30 FPS mode. If someone doesn't want it, then there should be a toggle to turn it off. But motion blur should ALWAYS be present and possible for players. 30 FPS without motion blur is like a slide show... But with GOOD motion blur it actually feels pretty great to play games even if they're only at 30 FPS.
I wanna have devs hard bake motion blur into the game just to spite all of the people constantly complaining about it, especially if it's for no reason at all and it's because they've heard others complain about it.
@@madawcofarreat2348 I complain about bad implementation of motion blur, often times the blur is too much and there's only an on\off switch with no strength slider. Many games use 100% blur when you enable motion blur which is too blurry, movies use 50% motion blur (180 degree shutter angle if you wanna get technical) for most scenes and 25% motion blur (90 degree shutter angle) for fighting\action scenes. 100% motion blur is just smeary and nauseating.
@@gamzilliohell no, 30 frames is a slideshow if no blur applied. 60 fps are not far either i definitely see frames changing and it hurts, i'm getting tired much faster. Good implementation of motion blur helps a lot.
I'm glad you'll came back and clear everything up because I was about to just skip this 1 even tho I been looking forward to it but now I might go ahead and pick it up
It's been the "Fallout" experience I've wanted since New Vegas so far. Very similar vibe imo. I've never played a Stalker game before. All I know is it's been a cult classic for years.
For me, that's the real problem with the game. Everybody talks about performance issues but for me, the lack of A-Life (or just content) is the biggest problem. Even then, I've almost 88h on the game on Steam but a big part of it was just me exploring the Zone, trying to visit places from the older games. But when you progress through the story, you realise how laking the game really is. I won't compare it to Anomaly/GAMMA because they're big mods compilation so it would be a little unfair but even Call of Pripyat had more content 15 years ago (and a fonctioning A-Life). I'll continu the story so I can unlock Pripyat but after that, I think I'll wait until they add more content. Or at least, until A-Life 2.0 is finally working.
I hope GSC update to UE 5.5 at some point soon . It would benefit all platforms and not just pc.Megalights.Performance updates,60 fps target HWRT for consoles and the rendering improvements(5.5 just looks better then 5.4)
same here, very little negatives to report from me. This is the first stalker game ive played and am having a blast, i love the gunfights and story mode so far! Makes me want to go play the original three right after this one.
I was digging performance mode til a major story portion a bit further along where the downgrades are quite noticeable, kind of took me out, just waiting til the next patch where hopefully motion blur is added for quality mode and some known huge side quest bugs are fixed
Same here as well, and plugged into a 65in Sony and absolutely loving the immersion and exploring and of course looting. Taking my time and I'll easily sink a hundred hours into Stalker 2. I'm not running into any bugs seriously! No crashes and no control drift here. As soon as A-Life is up and running properly. I almost feel this game would be the best post apocalyptic game I've played. In my opinion, fallout is child's play compared to Stalker!
Is an unreal engine update hard to manage? I can kinda imagine that alot of Code wont worky anymore after for example an update from 5.1 to 5.5 Also it would break all mods if they would upgrade it after they release official mod support.
@@Z3rgatul upgrading to a newer version of engine usually breaks something. For example in my game, which is a short 30 minutes long horror game, one script, two lights and one animation just broke. They were easy to fix, just poke it once and it worked again. In a big game like Stalker 2, they would have to test and validate that everything still works and that could take months, during which where they couldn't work on the game. And they were still fixing game breaking bugs a week before game's release.
I've had invisible enemies. Human enemies. not bloodsuckers. I can hear them talking and they start attacking me. No T posing but a few invisible enemies in seeming normal POIs.
Have you had the bread armour or the horde of rats that follow you everywhere, constantly respawning and killing everything? (Those really do happen!!)
On the series x and i have enjoyed the game. But there are some issues. The deadzone setting is absent. And some graphical problems like plants blurring out other plants through them when in motion
Fixing the stick dead zones as well as implementing a good motion blur will make the 30FPS mode on console a great way to play. It's still preferred to me over the performance mode but the jittery look certainly detracts from the experience as it is now.
I’m actually so confused because when I played on Xbox seriesx on day one it was unplayable on performance mode, then the next day I heard that I should play in mnk and I did that, it was so smooth I tried quality mode and now I have been playing quality mode and it honestly feels like I’m playing above 30fps…
So besides some visual artifacting the biggest issue I have is crashing.. especially if I haven't quick saved in a minute It crashes and I have to start doing what I was doing all over It's starting to drive me a little crazy.. I'm constantly pressing F5 now
It was unbelievably stupid of GSC to give out the review copies to gaming journos in that state. They should have just waited a little longer and patched with the day 0 patch beforehand. I think it's easily cost them 5-7% on meta/opencritic.
@@arthurarthur6083GSC themselves were the publisher. It's likely they just didn't really have the funding to push the release back, considering the game's _extremely_ troubled development.
It is what literally had the studio release day one patch with the game. 😂 It actually helped. I don't think Ukrainians are emotion wimps man. They can take the heat. They strong minded people. They wanted to hear the backlash. No studio does these days so they figured. Hey. Maybe getting yelled at by our customers is actually a good thing and they were right.
@HunterTracks like I said. They just gonna take the heat for a bit. Just like CDPR. They not emotion like western studios and our consoles being wacky and ass up and face down doesn't help these studios these days. 😂
I played the OG when I was still young and now I'm old but damn I love the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games. I finally beat it and got my reward but I won't spoil it for anyone who hasn't played it. Let's go back to the Zone and find some cool stuff.
I really have smooth experience with the game, been playing since day 2. Running on my old ryzen 5 5600x, native FSR 1440p, epic, HDR, 60 FPS stable through out even in towns. The only things I notice is texture clipping and its not that many.
Still, the patch released before release. Is it really impossible for reviewers to load up the game go to some area they had trouble and update the review accordingly?
This game is amazing imo. Im 20 hours in with zero crashes. Running it on Epic settings with dlss on performance at 1440 and getting 100 plus fps at most times in the game. The game has been a wonderful experience for me so far. It's likely gonna be my GOTY personally. I wish i could be playing it now. The game looks great. The gunplay is awesome. The atmosphere is top-notch. I really like it.
Does anyone know any fixes with pc gamepass and controller on this game? I've been having an issue where i started the game, watched the cutscene, then when i was given control, my inputs would change from controller to m+k back and forth, making it unplayable for me since im not skilled enough to learn m+k lol
I downloaded the game on day 1 from Gamepass on my PC, I played it for 30 minutes and it ran fine and looked good (DLSS 4k at epic settings at around 60 fps). I will, however, withhold from playing anymore until the game gets another major update or two, as well as see if any mods come out that enable flashlight shadows. There's definitely a really good game under the muck of bugs and issues, so if I have to wait another month or two, so be it.
I had some major performance issues so I updated my BIOS and all my Drivers and now the game crashes before it even launches. On the bright side all my other games are running smoother than ever before...
Crunching is completely normal at the point of release or just after release of any software. I know because I’ve done it for years and now work in support. It’s not always a negative thing if you get paid overtime and don’t overdo it.
I hate that there is STILL crunch time and a rush to launch day in days in which games are distributed almost exclusively digitally anyway. To my understanding, deals with partners like console stores are a big part of that. Either way, PLEASE start normalising a few days to weeks of delay instead of day 0 or day 1 patches that drive up download sizes and confuse everyone.
@@shravan1010 Yeah, there will be many moving parts for a launch date (some if which is just the principle of having a set date to target rather than allowing constant slips)
@@User57655 A lot of people dont get that. Devs need deadlines to work properly, but deadlines become meaningless if you know you can just to go your heads/publisher and say you need a delay. At some point, the foot needs to come down to make it clear that deadlines mean something. Advertising is another hugely expensive thing that usually needs to be set a decent bit in advance and timed right in order to get any great effect from, given how quickly the consumer mind can move on from something to the next. It's definitely way more complex than most gamers understand.
To be fair most of us probably let bethesda off for years untill starfield so for what the company have been through its genuinely an amazing game. Just needs some time to cook a little more
It’s pretty good, they need to patch the stick drift and it feels a little floaty and the AI need to stop grenade spamming live veteran on COD WAW but overall a good game
i couldnt run it on my laptop..my laptop has a 3050ti 8gb ram or 4gb vram and i7 idk what the other specs are called but i thought it would at least run anyone know if i would need a whole other pc build?
2:27 The Witcher 2 does precisely this, just not as pronounced, to this very day, and nobody talks about it, but it's the reason I never played the game. I guess it wasn't pronounced enough to ruin it for most people, but it IS there. 🤷♂
Can I please have this question answered on the next DF Direct? So, does Alex know how utterly handsome he is or what? Dude makes me feel feelings. Also, Stalker is cool. Thanks!
They probably should spent some time after fixing the rough stuff on porting it to a newer UE5 version which should have big improvements on performance already and then also turn on shadows for some of the dynamic lights Edit: Alex actually mentions it
I’m not a game dev, but how come studios release games in this state but then immediately follow up with a Day 1 patch? I know that it’s common for physical games since manufacturing cases and discs takes _roughly_ a month, but for a digital release like this, does a single day’s worth of work really equate to such drastic changes? Like if they released the game a week later, would it really make such a massive difference in comparison to the 4-5+ years of total development time?
"Deadlines" and "certification" are the two major reasons. Dev may know about a lot of these bugs, but they have to cherry pick the most critical ones to get it into the hands of the publishers so that it can be certified and released. A lot of these day X patches aren't there to necessarily fix critical bugs, but to smooth out as many of the rough edges as possible. And it's easier / safer to do that when you know you have a working baseline, instead of machine gunning as many bug fixes into the initial release as possible, because things may, inadvertently, get even worse as a result.
@@TheRenaliciousespecially certs/submission, those are fucking pain in the ass to deal with and if the storefront rejects the submission, that will take another week or 2
This game sounds interesting enough to try and play, but these games launching in buggy states always makes me hold off for a year or two since I don't fall for hype. I remember being on the fence about pre ordering cyberpunk 2077 and how talked up it was, then watched it piss off the entire internet overnight, lol. Bullet dodged, but im considering getting it now when there is a sale
I know it's been in development for a long time but the last couple of yrs they have had a war going on pat on the back for the dev team even finishing it
In my experience there were a few quests after a huge shift in the world story wise at around 25 hours where everything was incredibly bugged to the point of quests just straight up not functioning and then after that quest chain it went back to the somewhat normal technical experience of the first 25hours. Hopefullly it gets cleaned up in this weeks patch.
I wish they used their original Xray engine. Xray 2 or something. The latest version of Xray engine. I don't like everyone switching to Unreal 5 engine. Authenticity is dying. Each game engine has it's own taste and touch. It's own art style and feel. Nowadays every studio is switching to Unreal engine. That is bad for diversity.
My 3080/7800X3D does not like this game in a way I haven't seen in a very long time. After about 5 minutes the framerates plummet, after 10 seconds of that it starts to freeze for several seconds at a time, then the system begins to act like it's pegged at 100% CPU cycles and everything runs slow and even the RGB starts to flash and flicker and then it CTDs so hard that it's a full GPU restart. It acts like it does after a driver update where even the deactivated HDMI sound devices are re-activated again.
Personally, I think both Stalker 2 and Wukong (non path-tracing version) suffered from poor optimization, and low res shadow maps on trees and vegetation plus significant LOD pop-in on those assets, simply due to running on older builds of UE5. I really hope both developers would improve their games by migrating to the latest version of UE5 and provide PC users with the option to enable hardware Lumen and Nanite for WPOs, etc.
I'm having hardly zero issies with stutters on a 9800x3d. I get that is the top end, but even my friend with a 5800x3d isn't having these awful drops on our 4090s in towns. Granted I'm using FG so I know that takes away cpu strain, but it is running great so far for me. Yes there are issues, but I have played every Stalker game on release on pc and trust me, this is heaven compared to SoC....and on UE5 so there is hope for UE5 if these guys can do better than most big name devs.
You're using the most expensive GPU on the market, paired with the best gaming CPU on the market. Your experience is comparable to that of 0.01% of the community. That's awesome for you, but most people don't have that luxury.
@@blkshp25 Me too, I really like the game but I had to stop playing after a while because for some reason that imprecise floaty feel gave me motion sickness. I just put the game aside for now until they fix it.
Reviewers SHOULD be communicating with the publisher and not the developer - it's the publisher who rushed this out. They damn well need to be held responsible by being placed at the top of the communication chain. They are the ones that all the flak SHOULD be directed to.
While it's not the fault of the reviwers, it would be nice if they could go back to a game after a month for instance and update their review. Stalker 2 so far is such a great game, and it's a shame that it got a big percentage of a score cut due to pre-release state
Can you comment if Alife was more intact before the day zero patch? Maybe they couldn't balance it and just removed a life to fix performance issues with the patch?
A-life is not removed. A-life controls spawning and fighting random npcs and mutants. Do they spawn and fight? Yes. Are spawns buggy? Yes. I think they were doing some code refactoring and didn't finish it in time. They changed few a-life parameters so it can work at the basic level and released. That's it
This system has to change... we cant have reviewers rushing out reviews without taking the day 1 patch in effect. These reviews are COMPLETLY pointless because they do not represent what the customer is getting at all. I understand the devs should give more time too but the fact that it took you a week to update your review is a huge problem. People have already made their decision based on false information.
Great game, loving it. Just full of jank. Some is just funny, some is super annoying. Artifacts not appearing, getting locked into certain screens like trading or upgrading. In certain places the game does weird things like not letting you access your weapon selection wheel. Dunno about anyone else but those mutant pig enemies seem to just constantly respawn (perhaps by design). Admittedly I do find this game difficult, and the invisible bloodsucker enemies, man I feel like they're OP, but could be a skill issue on my part. Human enemies seem to notice you very easily, kind of eliminating the satisfaction of stealth gameplay. They're also very grenade happy it seems. All that said, the atmosphere and intensity of the game is on another level. Gameplay is generally entertaining, the world fun to explore & interesting with all the anomalous effects and crazy weather system.
It just crazy bc i have had pretty solid performance and almost no bugs, but i hear a lot about ppl experiencing lots of bugs and issues. My biggest issue is the balance of the mutants and survival items being far to available. Overall i really like the game and look forward to what moders will do over the next year or two
Ngl I really wanna love the game i had so much fun but wow getting to the end game and everything is bugging out doors won’t open quests won’t activate….i can’t wait till some of these issues are fixed
It really sucks to see all the negative reviews that are already outdated when most of the reviewers won't go back and give the game another chance, really harms the image of the game
An invasion by a hostile (and jealous) gangster and his army didn't stop them. But a deadline just couldn't be pushed for them to finish polishing - a well-worn occurrence and one that publishers still. Don't. Get.
I am now about 14 hours into the game and finally moved on to the second area of the map, Garbage. I now have a crash that happens while approaching a main quest objective there and am unable to progress. So it's still very broken and can just lock you out after a dozen hours
@@Z3rgatul Okay so disabling FSR didn't help but it turns out this issue was more like a very long freeze, not a crash. I just let it sit for 3 minutes and it unfroze itself. Previously I just assumed it was a crash and would force close the game from task manager. Not sure what that was all about, it was basically like a 3 minute traversal stutter. If anyone encounters an issue where the game seems to freeze but does not crash to desktop, give it a few minutes.
Yea but most games day 1 patches can make MASSIVE differences so reviewers should know by now not to judge a game solely on prerelease builds They should wait for a day 1 patch before publishing a review everytime but also, if the embargo is before day 1, the dev should have the day 1 patch ready the day before the embargo so the reviewers can check to see if things are fixed There are minor bugs hut so far stalker 2 at least on quality mode has been incredible. Real shame that the 60 fps is so bad though but at leaat the quality mode is very low input lag when you engage 120 hz in xbox settings and VRR, it feels like a 60 fps game tbh
Game has less bugs then Fallout 4 that I played few month ago. And developers actively working on fixing these bugs unlike bugs in Fallout 4 that will be there forever. So I can't understand what people are complaining about.
It's kinda funny Stalker 2 released in a better technical state than any of the previous ones im terms of performance, stability, visual bugs etc... However the current AI system is so broken, immersion breaking and antithetical to the stalker experience that i'd prefer having crashes every once in a while if it meant the A-life system was breathing life into its world like on the previous games.
You never played CoP, right? That was actually rather polished by stalker standards. Clear sky and SoC were a mess though, such a shame :( They at least had the excuse of having their own fully bespoke and innovative engine, back then. Hell, SoC even had a global illumination mode in it! Even though it was broken and needed commands to use it (and it was a total fps killer), it was insanely forward looking for the mid 2000s!
@@GarethFairclough I did! played it a little while after release, although much better than the previous ones, it stuttered like crazy. Still does to this day on modern hardware. Didn't know about the GI solution! pretty cool.
This is a good reminder for the gaming community to let go of the "play X game day one" mentality. Games are not released finished anymore, they are released in the last stage of an early access. Almost nobody ever wins playing a game day 1 anymore, at the game gets so much better later. And I have examples to back it up: Cyberpunk 2077, Star Wars Outlaws, to only name those two. With that in mind, one might actually forgive Team Cherry and be happy they take their time, assuming the day 1 product is not half baked. In the end, who wins? If CyberPunk 2077 released a year after its original date, it would have captured a lot of more users and thus a lot more money. A lot of the players seeing the bad reviews at launch postpone their purchases and some of them never ended up buying the game at all, despite the mastery it is today. Some publishers just don't lean, it might be up to gamers to teach it to them the hard way.
That's not true, most every 1st party PlayStation game over the past five years has not required a day one patch, they may have had a day one update for a minor problem or an enhancement such as photo mode but as a general rule their games run perfectly fine out of the box unlike this game. and many others where company's have shoved out half baked games that sometimes are never complete.
@ my friend: 1. PlayStation is only a part of the gaming ecosystem, 2. Most games are not 1st party games. Because if we go there, Nintendo almost never has that problem, but Nintendo is also within gaming on a category on its own, where most of its “triple A” games are first party. So you can’t use a sub-segment of the gaming industry to make it a rule. As a whole, gamers won’t necessarily be worse by playing a game 6-12 months after release vs day 1, that’s my point.
@@claudelk1719 I take your point that many games would have benefited financially from an extra 6months + of development, No man's sky, fallout76, Starfield, etc. the list is very long, however your phrase "Games are not released finished anymore" is a little disingenuous to playstation, the vast majority of their 1st party games are highly rated with or without a patch although I will concede some of them may have been delayed from the original release date by several months.
Don’t worry bro, stalker series is being sold for more than a decade. Also there is a difference between 20 testers and 1 million testers. There are like 2 soft locks and a bit of performance issues on day 1 release. For a massive open world title with 5 times less budget than veilguard and rockets flying to their company they delivered a pretty good product. Look at msfs 2024 launch, look at vg, look at test drive, at any release, gta in 2013 had more bugs. Also, mod support, there are about 300 mods already, health rebalance, optimization that allows 1030 to run this, this switch, that switch, cs2 knife skin. The game has to deliver entertainment and most of the bugs are making ppl laugh more than be disappointed. Not even a week passed. Like rly show me a massive open world game that would just release and be technically better in the past 10 years. Either that is a corridor game where nothing really happens, or its some small one. Cause gta had problems, fallout had problems, rdr2, witcher, cyberpunk, hogwarts legacy, you name it literally had more problems.
I hate scary games, Skyrim took me several tries in college because the Draugr's freaked me out (1000+ hours later, safe to say I got over it). I'm a Day 1 Cyberpunk enjoyer, even when it kinda sucked and was bugged beyond belief. This game is so cool in the 10-ish hours that I played that I would love to push through and keep playing, but the performance is so bad. I'll try it out again in 6 months, maybe a year. I feel for the devs, truly, and it's amazing that it's in anything close to a playable state, but I'm gonna have to wait on it.
I'm just NOT going to ruin my first playthrough with a broken AI until the game is done! This is my 4th STALKER release and true to form, it's buggier than a rotten tree stump, just like the previous three. That's just the nature of the STALKER beast but GSC will patch it until it's fixed and finished AND there will be 'Unofficial' patches from the modding community, once AGAIN, once everything there is up and running...eventually. You need patience. A LOT of patience to love STALKER, you really do! 😅
The memory leak makes this game unplayable for me after a couple of loads.. It definitely needs the patch coming this week. I might honestly wait for the patch to jump back in. Im shocked this wasn't mentioned...
Classic budget devs (probably not the devs fault, but fault of the people calling the shots) skimping on QA testing and leaving that up to the reviewers... the smart thing to do here would've been to postpone the launch a bit upon hearing all the feedback, and working on it for a couple more months along with the reviewers... or maybe hire a third party QA company...
Shame that UE5 still dont have direct storage on PC. Seems like it uses direct storage/xbox velocity on Series X, according to your video from Hellblade 2. I mean this area, when through the stone you enter a new location and on PC there's big stutter (even on high end cpus) and no stutter on Series X. Someone from Epic said that UE5 will support Direct Storage. But why it takes so long, and why they support it on consoles but not on PC? there's only benefits from Direct Storage. I mean especially better cpu performance, not just loading times.
Now we need that day 7 patch
@@Vampnyr and then day 14, and again and again until 2 years later. They have released the actual game as it was supposed to be. and then they'll call it it 2.0
Memory leak is my biggest compliant.
Yup. Im gonna give this game multiple weeks before i buy.
No.. the biggest thing is that the game is empty and the story sucks, just like Cyberpunk. Bugs are unrelated to this. It will never be "as it was supposed to be" unless they make a ton of new quests and environments in the style of the old games. This game is just Far Cry 3.
Weird take @@themodfather9382
Stalker is a diamond in a rough. Amazing game but need a few extra patches.
a diamond? hell no it is good but not amazing
@@lawnmanGmanit’s amazing.
@@TheBean87 Cope
@@Vampnyr you’re doing that just fine, I don’t need to haha
One of best games that I've played in recent years.. on PC.@@Vampnyr
I'm rooting for the game, and I'm sure they'll find ways to improve it, but it's also pretty worrying how many glowing reviews it got considering those reviews were written by people using a game in considerably worse shape than the release version right up until the deadline.
I usually trust German magazine Gamestar/Gamepro on that, who straight up said that it was unplayable up to the release patch and they therefore could not give it a rating. The review also put the issues front and center, although it noted a number of strengths as well.
Gamestar currently has its rating at a total trash-tier 57%, yet also a good deal of positive coverage. Such as an article debating why the community (and some Gamestar reviewers) are accepting of such issues that would be a complete knock-out punch against games by most other studios.
The 57% is made up of a 15% penalty for the technical issues (which can be revoked when it runs properly) on a 72% base rating. 72% is still not a good score. 80%+ is "good", 85-94% is for truly great games.
I think alot of the reviews are taking the circumstances and development of the game into context before completely trashing it. Obviously, people blindly buy the game without seeing reviews may be disappointed seeing the bugs, and theres an arguement to be made whether the game should be able to stand on its own regardless of the context in which it was developed, but regardless, from what I've seen it looks incredibly ambitious and the team seem committed to getting the game playable without relying on the community to fix it *cough* *Bethesda* *cough*, so I'm hopeful that sooner or later, the game will live up to its reception on a technical level.
@@bilalsadiq1450this. I think the criticism is valid, but the insane schizo takes I’ve seen online has hurt my soul. People believe this is like, a Ukrainian scam. Like wtf. Bethesda releases Starfield and the reception was “meh it’s Bethesda” at first. People are so weird.
If gaming journalists cared about technical aspect of games, Elden Ring would never win Game of the Year award. Besides bias to some developers, that is the reason I don't read reviews from mainstream gaming outlets.
That is far from ideal situation but once you review the game is not that you have to start from scratch when a huge patch is released, you already know where the problems are and you can check if the issue still there
7:30 Satisfactory upgraded from UE 4 to 5 with their Update 8, 4 years after early access launch and about a year before their 1.0 launch.
Then updating from UE 5.1 to UE 5.5 should also be doable? But I assume they currently prioritize gameplay bugs, since those are more important to fix than the performance which is already okay in quality mode (30 FPS).
@@cube2fox the problem is, GSC created their custom version of UE5 and it is unknown, how difficult it would be to upgrade
@@_fluffypuppy_ Oh a custom version. I assume Unreal Engine on its own isn't really optimized for open world games. I remember Finally Fantasy 7 Rebirth also using an old version of UE (some UE 4 branch). Likely they also had a lot of custom code inherited from FF7 Remake. At least that would explain why they didn't upgrade to a new version of UE. (Epic does make Fortnite, but that's not really an open world game like Final Fantasy or Stalker.)
@@_fluffypuppy_ E3 2021 in June showed Stalker 2 in UE4. August 2021, GSC announced Stalker 2 is updated to UE5. Now it's in UE5.1, which came out in November 2022. They have updated the engine versions at least twice now.
Besides if they can't update the whole engine, they could just update parts of it, like the Lumen and Nanite. Unreal Engine is made modularly like that.
@@PaintsAreOp Yeah, it doesn't really matter how modularly it was made, any software dev can tell you that upgrading a major dependency is absolute hell. It can literally take months to bring stuff back to a working condition after an update like that, and I assume GSC have a lot of other work on their plate at the moment.
Edit: also, the first Stalker 2 E3 announcement was all the way back in 2018, just to make the timeline a bit clearer.
The Digital Foundry crew are just so well spoken that they make many other creators sound like Neanderthals in comparison
Except most people don't talk this way. They sound very unnatural while speaking. Especially John and Oliver with their phrasing and Alex seems to have a speech impediment. lol Everyone just loooves John's writing in his content, but I find it awkward and cringe at times. (PS Triple) Don't get me wrong I enjoy these for the most part. Just playing Devil's Advocate because I instantly thought of their weird phrasing.
🤮
Yep and paid by MS!!!!
They are all European so they are going to sound different @@lotsathedetox
@@brianmcswain8932 okay bro
Why do they leave polishing and performance tuning to the week before release? Why don’t they work on that more during the development process.
publisher wants the game out, even if it's not necessarily completely ready. The developers continue working on the code even though it's close to the announced released date to fix the things that won't be ready to put in the release version with the intention of releasing a patch as soon as possible.
Becausw it's not up the developers when the game releases if the publisher wants it out sooner
Weeks before? Lol, try years after the fact. We all saw Cyber Punk 2077 pull a 180° at the 2 year mark .
@@smittyvanjagermanjenson182 yes. Cyberpunk was such a junk at the release that even stalker 2 looks like complete game with almost no issues.
Because planning and performance budgeting are not a thing, apparently.
My guess is someone decided that they had to release by November 20 for holiday sales and this is what happened. My guess is that it really needed to be delayed to around the start of 2025 or so. An extra couple months.
Yup. The lack of features and content also confirms that. No faction rep, shallow weapon upgrades and terrible a-life really hurts.
There is faction rep
We pressure them too much and I'm to blame too. Get it to me NOW because I want it NOW not LATER.... No, No I said NOW. lol
@@louisstanwufrom what i have hear basically everyone agrees that we rather wait for a complete game than get a broken mess a few months earlier. Dont think i have heard of a single person who rather get it broken, but earlier
I think it also comes down to the Game Pass deal. My understanding is that Microsoft supplies decent cash to the studios that put their games on Game Pass and I think this might have been a push from their side if anything else, but all we can do is speculate. I am not condoning the state of the game, however I still think this was the best state the game could have released in. Businesses dont have infinite cash to burn.
We are still going to need 7-8 more “day 1”‘patches to make this game an immersive and complete experience. Such a shame. Will check back with Stalker 2 in 6-8 months. As is the norm with most AAA game launches these days
Just go play stalker anomaly right now, that’s what I started doing. Fucken awesome game and it’s completely free, there is a learning curve though
100%. All those game releases are a joke. Also that you need DLSS or FSR or Frame Gen to play a bit normal is so so bad.
I really hope that Stalker 2 makes it that far. But the potential seems to be there.
Other than with Cities Skylines 2, that did not just have a disastrous technical launch but had also messed up the fundamentals of the simulation. Within a few days, the community had realised that the new simulation is basically pointless.
it's fine, should be better, but nowhere near as bad as others games at launch.. it's totally playable right now, with very few bugs in between each other..
Same. Never buying a game on release nowdays. Giving it around half a year until it's in better state and also cheaper.
Stalker 2 is fast becoming my GOTY 2024. It runs ROUGH on my 4070 laptop. But I can’t stop playing it. I really blame Unreal Engine 5 for the performance and AI issues. I’ve written at length about it elsewhere, but Unreal 5 has not been developed with open world deep simulations in mind. It hammers modern CPUs just to calculate Lumen (global illumination), let alone adding dozens of complex NPC interactions to the background. UE5 doesn’t support many fallback technologies that perform better. But, GSC’s ambition is going to help push Unreal into a better state for future games. Like it or not we’re going to get a lot more of UE5. At least GSC are trying to build a proper game (instead of just a cinematic tech demo) and overcome UE5’s performance limitations. They’re committed to this and they have my support.
have they fixed the spawning issue ? You check an area from a distance, and when you get closer and they spawn in.
Remember when games had to be not broken before they were released? I really miss those days.
Yup this whole thing is BS I’m sick of it.
Yeah. Hooray for pre-orders and people who think "it's their money and they do what I want" paying every single game in advance so they can always afford to just throw out whatever and fix it later.. maybe.. if they get around to it.
Somebody should've really told Stalker devs about those days, because their previous games didn't exactly clear that bar.
@@stephenhall2980 I do remember playing Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl on day 1 with a DirectX 8 graphics card. Man was that thing buggy 😂 Constant crashes and many doors didn't render and often the weapons didn't either.
Stellar Blade launched perfectly
It's probably a huge task to do so, but I would agree that upgrading stalker 2 to the latest version of Unreal Engine would be an absolute treat. Early versions of UE5 seem like a beta compared to where Epic has moved it now.
Stalker 2 is self-published, at least according to Steam and GOG (for everywhere but Asia, which I expect to be just a publishing deal without further involvement).
My guess is, they simply ran out of money and the thing had to release now. The deal with Microsoft might gave them a couple of more months, but you can't push back a game endlessly.
Yes you can. It's happened before. The hell are you talking about?
@@Moon_Presence what ? How ? How old are you? Do you know that the thing like 'money' exists in this world? In order to develop the game you need workers and you need to pay salaries to them. You can't have infinite development time because you don't have infinite money
@@Moon_Presence People need to be paid man. Studio costs money to rent/lease. Advertising deals cant just be adjusted freely. Etc. Some developers have a lot more freedom/clout to delay games, but most dont.
@@lightspectr ever heard of pre orders or kickstarter
@@user-im2te2fg9y is this a source of infinite money?
The real game changer would be to port the game to UE 5.4
5.5 would bring huge fps to the game with mega lights
is that even possible? from what i know that would take a year or 2 at least no?
And run even worse. Fantastic idea.
It's crazy, that I'm not able to achieve stable 60 fps with my rtx 3060
@@jupitertheplanet2030 drop the settings. Or else you are cpu limited.
That ‘returned’ dead soldiers glitch would be awesome, though, if yhey could incorporate it in some sort of supernatural phenomenon way 😂
It is already in the game.
On one sidenote, the developers have said in their discord server that they're giving complete support to fix the bugs and a new update is underway this week. And also plan on fixing a life in more further patches.
Yes, motion blur should be a MUST in every game that has a 30 FPS mode. If someone doesn't want it, then there should be a toggle to turn it off. But motion blur should ALWAYS be present and possible for players. 30 FPS without motion blur is like a slide show... But with GOOD motion blur it actually feels pretty great to play games even if they're only at 30 FPS.
30 frames is not a slideshow.
@@gamzillio without motjon blur it can definitely appear that way to some people. Not everyone perceives motion smoothness the same way
I wanna have devs hard bake motion blur into the game just to spite all of the people constantly complaining about it, especially if it's for no reason at all and it's because they've heard others complain about it.
@@madawcofarreat2348 I complain about bad implementation of motion blur, often times the blur is too much and there's only an on\off switch with no strength slider. Many games use 100% blur when you enable motion blur which is too blurry, movies use 50% motion blur (180 degree shutter angle if you wanna get technical) for most scenes and 25% motion blur (90 degree shutter angle) for fighting\action scenes. 100% motion blur is just smeary and nauseating.
@@gamzilliohell no, 30 frames is a slideshow if no blur applied. 60 fps are not far either i definitely see frames changing and it hurts, i'm getting tired much faster. Good implementation of motion blur helps a lot.
I've had some minor bugs but not had any performance issues at all on PC and my FPS averages from around 120-160 throughout on epic settings.
I'm glad you'll came back and clear everything up because I was about to just skip this 1 even tho I been looking forward to it but now I might go ahead and pick it up
It's been the "Fallout" experience I've wanted since New Vegas so far. Very similar vibe imo. I've never played a Stalker game before. All I know is it's been a cult classic for years.
GTA 6 has A-Life 8.0 with a billion dollar budget. I expected this game's A-Life 2.0 to be barebones, what I didnt expect was it to not exist at all.
For me, that's the real problem with the game. Everybody talks about performance issues but for me, the lack of A-Life (or just content) is the biggest problem. Even then, I've almost 88h on the game on Steam but a big part of it was just me exploring the Zone, trying to visit places from the older games. But when you progress through the story, you realise how laking the game really is.
I won't compare it to Anomaly/GAMMA because they're big mods compilation so it would be a little unfair but even Call of Pripyat had more content 15 years ago (and a fonctioning A-Life). I'll continu the story so I can unlock Pripyat but after that, I think I'll wait until they add more content. Or at least, until A-Life 2.0 is finally working.
I hope GSC update to UE 5.5 at some point soon . It would benefit all platforms and not just pc.Megalights.Performance updates,60 fps target HWRT for consoles and the rendering improvements(5.5 just looks better then 5.4)
Yet here I am 18hrs in on series x in performance mode and loving it... .
same here, very little negatives to report from me. This is the first stalker game ive played and am having a blast, i love the gunfights and story mode so far! Makes me want to go play the original three right after this one.
I was digging performance mode til a major story portion a bit further along where the downgrades are quite noticeable, kind of took me out, just waiting til the next patch where hopefully motion blur is added for quality mode and some known huge side quest bugs are fixed
Same here as well, and plugged into a 65in Sony and absolutely loving the immersion and exploring and of course looting. Taking my time and I'll easily sink a hundred hours into Stalker 2. I'm not running into any bugs seriously! No crashes and no control drift here. As soon as A-Life is up and running properly. I almost feel this game would be the best post apocalyptic game I've played. In my opinion, fallout is child's play compared to Stalker!
Is an unreal engine update hard to manage?
I can kinda imagine that alot of Code wont worky anymore after for example an update from 5.1 to 5.5
Also it would break all mods if they would upgrade it after they release official mod support.
Unreal Engine is very modular and if they modified it correctly, it should be fairly easy to update.
@@PaintsAreOp I think if it is easy to upgrade they would already do this by themselves. And they had plenty of time
@@Z3rgatul upgrading to a newer version of engine usually breaks something. For example in my game, which is a short 30 minutes long horror game, one script, two lights and one animation just broke. They were easy to fix, just poke it once and it worked again.
In a big game like Stalker 2, they would have to test and validate that everything still works and that could take months, during which where they couldn't work on the game. And they were still fixing game breaking bugs a week before game's release.
I've had invisible enemies. Human enemies. not bloodsuckers. I can hear them talking and they start attacking me. No T posing but a few invisible enemies in seeming normal POIs.
Right same here. It was pissing me off. I decided to start halo again. Xbox is still kicking ass this fall. Just a little long till Indy comes out.
Have you had the bread armour or the horde of rats that follow you everywhere, constantly respawning and killing everything?
(Those really do happen!!)
On the series x and i have enjoyed the game. But there are some issues. The deadzone setting is absent. And some graphical problems like plants blurring out other plants through them when in motion
Fixing the stick dead zones as well as implementing a good motion blur will make the 30FPS mode on console a great way to play. It's still preferred to me over the performance mode but the jittery look certainly detracts from the experience as it is now.
I’m actually so confused because when I played on Xbox seriesx on day one it was unplayable on performance mode, then the next day I heard that I should play in mnk and I did that, it was so smooth I tried quality mode and now I have been playing quality mode and it honestly feels like I’m playing above 30fps…
So besides some visual artifacting the biggest issue I have is crashing.. especially if I haven't quick saved in a minute It crashes and I have to start doing what I was doing all over It's starting to drive me a little crazy.. I'm constantly pressing F5 now
Disabling FSR frame generation helped me with crashes
@5:37 aren't they themselves a publisher of this game?
I have zero issues with stability and great FPS on an i5 and 3080 on epic settings at 1440p
It was unbelievably stupid of GSC to give out the review copies to gaming journos in that state. They should have just waited a little longer and patched with the day 0 patch beforehand. I think it's easily cost them 5-7% on meta/opencritic.
I agree, however, I believe it was not GSC's decision but rather that of the publisher.
@@arthurarthur6083GSC themselves were the publisher. It's likely they just didn't really have the funding to push the release back, considering the game's _extremely_ troubled development.
It is what literally had the studio release day one patch with the game. 😂
It actually helped. I don't think Ukrainians are emotion wimps man. They can take the heat. They strong minded people. They wanted to hear the backlash. No studio does these days so they figured. Hey. Maybe getting yelled at by our customers is actually a good thing and they were right.
@HunterTracks like I said. They just gonna take the heat for a bit. Just like CDPR. They not emotion like western studios and our consoles being wacky and ass up and face down doesn't help these studios these days. 😂
@@HunterTracksour XSX consoles may seem awesome to us but as far as I know. Our consoles are a nightmare to video game studios. 😅
My favorite game of the year
mine of teh last 14 years
I played the OG when I was still young and now I'm old but damn I love the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games. I finally beat it and got my reward but I won't spoil it for anyone who hasn't played it. Let's go back to the Zone and find some cool stuff.
I really have smooth experience with the game, been playing since day 2. Running on my old ryzen 5 5600x, native FSR 1440p, epic, HDR, 60 FPS stable through out even in towns. The only things I notice is texture clipping and its not that many.
Still, the patch released before release. Is it really impossible for reviewers to load up the game go to some area they had trouble and update the review accordingly?
Love this game, but one bug turned my armour to bread, was really good early game armour that bread lol.
This game is amazing imo. Im 20 hours in with zero crashes. Running it on Epic settings with dlss on performance at 1440 and getting 100 plus fps at most times in the game. The game has been a wonderful experience for me so far. It's likely gonna be my GOTY personally. I wish i could be playing it now. The game looks great. The gunplay is awesome. The atmosphere is top-notch. I really like it.
Try Running 4K im on 4K Quality DLSS and Frame Gen getting 100 fps with Drops in the 50s in the towns (4090)
@LouRaX nice. I will have to try it.
4:00 actually that was a paranormal activity
Does anyone know any fixes with pc gamepass and controller on this game? I've been having an issue where i started the game, watched the cutscene, then when i was given control, my inputs would change from controller to m+k back and forth, making it unplayable for me since im not skilled enough to learn m+k lol
I downloaded the game on day 1 from Gamepass on my PC, I played it for 30 minutes and it ran fine and looked good (DLSS 4k at epic settings at around 60 fps). I will, however, withhold from playing anymore until the game gets another major update or two, as well as see if any mods come out that enable flashlight shadows. There's definitely a really good game under the muck of bugs and issues, so if I have to wait another month or two, so be it.
I had some major performance issues so I updated my BIOS and all my Drivers and now the game crashes before it even launches. On the bright side all my other games are running smoother than ever before...
On console after completing the game. I did not have any issues or crashes
Crunching is completely normal at the point of release or just after release of any software. I know because I’ve done it for years and now work in support.
It’s not always a negative thing if you get paid overtime and don’t overdo it.
Any clip on MSFS2024 coming up?
I hate that there is STILL crunch time and a rush to launch day in days in which games are distributed almost exclusively digitally anyway.
To my understanding, deals with partners like console stores are a big part of that.
Either way, PLEASE start normalising a few days to weeks of delay instead of day 0 or day 1 patches that drive up download sizes and confuse everyone.
Unfortunately it's a lot complex than that. A lot of things depend on release day and many people would get angry if it's not met
@@shravan1010 Yeah, there will be many moving parts for a launch date (some if which is just the principle of having a set date to target rather than allowing constant slips)
@@User57655 A lot of people dont get that. Devs need deadlines to work properly, but deadlines become meaningless if you know you can just to go your heads/publisher and say you need a delay. At some point, the foot needs to come down to make it clear that deadlines mean something. Advertising is another hugely expensive thing that usually needs to be set a decent bit in advance and timed right in order to get any great effect from, given how quickly the consumer mind can move on from something to the next. It's definitely way more complex than most gamers understand.
To be fair most of us probably let bethesda off for years untill starfield so for what the company have been through its genuinely an amazing game. Just needs some time to cook a little more
5 hours in on PC and no bugs... yet.
I had no issues at all in my first 5 hours, then the crashes started
20 hours in and only one bug so far 👍
I added enhancements... still no bugs, and only a couple crashes... Everything on epic settings
5 hours in and I had several crashes. But I like it a lot therefore I don't care. It looks amazing and the atmosphere is outstanding. ☮️
@@KennyCutzwhich card do you have? My 4070 is struggling and I will upgrade to 32 gb RAM from 16 gb. ☮️
*IF* they manage to update the engine version eventually, I would celebrate this.
It’s pretty good, they need to patch the stick drift and it feels a little floaty and the AI need to stop grenade spamming live veteran on COD WAW but overall a good game
i couldnt run it on my laptop..my laptop has a 3050ti 8gb ram or 4gb vram and i7 idk what the other specs are called but i thought it would at least run anyone know if i would need a whole other pc build?
16gb RAM minimum requirements.
@ HOLY COW BATMAN
@ you cant add that to a laptop?
@@doritochip2760depends on laptop. Average laptops nowadays don't have ability to change RAM
@ 😭😭😭 its an msi i doubt it does i got it in like 2022
Should LG OLED users leave their Xbox series X at 60 hz or 120hz while playing this game ?
2:27 The Witcher 2 does precisely this, just not as pronounced, to this very day, and nobody talks about it, but it's the reason I never played the game. I guess it wasn't pronounced enough to ruin it for most people, but it IS there. 🤷♂
Can I please have this question answered on the next DF Direct? So, does Alex know how utterly handsome he is or what? Dude makes me feel feelings. Also, Stalker is cool. Thanks!
The cyberpunk fever lives on!
Now they just need a Netflix cartoon and a big celebrity DLC. Then it will suddenly be GOTG.
@@SotNist Game of the Gays?
Amazing video, thank you Digital Foundry.
They probably should spent some time after fixing the rough stuff on porting it to a newer UE5 version which should have big improvements on performance already and then also turn on shadows for some of the dynamic lights
Edit: Alex actually mentions it
"We can throw all the problems on the table, let's take advantage of the fact that it's a game that can't be played on the PlayStation"
Waiting on the PS5 PRO version. Hope it does not have problems.
Who told u stalker will be on Ps5?
@@trzmouhamouha2119I believe the dev said it’s a 3 month exclusive
PS guys will laugh on us "thanks for beta testing" 😂
This needs to be on the newer version of ue5 desperately
I’m not a game dev, but how come studios release games in this state but then immediately follow up with a Day 1 patch? I know that it’s common for physical games since manufacturing cases and discs takes _roughly_ a month, but for a digital release like this, does a single day’s worth of work really equate to such drastic changes? Like if they released the game a week later, would it really make such a massive difference in comparison to the 4-5+ years of total development time?
@@5persondude It's because you didn't see the 300 other small bugs like this that were in the game just a week prior. Probably even more serious ones.
"Deadlines" and "certification" are the two major reasons. Dev may know about a lot of these bugs, but they have to cherry pick the most critical ones to get it into the hands of the publishers so that it can be certified and released. A lot of these day X patches aren't there to necessarily fix critical bugs, but to smooth out as many of the rough edges as possible. And it's easier / safer to do that when you know you have a working baseline, instead of machine gunning as many bug fixes into the initial release as possible, because things may, inadvertently, get even worse as a result.
@@TheRenaliciousespecially certs/submission, those are fucking pain in the ass to deal with and if the storefront rejects the submission, that will take another week or 2
This game sounds interesting enough to try and play, but these games launching in buggy states always makes me hold off for a year or two since I don't fall for hype. I remember being on the fence about pre ordering cyberpunk 2077 and how talked up it was, then watched it piss off the entire internet overnight, lol. Bullet dodged, but im considering getting it now when there is a sale
I know it's been in development for a long time but the last couple of yrs they have had a war going on pat on the back for the dev team even finishing it
So why do i keep reading at 25 hrs in its beyond broken?
In my experience there were a few quests after a huge shift in the world story wise at around 25 hours where everything was incredibly bugged to the point of quests just straight up not functioning and then after that quest chain it went back to the somewhat normal technical experience of the first 25hours. Hopefullly it gets cleaned up in this weeks patch.
GSC is both the publisher and the developer.
I wish they could update engine, but I doubt it will be easy or even possible.
I wish they used their original Xray engine. Xray 2 or something. The latest version of Xray engine. I don't like everyone switching to Unreal 5 engine. Authenticity is dying. Each game engine has it's own taste and touch. It's own art style and feel. Nowadays every studio is switching to Unreal engine. That is bad for diversity.
Still no update on pc game pass 😢
My 3080/7800X3D does not like this game in a way I haven't seen in a very long time. After about 5 minutes the framerates plummet, after 10 seconds of that it starts to freeze for several seconds at a time, then the system begins to act like it's pegged at 100% CPU cycles and everything runs slow and even the RGB starts to flash and flicker and then it CTDs so hard that it's a full GPU restart. It acts like it does after a driver update where even the deactivated HDMI sound devices are re-activated again.
Strange, I have 7950x3d and 3090. Few times I got big lag (for 3-5 seconds), but it happens very rarely, like once in 5-8 hours of playing
Personally, I think both Stalker 2 and Wukong (non path-tracing version) suffered from poor optimization, and low res shadow maps on trees and vegetation plus significant LOD pop-in on those assets, simply due to running on older builds of UE5. I really hope both developers would improve their games by migrating to the latest version of UE5 and provide PC users with the option to enable hardware Lumen and Nanite for WPOs, etc.
I'm having hardly zero issies with stutters on a 9800x3d. I get that is the top end, but even my friend with a 5800x3d isn't having these awful drops on our 4090s in towns. Granted I'm using FG so I know that takes away cpu strain, but it is running great so far for me. Yes there are issues, but I have played every Stalker game on release on pc and trust me, this is heaven compared to SoC....and on UE5 so there is hope for UE5 if these guys can do better than most big name devs.
You're using the most expensive GPU on the market, paired with the best gaming CPU on the market.
Your experience is comparable to that of 0.01% of the community. That's awesome for you, but most people don't have that luxury.
If only they fixed that damn lack of a deadzone on the analog sticks.
Oh damn
Next patch probably.
This is the only thing stopping me from playing
@@blkshp25 Me too, I really like the game but I had to stop playing after a while because for some reason that imprecise floaty feel gave me motion sickness. I just put the game aside for now until they fix it.
Reviewers SHOULD be communicating with the publisher and not the developer - it's the publisher who rushed this out. They damn well need to be held responsible by being placed at the top of the communication chain. They are the ones that all the flak SHOULD be directed to.
Loving Stalker 2 so far!
While it's not the fault of the reviwers, it would be nice if they could go back to a game after a month for instance and update their review. Stalker 2 so far is such a great game, and it's a shame that it got a big percentage of a score cut due to pre-release state
Can you comment if Alife was more intact before the day zero patch? Maybe they couldn't balance it and just removed a life to fix performance issues with the patch?
A-life is not removed. A-life controls spawning and fighting random npcs and mutants. Do they spawn and fight? Yes. Are spawns buggy? Yes. I think they were doing some code refactoring and didn't finish it in time. They changed few a-life parameters so it can work at the basic level and released. That's it
Mark my words, by the end of next year, we will have games in alpha stage at full price.
This system has to change... we cant have reviewers rushing out reviews without taking the day 1 patch in effect. These reviews are COMPLETLY pointless because they do not represent what the customer is getting at all. I understand the devs should give more time too but the fact that it took you a week to update your review is a huge problem. People have already made their decision based on false information.
We shouldn't have games launching that need a day 1 patch to fix major performance issues.
Most reviewers gloss over performance related stuff anyway and go straight to meat riding
@@obredaanps3THIS
@obredaanps3 this is the truth and the main issue with launching new games.
@obredaanps3 that's an unrealistic expectation honestly, unless you only play simple Playstation games
Great game, loving it. Just full of jank. Some is just funny, some is super annoying.
Artifacts not appearing, getting locked into certain screens like trading or upgrading.
In certain places the game does weird things like not letting you access your weapon selection wheel.
Dunno about anyone else but those mutant pig enemies seem to just constantly respawn (perhaps by design).
Admittedly I do find this game difficult, and the invisible bloodsucker enemies, man I feel like they're OP, but could be a skill issue on my part.
Human enemies seem to notice you very easily, kind of eliminating the satisfaction of stealth gameplay. They're also very grenade happy it seems.
All that said, the atmosphere and intensity of the game is on another level. Gameplay is generally entertaining, the world fun to explore & interesting with all the anomalous effects and crazy weather system.
It just crazy bc i have had pretty solid performance and almost no bugs, but i hear a lot about ppl experiencing lots of bugs and issues. My biggest issue is the balance of the mutants and survival items being far to available. Overall i really like the game and look forward to what moders will do over the next year or two
Ngl I really wanna love the game i had so much fun but wow getting to the end game and everything is bugging out doors won’t open quests won’t activate….i can’t wait till some of these issues are fixed
It really sucks to see all the negative reviews that are already outdated when most of the reviewers won't go back and give the game another chance, really harms the image of the game
It harms the image of the game more to release it in the state it was
@@blaznpookiethe reviews didn't have the day 1 patch....
@@blaznpookieThat's the thing, the reviews literally reflect a state of the game that is worse than what people got to play at launch.
no need to release game if its not fixed it ruined experience for eveyrone and prob a lot wont return
With controller? Ain't happening. 😂
An invasion by a hostile (and jealous) gangster and his army didn't stop them.
But a deadline just couldn't be pushed for them to finish polishing - a well-worn occurrence and one that publishers still. Don't. Get.
I'm VERY excited to play this but as usual I'll wait for next gen consoles to play this generation of games.
I am now about 14 hours into the game and finally moved on to the second area of the map, Garbage. I now have a crash that happens while approaching a main quest objective there and am unable to progress. So it's still very broken and can just lock you out after a dozen hours
I started getting crashes after enabling FSR frame generation (I have 3090). Disabled it and I am good again
@Z3rgatul Thanks for the tip, I do have FSR enabled so I'll give that a shot
@@Z3rgatul Okay so disabling FSR didn't help but it turns out this issue was more like a very long freeze, not a crash. I just let it sit for 3 minutes and it unfroze itself. Previously I just assumed it was a crash and would force close the game from task manager. Not sure what that was all about, it was basically like a 3 minute traversal stutter.
If anyone encounters an issue where the game seems to freeze but does not crash to desktop, give it a few minutes.
@@EvilTim1911 I had game freezes, maybe 5 times in 60 hours, but it was for like 10-20 seconds, not minutes
Can’t wait to play it in a year or two
so we get a optimization guide instead of actual optimization improvements...very nice
not enough reviewers casually throwing ameliorate about these days
Yea but most games day 1 patches can make MASSIVE differences so reviewers should know by now not to judge a game solely on prerelease builds
They should wait for a day 1 patch before publishing a review everytime but also, if the embargo is before day 1, the dev should have the day 1 patch ready the day before the embargo so the reviewers can check to see if things are fixed
There are minor bugs hut so far stalker 2 at least on quality mode has been incredible. Real shame that the 60 fps is so bad though but at leaat the quality mode is very low input lag when you engage 120 hz in xbox settings and VRR, it feels like a 60 fps game tbh
Game has less bugs then Fallout 4 that I played few month ago. And developers actively working on fixing these bugs unlike bugs in Fallout 4 that will be there forever.
So I can't understand what people are complaining about.
They ship because they need money, plain and simple, let's celebrate a company getting a game out first, and hope the best, why such negativity.
So you praised the Cyberpunk release?
It's kinda funny Stalker 2 released in a better technical state than any of the previous ones im terms of performance, stability, visual bugs etc... However the current AI system is so broken, immersion breaking and antithetical to the stalker experience that i'd prefer having crashes every once in a while if it meant the A-life system was breathing life into its world like on the previous games.
You never played CoP, right? That was actually rather polished by stalker standards.
Clear sky and SoC were a mess though, such a shame :(
They at least had the excuse of having their own fully bespoke and innovative engine, back then. Hell, SoC even had a global illumination mode in it! Even though it was broken and needed commands to use it (and it was a total fps killer), it was insanely forward looking for the mid 2000s!
@@GarethFairclough I did! played it a little while after release, although much better than the previous ones, it stuttered like crazy. Still does to this day on modern hardware.
Didn't know about the GI solution! pretty cool.
This is a good reminder for the gaming community to let go of the "play X game day one" mentality. Games are not released finished anymore, they are released in the last stage of an early access. Almost nobody ever wins playing a game day 1 anymore, at the game gets so much better later. And I have examples to back it up: Cyberpunk 2077, Star Wars Outlaws, to only name those two. With that in mind, one might actually forgive Team Cherry and be happy they take their time, assuming the day 1 product is not half baked.
In the end, who wins? If CyberPunk 2077 released a year after its original date, it would have captured a lot of more users and thus a lot more money. A lot of the players seeing the bad reviews at launch postpone their purchases and some of them never ended up buying the game at all, despite the mastery it is today. Some publishers just don't lean, it might be up to gamers to teach it to them the hard way.
That's not true, most every 1st party PlayStation game over the past five years has not required a day one patch, they may have had a day one update for a minor problem or an enhancement such as photo mode but as a general rule their games run perfectly fine out of the box unlike this game. and many others where company's have shoved out half baked games that sometimes are never complete.
@ my friend: 1. PlayStation is only a part of the gaming ecosystem, 2. Most games are not 1st party games. Because if we go there, Nintendo almost never has that problem, but Nintendo is also within gaming on a category on its own, where most of its “triple A” games are first party. So you can’t use a sub-segment of the gaming industry to make it a rule. As a whole, gamers won’t necessarily be worse by playing a game 6-12 months after release vs day 1, that’s my point.
@@kenwifyou believe that?
@@claudelk1719 I take your point that many games would have benefited financially from an extra 6months + of development, No man's sky, fallout76, Starfield, etc. the list is very long, however your phrase "Games are not released finished anymore" is a little disingenuous to playstation, the vast majority of their 1st party games are highly rated with or without a patch although I will concede some of them may have been delayed from the original release date by several months.
Don’t worry bro, stalker series is being sold for more than a decade. Also there is a difference between 20 testers and 1 million testers. There are like 2 soft locks and a bit of performance issues on day 1 release. For a massive open world title with 5 times less budget than veilguard and rockets flying to their company they delivered a pretty good product. Look at msfs 2024 launch, look at vg, look at test drive, at any release, gta in 2013 had more bugs. Also, mod support, there are about 300 mods already, health rebalance, optimization that allows 1030 to run this, this switch, that switch, cs2 knife skin. The game has to deliver entertainment and most of the bugs are making ppl laugh more than be disappointed. Not even a week passed. Like rly show me a massive open world game that would just release and be technically better in the past 10 years. Either that is a corridor game where nothing really happens, or its some small one. Cause gta had problems, fallout had problems, rdr2, witcher, cyberpunk, hogwarts legacy, you name it literally had more problems.
I hate scary games, Skyrim took me several tries in college because the Draugr's freaked me out (1000+ hours later, safe to say I got over it). I'm a Day 1 Cyberpunk enjoyer, even when it kinda sucked and was bugged beyond belief. This game is so cool in the 10-ish hours that I played that I would love to push through and keep playing, but the performance is so bad. I'll try it out again in 6 months, maybe a year. I feel for the devs, truly, and it's amazing that it's in anything close to a playable state, but I'm gonna have to wait on it.
I'm just NOT going to ruin my first playthrough with a broken AI until the game is done! This is my 4th STALKER release and true to form, it's buggier than a rotten tree stump, just like the previous three. That's just the nature of the STALKER beast but GSC will patch it until it's fixed and finished AND there will be 'Unofficial' patches from the modding community, once AGAIN, once everything there is up and running...eventually. You need patience. A LOT of patience to love STALKER, you really do! 😅
The memory leak makes this game unplayable for me after a couple of loads.. It definitely needs the patch coming this week. I might honestly wait for the patch to jump back in. Im shocked this wasn't mentioned...
1 million copies 🔥🔥🔥🔥
More than half is probably Gamepass installs. 😅
Nobody sells copies. Just digital bs. Gamepass installs count towards that number.
Is not a lot.
Only selling 1 million copies, no wonder this game flopped 😂😂😂🤣
@@ilhamsusanto555 eeewwww. A Sony pony. 🤮🤣
another hurry up and wait game...
Classic budget devs (probably not the devs fault, but fault of the people calling the shots) skimping on QA testing and leaving that up to the reviewers... the smart thing to do here would've been to postpone the launch a bit upon hearing all the feedback, and working on it for a couple more months along with the reviewers... or maybe hire a third party QA company...
The T-pose clip was so funny
Shame that UE5 still dont have direct storage on PC. Seems like it uses direct storage/xbox velocity on Series X, according to your video from Hellblade 2. I mean this area, when through the stone you enter a new location and on PC there's big stutter (even on high end cpus) and no stutter on Series X. Someone from Epic said that UE5 will support Direct Storage. But why it takes so long, and why they support it on consoles but not on PC? there's only benefits from Direct Storage. I mean especially better cpu performance, not just loading times.
Now we need day 30 patch point where finally people playin GAMMA can play