Stalker 2 still inferior to an almost 2 decade old game or is it worth pirating now?
I just bought it last week and am ten hours in game. It's not bad but there are some things that rub me the wrong way. I wouldn't say its inferior, just is misguided and I am having fun. I played the original Stalker back in 2007 on version 1.0 where there were no shortage of bugs, incomplete things such as repairing weapons wasn't a thing despite degradation and the suits didn't have durability issues, and some enemies were missing despite being advertised on the website (military stalkers, chimeras, and burers were referenced but not in version 1.0). The game was playable and beatable and I think was a good game at the time but got reviewers gave it grief. I also played Clear Sky on release which was a bigger mess and I never beat it because I got bored with it. Call of Pripyat was even worse and felt like a downgrade compared the previous two and I got as far as reaching Pripyat and stopped playing. I think the comments about it being inferior are probably from people playing modded versions for years and forget what vanilla is like.
I hate how certain dangerous mutants like Bloodsuckers are overdone and don't fight like they do in the previous games. The old games had them run up to you invisible, eyes glowing to alert you and in the case of the Clear Sky, bloodsuckers were invulnerable until they stopped being invisible. They were also uncommon, were found deeper in the zone, and were solitary mutants. Stalker 2, has them all over the place, they run up to crouched over like a chimp despite having homind/human proportions, are bullet sponges, and can have multiple in Garbage. It wrecks the world building with the mutants and created a mutant that's not fun to fight especially if you encounter them early game when you use the early double barreled shotguns. Once you get the pump action and have wide open space to fight them, you can cheese them so hard. Again, wrecks the world building.
I'm really annoyed with the map size and how there are chokepoints to access areas despite being open world. I don't want to go south from Garbage to Lesser Zone through the broken bridge anomalies. It's not fun having to chuck bolts at everything to try to climb through a window. I also am annoyed at having to walk everywhere especially when overburdened because I found good loot and don't want to leave it behind. Now in defense of the game, Gamma is the same fucking way albeit with more guides but still is a slog to ferry loot from one place to another especially with a leg injury. I'm not going to get into how much I hate Gamma but I think it's unfair to praise Gamma despite the unfun mechanics and to bash Stalker 2 for the similar if not the same mechanics.
I also find it annoying that enemies can shoot you through certain cover despite no clear line of sight and shots can clip the top of terrain to hit you. Poltergeists can throw objects at you despite being two floors above them. For example, when you first get to the Garbage's Detention Center, there is a poltergeist in the basement. If you go down there and agro it, it will throw objects at you through the rest of the building and yes the objects will go through walls. These are very bad bugs and should be fixed. That said, Call of Chernobyl had one poltergeist in it in the first underground lab and it would throw objects at you despite no line of sight but at worst case it was a only one floor difference.
On positives, I like the look of the game, its more colorful than the original games but those games looked bleak and gray probably because a very common technique to get graphical fidelity back then was introduce grey coloring in the textures to help with compression, Killzone 2 is a good example of this. The original Stalker game was in development back when AGP cards were still relevant and it was an ambitious game at the time so I can see them using this technique and hence the world looked depressing and bleak. Gunplay feels alright when you use upgraded weapons. I also think the story is a little silly but I'm actually engaged and so far want to know what happens next. I really, really like the unified loot box system. I get the immersion breaking from not having mulitple stashes but I'm old and don't want to spend a lot of time portaging items from stashes. That was a pain in the ass in the other games.
I think its worth trying but it's not a $60 game so far.
