truly an authentic Stalker game. I remember my Clear Sky playthrough ended when a faction I needed to talk to for a main story quest was hostile towards me.

yea that weird snow effect around the edge of the screen is annoying. I thought it was a bug at first until I saw it in other gameplay videos.

it'd be great if the day/night cycle was longer, but it was possible to sleep on the beds you find near campfires/in some houses etc. to pass the time.

i've heard lots of complaints about enemy spawning but haven't really noticed anything myself so far. feels like the random enemy encounters have been at a good level and I'm not seeing enemies spawn in, feels pretty organic thus far but i've only played 4 hours.

I don't really get the hype around this game. It looks nice and has some great environments but that's about the only nice thing I can say about it.

The ranged weapons felt weak to me, at least against the non-horde enemies and it didn't make sense to use ammo on them anyways.

Melee combat feels all right but it's pretty simplistic and some things feel unresponsive like heavy attacks and parries.

The story is presented with the most dull ass grim gruff voice acting. I know it's universe appropriate but I did not enjoy it.

The missions themselves all kind of blur together with only a few stand-out moments that I can remember

It's a competent but thoroughly unremarkable action game. I'd probably give it a 6 out of 10. Would much rather play Darktide for my 40K fix

I played a couple hours after work last night. a few random thoughts:

- I hate the first person cutscenes. they make me super motion sick. I had to stop playing after the opening one, and come back an hour later to continue. now I skip them or look away from my screen. going to make it a bit hard to follow the story

- in terms of bugs/performance, its been OK for me so far. i get around 100fps on high with DLSS/FSR Frame Gen but it feels a bit 'framey' - not super smooth but very much playable (12700k/3070/32gb DDR5). A couple times the frame rate randomly went to shit for 10-15 seconds before recovering.

-Only bug was opening a door while a Stalker was trying to walk out of the building. He got stuck on the door and continued walking in place afterwards.

-I think the game suffers from the same problem as Dying Light 2 - much more dialogue/voice acting/choices, but the people you talk to are mostly assholes and i'm not sure it adds much to the game. The Bethesda-RPG style zoom into the NPC faces during convos is somehow unsettling and very unnecessary. I wish I could just talk to them while keeping the normal camera.

- It feels like a proper PC tactical shooter. you die quick, but can take out enemies quick if you aim for the head. enemy AI seems pretty decent, they will flush you out with grenades and try to flank you. Feels like it would be tricky with a controller.

-I feel like its being very generous with supplies/ammo early on but we'll see if that continues. You can definitely burn through medkits quickly

cheers i'll give this a try when I jump on the game after work

yea, you'd think of all companies MS would be equipped to deal with this quickly given they own a major cloud computing platform.

Its always amazing how both people and companies seem to be caught by surprise when a game that relies heavily on servers has launch issues with everyone trying to play at once.

these Flight Sim games stream in a ton of data, so i'm not surprised one bit. MS probably knows that the vast majority of people will probably only play it for a few hours, do some training, fly over their house, and uninstall it. so maybe they are willing to weather the initial wave of problems rather than set up the server infrastructure that will only be used briefly.

but seriously. when was the last time a sever reliant game DIDN'T have launch issues? maybe Call of Duty? I find it so funny how gamers get so furious about it when its the most predictable shit ever and will probably sort itself out in a few days like always.

wonder if there is a option for Russian VO with subtitles

Sounds like a authentic Stalker game to me.

I remember running the first one in Direct X 8 mode when it came out because my PC couldn't handle it in DX9 lol.

now the question of whether I can get it running acceptably well with my RTX 3070.

dang, being stuck playing on a console with sub par performance and no ability to do anything about it would be my nightmare.

I'd hope that even if its a bit rough on PC, smart people will figure out ways to mitigate performance issues with various tweaks.

one more day until we find out... then it'll be the usual chaos of some people saying "well it runs fine on my laptop with a RTX 2050m and 7th gen i5" and then others saying "well my 4090 with a 14900k XTREME EDITION cooled by dry ice overclocked to 33ghz + 128gb of ram is getting terrible performance"

and we still won't know shit lol

I have some cousins literally on the other side of the world in New Zealand who game, otherwise, no one.

my two brothers both gamed a bit when younger but neither kept it up