I’m a massive Stalker fan, and the state of the game pains me. What they have is so good. The world is beautiful and immaculately designed, the vibe and the atmosphere is all there. The guns feel good. The story is good so far with interesting characters and good performances (at least in Ukrainian) and the animations and presentation in main story dialogue quests has been good and immersive. Not cyberpunk levels maybe but good and a huge step up from previous games.
But man, there is so much that reeks of unfinished and half-done. They likely would have needed another year at least but I think they just ran out of money. It also looks like being forced to comply with console parity for the Xbox meant they couldn’t get performance under control and had to rip out A-life (or abandon it when it was clear it wouldn’t work on Xbox).
With how great the good parts are it pains me doubly.
The other interview did suggest consoles are the problem. It’s wild to me that real developers are putting effort into those things, literally no one owns a PS5 still and the xbox is basically worthless. They’d have a better excuse to put stalker onto the switch than those ancient relics. Hopefully they get abandoned soon and the developers put all their effort where it matters.
Console should stop running a proprietary OS that needs a special SDK to develop on.
Take the Steam route : use Linux with their flavor on it. Makes life easier for devs, more games can run on your console and we get (hopefully) better optimized games
I’m a massive Stalker fan, and the state of the game pains me. What they have is so good. The world is beautiful and immaculately designed, the vibe and the atmosphere is all there. The guns feel good. The story is good so far with interesting characters and good performances (at least in Ukrainian) and the animations and presentation in main story dialogue quests has been good and immersive. Not cyberpunk levels maybe but good and a huge step up from previous games.
But man, there is so much that reeks of unfinished and half-done. They likely would have needed another year at least but I think they just ran out of money. It also looks like being forced to comply with console parity for the Xbox meant they couldn’t get performance under control and had to rip out A-life (or abandon it when it was clear it wouldn’t work on Xbox).
With how great the good parts are it pains me doubly.
The other interview did suggest consoles are the problem. It’s wild to me that real developers are putting effort into those things, literally no one owns a PS5 still and the xbox is basically worthless. They’d have a better excuse to put stalker onto the switch than those ancient relics. Hopefully they get abandoned soon and the developers put all their effort where it matters.
Console should stop running a proprietary OS that needs a special SDK to develop on.
Take the Steam route : use Linux with their flavor on it. Makes life easier for devs, more games can run on your console and we get (hopefully) better optimized games