In my STALKER 2 review, I mentioned how the game’s balance is currently causing frustration for the player:
When you’re hit in STALKER 2, there’s a decent chance you’ll not only lose health (which does not regenerate on its own), but you’ll also start bleeding. While medkits restore health, you need bandages to stem the bleeding. Similarly, you need to bring food and drinks, anti-rads, and enough ammunition whenever you venture out of the safe zones. You’ll want to stock up on all these things because there is no fast travel in this game, and there’s no telling when you might need them while roaming the ever-dangerous Zone. However, everything has its own weight; even quest items have weight, and the more you carry, the quicker the stamina drops.
While that is perfectly understandable within the context of the game’s design, I feel that it is absolutely overtuned and ends up being too penalizing. Even when the inventory’s weight is in the green range, it only takes a little sprint to deplete the stamina, leading to fairly slow and long treks to travel across the map. I literally wished there was some kind of auto-run functionality, as you’re just pushing the forward button for minutes at a time on certain occasions with nothing else to do. A modular approach to difficulty, which is becoming more common in recent game releases, would have been preferable to set the challenge level of combat, travel, injuries and survival separately depending on the player’s preferences.
There’s more. The equipment’s durability depletes over time, as you’d expect given the realistic theme. Tech NPCs can repair them in the safe zones, provided you’ve got enough coupons to spare. The problem is that, in some cases, the cost is simply outrageous. I had found an extremely effective armor suit that was worth over 20K coupons. However, when I went to repair it, I was appalled by the NPC requesting 70K coupons – far more than I had available. When repairing something costs over three times its worth, you know something’s wrong. I also believe that the side missions could be more rewarding at handing coupons; you don’t loot coupons from fallen foes, as they are transmitted digitally to your PDA. You could gather items and then sell them, but there’s the little problem mentioned above with taking on too much weight. In short, the economy needs a balance pass, too.
Later in the review, I mentioned that either GSC Game World or modders would have to take care of the problem. It looks like the modders already did, albeit in a perhaps excessive fashion. Mere hours after the launch, Nexus Mods user Ronon_Dex_6 uploaded a mod that provides unlimited carry weight for the player. This works through Cheat Engine, so it’s essentially a hack, and it certainly kind of undermines the harsh journey the player is meant to go through. However, it is a temporary solution for those who cannot bear the system as-is, while a better fix can be provided by the developers or by a more elegant mod.
There’s also another mod that removes weapon durability loss. This is achieved by manually tweaking the durabilitydamagepershot value to 0.0 in the PlayerWeaponSettingsPrototypes.cfg file. Many more mods will undoubtedly be released for STALKER 2. The development team plans to release official tools that will allow fans to create cross-platform mods that work on consoles, too. We’ll keep you informed of all the most interesting mods as they appear.
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