A-life not working is a 'refund til fixed' level of broken, but the mutants were always tanky.
this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2024
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I honestly don’t think the mutants are unbalanced or too tanky. One of the first things you have to do in STALKER is know when to GTFO and run away. This is even demonstrated in the first bloodsucker encounter when there’s a ladder only you can climb nearby and escape.
It shouldn’t be easy to take out bloodsuckers early game. They’re trivial once you’re 10 hours in and have a good shotgun. You close distance, mag dump in their face, and that’s that. It’s even easier if you can backtrack into a corridor.
You’re supposed to feel weak and scared of engagements early game. You can run away from many encounters, or lure them into a favorable position. Jump on something. This has been the vanilla stalker experience since I started playing back when SoC came out. If you’re really stuck, just toggle it to easy difficulty for a couple minutes.
IMO all that needs tweaking for balance is the repair costs, those are exorbitant.
Repair costs are fucking insane, fr.
But I also think the humans can be too tanky. It shouldn't take half a mag into someone's head to kill them. And with that headshot crunch sound, there's no mistaking when you're landing headshots.
I'm just gonna play Clear Sky until they fix the FPS and A-Life issues. Game feels like a ghost town when not in a town/hub thing right up until an entire army of mutants or bandits appears right up your ass, and has a 50/50 chance of being a slide show when in a town.
I drop people in a single shot often. Skif’s pistol, silenced with AP rounds, is OP as hell and nearly free to repair.
Only recently near SIRCAA have I noticed it being much harder, now that enemies have better gear. It takes 4-5 headshots with mid tier rifles for some of the armored/exoskeleton guys, using AP rounds in one of the unique mid tier 5.45mm guns.
I dunno. Personally it doesn’t feel much different than any other STALKER game in terms of enemy difficulty or how the guns work. Lots of damage falloff over distance with the early game guns.
I desperately miss A-Life though, and some of the bugs in SIRCAA are really bad, it took me quick saving every 10 seconds and many, many reloads after a CTD to get past that area.
You're right that it feels in line with previous games. But that's not necessarily good. You'd think after 18 years they would have made it better. I haven't even encountered the military or exo skeletons yet. It's just the bandits with the black hooded jackets seem to have insane armor.
Hooded bandits drop in a single headshot from Skif’s pistol. Guns in all stalker games have pretty severe damage falloff with the lower tier weapons. Gotta close the gap.
I’ve not really had any issues dropping dudes or mutants except the Chimera, on medium difficulty.
I'm using a .308 sniper rifle I found hella early on. This ain't a low tier weapon and shouldn't be dropping off at 300m or less to make lightly armored targets take multiple headshots to finish.
Hell, it might not even be a balance thing; it could just be a bug.
Hmm. I haven’t played with the sniper rifles yet due to the extremely short range spawns, but I’ll give it a shot later.
One thing to keep in mind is the game is not realistic in terms of weapon damage. You can fire the same bulllets out of different tiers of weapons and they’ll have drastically different damage due to the penetration values. To me, penetration seems to be the key stat for weapons.
I loved the six hours or so that I played, but have tabled the game until the A-life is (hopefully) fixed, the mutants are better balanced, and (hopefully) the timescale can be adjusted. Bonus points if they can stop my cutscenes/dialogue events from dropping to 10 FPS. But I want to be playing it and I think about it a lot. Until then, I've started over fresh in Anomaly and will patiently inhabit the Zone there.