STALKER 2: Coronary heart of Chornobyl brings scavengers, trespassers, and adventurers from throughout to stay their greatest lives in a faithfully digitized nook of Ukraine. Hazard is lurking round each nook, be that from hungry mutants or battle-hardened mercenaries. However very like Darkish Souls and Bloodborne, the sport has its personal inner quirks and oddities that it’s essential to be conversant in earlier than you get too far in.
Listed here are the newbies ideas it’s essential to know earlier than stepping off in your first journey into the Zone in STALKER 2.
Save scumming may be harmful
STALKER 2 solely contains three playable sport slots. However in all three of those slots, I’ve solely been given the power to avoid wasting 50 discrete saved sport information on PC. Any greater than that, and I’ve needed to overwrite an current save.
Moreover, the sport doesn’t can help you annotate or in any other case point out what you’re as much as when making a save file. All you get to jog your reminiscence in a while is a inventory picture from the area of the Zone that you simply have been standing in when the file was created, alongside the time and the date that it was first saved out or final overwritten. That’s tremendous, if just a bit bit inconvenient.
Nevertheless, when mixed with a built-in autosave function, there’s each probability of inadvertently saving over a file that you simply desperately must revert to with the intention to transfer the sport ahead in your most well-liked method. It’s as much as you the participant to maintain cautious tabs in your save information, and never overwrite them recklessly.
If you sit down for a session, be aware of the save file that you simply create on the very starting of the evening. Concentrate on those you create going ahead. You simply may want them in working order just a few hours later whenever you understand you’ve inadvertently messed one thing up.
Know you’re being watched
STALKER 2 has a number of endings – 4, say the press supplies, however I wouldn’t be shocked if there are greater than that. With previous iterations of the STALKER franchise, the variety of instances you die when enjoying from a given save slot can immediately impression the endings which might be accessible to you, and I’ve a suspicion that that’s the case right here as properly.
The sport is lengthy, with the potential for 100 or extra hours of complete gameplay together with sidequests and extra. So if getting the “greatest” ending isn’t an enormous deal for you, then go nuts on the market and have enjoyable. Simply know that you could’t actually undo the impression of that dying (or a number of deaths, relying on the place you ended up) in your remaining rating in a given save slot.
STALKER 2 is a sport about taking lengthy expeditions by an unforgiving panorama, however the atmosphere itself gives a stunning quantity of sustenance to maintain you topped up alongside the best way. For those who’re heading off in a brand new course, the place the loot shall be contemporary, don’t fear all that a lot about having a six-pack of vitality drinks and a dozen free sausages rattling round in your pockets. Possibly half that quantity, at most, plus some vodka to take care of radiation is sufficient to get you thru, alongside scavenging.
Retaining your weight down is necessary, since you received’t be gaining any ranges on this sport. It’s not an RPG, so you possibly can’t dump just a few factors in power to up your carrying capability. As an alternative, you’ll want to have the ability to carry round a lot of sellable loot – particularly rifles and shotguns, a half-dozen or extra at a time – with the intention to earn sufficient cash to purchase different requirements and restore your favourite gear. So the less cans of condensed milk in your particular person, the extra firearms you possibly can lug again to camp.
Lastly, don’t waste your time lugging round damaged weapons, marked with a pink icon within the stock menus. Distributors received’t purchase them, and until they’re particularly uncommon you’re higher off shopping for a brand new gun than repairing an outdated one.
Prioritize repairing your gear
Traipsing round in knee-deep river water and stumbling into anomalies – like as an illustration, a floating discipline of glass shards, or a nasty gust of phantasmal wind that may throw you for a loop – is a sure-fire method to harm your well being. However whilst you can apply a bandage, the garments in your again aren’t so simply mended. Even your weapons will start to indicate put on and tear contained in the stock display screen, the place you possibly can observe the degradation of your gear in actual time. That’s proper, the sport world doesn’t pause whenever you open up the menus, so examine your environment earlier than you bust out that PDA.
Talking from expertise, when you’ve burned by say 10% of your go well with’s accessible sturdiness, you’re going to be 1000’s of coupons in repairs. For those who flip in your heel proper then, and get residence with lower than 20% of harm achieved, you may be capable to maintain your prices under 10,000 relying on what you’re sporting. Go any additional than that – particularly with the sport’s extra unique, mid- and late-game armor and weapons – and also you’ll be a really hefty butcher’s invoice certainly. Plan your funds, akin to they’re, accordingly, lest you get caught outdoor with damaged or broken tools or, worse but, a shell case caught stovepiped within the receiver of your beforehand trusty AK.
Semi- and fully-automatic weapons are enjoyable and all, what with all of the mode selector switches and attachments and scopes and stuff. However there is no such thing as a substitute for an inexpensive, easy-to-repair smoothbore shotgun and a dozen rounds of 20-gauge slug rounds. Convey 50 or so buckshot simply to be on the protected facet, and ensure to get in shut. Staggering one enemy after which pecking away at one other is typically the one method to make it out of a STALKER 2 gunfight alive.
