Might finally make me play it again, at least to fuck around with some new builds.

Both PugJesus and Blaze are doing some seriously heavy lifting all over Lemmy. Either one would be a worthy winner imo.

If not for a bunch of McLaren blunders this season would have been an all-timer. Not sure what you were watching but the stretch between June and November was genuinely thrilling and Lando had a solid shot at clinching his first championship this year were either he and McLaren a bit better or Max and Red Bull a bit less perfect at extracting the maximum of every weekend.

The stretch of mid '22 through '23 was a low mark in terms of excitement I agree (though we had some awesome races last year if you discount who won), but after what we've seen this year I'm very hopeful next year will be an absolute thriller. There is a genuine chance we'll have a 4 way title battle!

I think Red Bulls priorities have changed since the death of Mateschitz. He was more interested in sporting success itself, the current owners are more interested in finances. And for marketing purposes the WCC doesn't actually matter much, it's only the Driver's Champion that people really care about, hence also what sponsors care about. Mercedes won the WCC in '21 but nobody cares or remembers. And the marketing upside Perez brings (at least so far) has been very enticing. I don't really get why (might just be fiery nationalist pride) but Perez is unspeakably popular in Mexico - and even extended to Latin America in general. As far as I know he sells the most merch in the entire sport and brings in the most sponsors. He brings a huge amount of value for shareholders.

No, but I would have if I had fewer hours played just to get a proper experience from the start and consequently less of an item stockpile etc. Grok's less loot in stashes won't apply retroactively for example.

They're definitely not pushing the engine to its limits and it's a shame. No Ray Reconstruction for example and no hardware ray tracing. I was wondering why shadows and reflections lacked clarity at first. This is apparently why.

It's a weird one though because despite all the flaws I can't stop playing the game. Maybe I just love STALKER that much. I also have a bunch of mods installed, granted.

I recommend going through what's trending on Nexus and seeing what appeals to you. Apart from fixing the timescale I installed some rebalancing mods that make enemies less bullet spongy and combat more lethal, as well as a mod attempting to improve A-life and stealth. Also installed all of Grok's mods. and this Medkit and Consumable rebalance.

As long as they're not lying about the existence of A-life in the first place I'm hopeful. If the framework of it actually is there but not working I have hope they'll fix it.

Otherwise yes, I'm still enjoying having more STALKER after all these years. I've installed maybe a dozen mods and am now having a lot of fun with the game, but even so there are a lot of things missing and/or lacking. Even stuff like factions. You can't see the faction of corpses anymore when you loot them, and you can't keep track of your relations in your PDA. Aren't factions supposed to be important? Puzzling.

What makes the older STALKER games special is the way the zone lives its own life independent of the player. That's what makes you feel small and insignificant, just wandering a hostile wasteland. As you're heading to your mission you hear gunshots in the distance, NPC Stalkers are fighting bandits perhaps? As you head over you arrive as the fight is over and they're looting the bodies, after which they start heading off towards the nearest encampment. Unscripted stuff like this is missing in the game right now.

I'm so glad you're enjoying it! It's a damn shame BG3 took the world by storm last year, as I felt AW2 truly deserved more awards, including Game of the Year. BG3 is good and all but at the end of the day it's just a really well made RPG. AW2 is doing something bold and interesting with the video game medium in a way that deserves to be celebrated. It topped Jacob Geller's yearly list for a reason, and I think he put it the best in his video:

"Is Alan Wake 2 the best game I've played this year? No. But it's the most excited I've been to be playing a video game this year."

Also it should have won the Game award for best soundtrack and I'll hear no arguments.

The devs kinda have to put their money where their mouth is in terms of A-life. Most of the other issues are already being addressed via simple .cfg mods so they should be easily patched (though I have no idea how some of them ended up in the game, was it not QA tested at all?).

A-life is what makes the Zone feel alive in all the previous games. The devs have said it's not working right, so now they actually have to prove that the framework is there at all and can be fixed.

Shows how insanely sensitive this track is in terms of tire temps. Getting them working right is everything here and can put an Alpine 3rd. Amazing qualy by Gasly.

I'm praying the successful sales gives the team the resources to fix the games many problems in coming patches. Unlike the author of this article I have a lot of issues with the current state of the game and find many design decisions to be not in the spirit of classic STALKER. Finally, the broken at best and absent at worst A-life (simulation of what NPCs and mutants are doing off screen for those unfamiliar) is a massive issue.

The bones of a great STALKER game are there, but it's quite a ways away from it in its current state.

I really wish they'd get the opt-in solo queue only working soon. One thing I loved about ranked was you'd be on an even playing field. I also personally felt like the match quality in ranked queue was better so I'm sad to see it go.

I'm also a bit sad that the community as a whole seems to have rejected the experiment with ranked badges assigned once a week and forced the return to classic +/- MMR after each game. I actually enjoyed it and felt like it made it easier to push losses out of your mind.

The souls sharing and kill bounty changes are perhaps the most interesting as the experiment with bumping those up significantly has now almost entirely been walked back. The longer death timers earlier are also reverted which to be honest feels good. All this - combined with the walker changes - will probably lead to longer games, but maybe that's okay?

No idea what to make of the new Urn experiment because I actually love the urn. Maybe it's good?

Finally, having the bridge buffs be claimable with a heavy punch feels so obvious in hindsight. Great change and will open up some cool parry plays.

Mods are already out to fix it, but it's not unlikely they tied a bunch of functions to timescale so that longer days screw up AI/Emissions/Quests etc.

The keybinds are absolutely atrocious and I was staggered that so many were unable to be re-bound. Quick Melee is "V" and you can't change it??

The beefy mutants are absolutely a problem and made me actually switch from Veteran to Stalker difficulty simply because those bullet sponges are not fun gameplay. Otherwise in the long sequence of inane design decisions the absurdly fast timescale (24h in game in a single real life hour!!!!) is pulling me out of immersion a lot as well. I hope it can be modded without breaking everything because I just want to be able to savour these beautiful areas and weathers for a bit while exploring without weather changing and night falling every 5 minutes!

Lastly, and I haven't gotten far enough to see much of it yet, but most importantly will be the A-life implementation and how much of it is actually fixable with patches. That was what made the other STALKER games feel alive, and the devs have at least acknowledged that it's not working at the moment. Hopefully that means the engine for it is actually there though and can be patched. Unless they're lying to save face, I suppose.

I have a 7800X3D and a 4070TI, running the game at 3413x1920 with DLDSR on my 1440p monitor with everything on Epic and DLSS on Balanced. For the most part, I'm sitting at 65-85 FPS. However both frame drops and stutters are pretty bad, and performance tanks in the populated first town area (forgetting its name), regularly hitting 45-55 FPS. To note also, frame gen doesn't seem to work for me. It works for a couple of minutes, then it starts behaving like a memory leak: getting me down to sub 10 FPS until it crashes or I reboot the game. This doesn't happen with frame gen off.

On that subject though, I'm getting frequent crashes anyway. The first two hours yesterday were fine, but I've had 4 fatal error CTDs today. Very disappointing.

Was it worse than last year? I haven't played this year's edition but F1 Manager 2023 was a pretty fun game, albeit lacking the depth of something like Football Manager or Motorsport Manager.

It breaks my heart to read about all the bugs and performance issues. Not that they were entirely unexpected - especially since it's a STALKER game - but I was hoping for a miracle. I really, really want this game to succeed and the game itself sounds like they hit it out the park. I just hope launching in this state doesn't ruin the game's reputation and sales.

That makes me hopeful, I've had some truly awful games lately and had a pretty bad loss streak where I felt completely powerless as my teammates were losing every lane. And on the flip side the games I won last week were similar stomps where the poorly matched players were on the other side and we won in 20-25 minutes with like a 50k soul lead.

Feels bad since the even matches where everyone is on comms and talking to each other are so fun. But I'm struggling to break into that MMR range, I had matches like that in early ranked but I've been slipping since then and now I'm back to 50% of people not using their mic.