>>718137591 (OP)
>what went so terrible fucking wrong.
I didn't buy stalker 2. I could smell that shit pile from the other side of the plane of flat earth.
No A-life. A-life was promised, it wasn't delivered. It's one of the most important features of the first game. It makes the world more immersive when NPC's all have routines, schedules, paths and are a fixed element. In the second game they are just spawned in around you, they don't actually exist within the game world until seconds before you see them.
Ukraine political activism in the fanbase. This turned me off of the game big time, but it's probably where most of the games sales came from. Remember the war in Ukraine? Probably not, It was the "current thing" after lockdowns. Nobody talks about it anymore, it's stale and everyone has moved on to some other fotm political outrage virtue signalling vile chicanery. Any criticism of the game at the time got you accused of being a Russian shill.
This sequel reminds me of F.E.A.R. 2 so much I'm having hard Deja Vu. It's a visually stunning cinematic mockery of it's predecessor that removed the depth of the gameplay in an attempt to capture a wider audience and flopped hard. What a cash grab.
I'm sure the game isn't awful if you play it on it's own because the universe is so interesting but it doesn't exist in a vacuum. There's 3 other games to compare it to and it's shit compared to any of them.
