After sharing an image of night vision goggles for STALKER 2 with green and blue tinges and a weird technical caption something to the effect of, “Oh look at you darling! You are so… green? Or even blue! Why is that?” GSC Game World confounded the STALKER community for quite a while.
These replies to the tweet are a mixed bag of hype versus real-frustration coming in right from the get-go. One player: “YES, YEEEEEEEEEES FINALLYYYYYYY,” which is nice until you begin scrolling down and most people are talking fixes and lack of features. MrBubblyTTV blatantly asks, “did you guys scrap/cancel the multiplayer mode?” That starts off an enormous thread of arguments over whether or not PvP should be a priority when the singleplayer still has issues.
That is quite gat-ing, for real: the community feels somewhat torn between being excited by new stuff like NVG while being somewhat annoyed with the performance of the game and what is still lacking-anything really. And then a player answers, “I think nobody would play pvp with the horrible performance the game has right now,” which is a very fair point. Why even bother with new modes when core experience will not even run smooth?
Then, there is the tactical bound to this one. People want to know if these NVGs will be accompanied by IR lasers or various other sights or whatever really gets into detail. ArtsAttha practically steers ask if weapon sight use has now become more tactical, which is a worthy question indeed. Would NVG use change gameplay or simply serve as an alternate visual?
But Bambucha has this great idea of mutants with glowing eyes while using night vision; it would likely be as terrifying as cool.
Although, the negative vibes are a go as well. One describes this game as “one big steaming pile of cow dung” and an admonishment for the devs to stop congratulating themselves-ouch. Then there’s this whole side debate regarding game sounds and GSC getting rid of Soviet-era stuff, which some players feel killed the ambiance. MixailS81385 finds himself fighting back against another player, suggesting that these devs “blindly hate everything that’s Russian,” which is quite a heavy accusation.
The performance though would seem to be the biggest complaint. Several replies commented on the technical state of the game; some even called it “early access which isn’t called early access.” There were talks about AI needing fixes, about render distances, all technical details that either make or break immersive gameplay for a game like STALKER.”
That said, the console players are feeling left out. Tatsu866 remarked, “My fight for the Zone ends when you add mod support for consoles. For now, I rest in Pripyat.” That’s funny and sad because, truly, mod support is such a massive part of the STALKER community experience.
The hilarious thing is that the community already started thinking about mods for this new NVG thing. Medikamentos says, “I see already the ‘vignette begone’ mod,” which most certainly will be what happens; everyone will mod out any visual effects they are not fond of.
The different color schemes in the tweet-Green and Blue-have started players speculating on several tiers of NVGs. Sgt_chmonya asks if there are four tiers: “Monocular, Binocular, Quad Eye Green, and Quad Eye Blue?” Wow, these players want to get very detailed with their classification of this system.
Some guys could not be happier that nighttime is finally getting some attention. JapaneseGoblin says, “Finally nightmare vision!” while Object122 writes some poetry about how night “should be for rest but if humans want a good hunt in the Zone…”
However, the majority of discussion ends up sounding something to the effect of: cool feature, but please fix the game first? It seems that players want to have a solid foundation to build on before any fancy new features come in. A large amount also mention how they’ll be waiting on patches before they even start thinking about jumping back in.
Then, another groan from down below that stirring quake, the multiplayer question, with players being puzzled if it’s coming or not. MrBubblyTTV seems to be the star question-asker of this issue, and others say that multiplayer should be put aside until single-player is properly working.
That is that classic old-time struggle in game development communication. The devs want to show off cool new stuff, and the community is mostly concerned with the problems it already has. Fret looks promising, though; community feedback shows that STALKER 2 still has to regain some trust after a rough launch.
That said, it is evident that the STALKER community is very passionate and wants the game to be one of the greats. They aren’t mindlessly hyped; these, in fact, are a critically engaged group about what actually works and what doesn’t. The NVG tease generated quite a bit of discussion, just maybe not quite as intended by the devs.
Really, on their end, what people want is polished, complete, smooth STALKER with less concern on shiny new gear previews. Night vision on paper looks good; however, the community wants to see some proper performance and AI improvement before joining into new features’ hype. The Zone deserves nothing but excellence or something freaking close.
