Stalker 2 Has Faction Wars Now: Enemies 'can Expand Control Over...

Just three days out from Stalker 2's first birthday (doesn't time fly?) GSC Game World has released another meaty patch for its unique, ambitious, and at times conflagrating shooter. Patch 1.7 is a doozy—you can tell because it's one of those patches a developer puts out a video to mark—and it's out now.

There are a few significant tweaks here, but the things that stand out to me are: yet more fixes for the game's A-Life system and a whole new difficulty. That's in descending order of importance, so far as I'm concerned.

The A-Life fixes sound a lot more interesting than GSC's prosaic "Fixes and improvements to the A-Life system" makes it sound. If you're not familiar, A-Life is the name GSC gives to the systems in all its Stalker games that, more or less, let the games' beasts and NPCs pursue independent lives and objectives. It's always kind of an illusion, but it's an illusion that many felt was especially lacking in Stalker 2 at launch.

The big change today? "Factions can expand control over new territories." Which, let me be the first to say: hell yeah. "This means they may also lose control over their lands if they fail to defend them. Various points of interest, checkpoints, locations (but not hubs) are in contest between different NPCs and… mutants! They also want to defend their lairs and territories from their very unfriendly stalker-neighbours," says GSC.

Bellum omnium contra omnes, except some of the omnes are packs of like 40 dogs. This sounds great. I've not had a chance to test it yet, but I found Stalker 2's factions a little lacking at launch. Where previous games—particularly Clear Sky, whose faction war system was its centrepiece—placed a lot of weight in your relationship with their factions, in Stalker 2, they rarely felt meaningful. I'm very glad to see GSC giving them some love.

The new difficulty, meanwhile, is essentially ultra-hard mode. GSC hasn't actually said a great deal about what this entails—save that it's very hard and you can only select it at the start of a game—but we can likely take some cues from the OG game's Master mode. Bullets and monsters hit so hard that even a gunfight with a single battle turns into a huge event in Shadow of Chornobyl's hardest difficulty; I suspect the same will be true of Stalker 2.

Those aside, 1.7 also tweaks the enemy's line of sight—hiding behind bushes and long grass will play havoc with their aim now—adds new anomalies, changes some equipment stats, reworks sprinting and stamina,

Source: PC Gamer