Pretty good I think, would have been great if they had expanded on the faction wars like in Clear Sky. With Duty faction hired to guard the bunker, and Strider`s group hired to join Freedom, each side of the map can be owned by each faction. But it is not just fighting, there are also faction considerations. But I guess, this is a gameplay consideration, to avoid the player becoming bored in a map with nothing to fight. But it is very strange that the good ending of Call of Pripyat says that Yanov is free of mutants, but when you kill important mutants, this results in more of them spawning randomly. Sure, have enemies hanging around outside, but the inside should be a safezone. Mutants in Yanov can get into the Yanov railway station and kill the Barkeep, then the player cannot use the trader. It is very annoying when they are killed and the player has to start again. One more consideration is making important NPC characters invincible, or at least some of them. This is what can make or break Stalker 2. That is what players will expect from a new Stalker game. That is if the developers want to include a working A-Life simulation. That would work perfectly for an in-depth simulation of a living breathing zone. AI on other maps could be moving around virtually, so there are fights and movement of NPC characters, but it is virtual, and when a player is close, they load in fully. This is why having a game that is multithreaded would really help if you had a large world with no loading screens. Trickier to render distant landscape but you could probably do the same but a lower quality for further away. Dynamically load and unload parts of the map on a separate thread and it can handle it flawlessly. The same with loading terrain and objects. This needs to be smoothed out to avoid such micro-stuttering events. This is due to AI loading in when you approach them. Lost Alpha DC Yantar with DirectX 10 graphics.

Many Stalker mods suffer from stuttering. This could be done with a lot of trees and a bit of fog to hide new areas so the player cannot see the new areas loading in. The Unreal 4 engine has a theoretical maximum map size of 15sqKM, but this could be made larger, if the new map areas where streamed to the player from the hard disk while they were walking towards the new area. The passage to Army Warehouses is a bridge over a river and it can be explored underneath. Dead City is another map with massive areas to explore. The underground areas are part of the main map, and are massive to boot. The alpha version of this map is huge and worth exploring. Some parts are very hard, but it is rewarding to play when you get past X-18 and are on to Yantar. Lost Alpha DC has a good mix of gameplay and features. Many new Stalker mods like Dead Air and Misery are adding countless new features to their mods, but are forgetting about stability and gameplay.

Stalker road to the north