Recent reviews by Soulstuff

This review doesnt cover any gameplay from DLC content

Borderlands 2, the sequel that couldnt fill the boots left by Borderlands 1

Now BL2 is rather good step up in visual detail that gets dragged down by its world, gameplay and story

- World -
World is way larger compared to its predecessor, but way more dead
Its good example why larger doesnt mean better

• While BL1 also had few maps that are barren (Dahl Headland, Trash Coast, The Salt Flats) most of the maps are packed with something to do or inviting to explore the locations with really good loot chest placements, even minor camps tend to have one most of the time while larger encampments have multiple
  
  
• BL2 has almost none of that. While toilets and lockers pretend being lootboxes and blend in more with the world, some of their placement is questionable or just in your face, there is barely any loot behind some parkour puzzle or hidden off the main path
  Most maps have massive "dead zones" and encourage you to call in a vehicle
  
  
• At best you get "follow the wire to breaker" or rather rare occasion some hidden area off the main path.
  Best area with hidden loot is by far "Wildlife Exploitation Preserve" with Mordecai stashes and most parkour was probably "Lynchwood" or "Sawtooth Cauldron" (yes the most hated areas in the whole game)
  
  
• Areas are not memorable, the longer you play the higher the chance that you will start quitting to main menu to "fast travel" because getting anywhere slowly becomes a chore, later maps have same issue BL1 had with Salt Flats/Trash Coast like Arid Nexus Boneyard/Badlands as there is only 1 thing to do with no real reason to return apart 1 boss (Saturn) and 1 miniboss (Hellquist)
  
  By far the best area is probably Caustic Caverns due to how densely packed the area is

- Gameplay -

• Gun handling got ruined and unique weapons got gimmicks to them, some make them completely obsolete even if they are above enemy level
  Each manufacturer now has its own unique gimmick:
  Torque = always explosive and shooting rockets
  Hyperion = shooting makes you more accurate
  Tediore = on reload you throw you gun away with all the leftover ammo like a grenade
  and ect.
  
  
• Accuracy doesnt matter as much
  If the gun is not over 85+ accuracy stat it will miss broad side of the barn, hell it still can miss horribly
  Some hyperion brand guns will shake like mad when using sight for no reason until you start firing to kick in their passive
  
  
• Shotguns got completely butchered, there are only couple usable examples, some only on specific characters only due to their skill interactions and some are post final battle only
  To put into perspective BL1 60ish accuracy shotgun can and will kill something while BL2 Hyperion shotgun will be obsolete at same range
  
  
• Game balance now revolves around your and gear levels
  You no longer can pick up some amazing gun that will carry you through whole playthrough
  
  I had finished BL1 base game with lvl 18 No Element Green Rarity Jakobs shotgun (113x9 dmg with 58.3 accuracy) while playing as Brick (he has no shotgun skills at all and i didnt spec into kill skills for weapon damage and no any DLC items), for at least 2/3rd's of the game
  Destroyer tentacles were getting consistently 1-2 shot and it can still kill level 37 enemies rather easy
  
  If i even dared to do this in BL2 i would be forced to abuse Slag as weapon levels matter, but even then it will hit the ceiling of what it can do meaning if you find gun you like it will be obsolete in 1-2h of gameplay if not faster
  
  
• Enemies are now complete damage sponges, the deeper into the story you get the more spongy they get (SGT, RPG, Angelic Loaders, Bullymongs)
  Game really forces you to not only use the appropriate elemental weakness but also even before UVHM slowly pushing you into using Slag (+100% dmg multipier) as some firefights you get into can be done x3 the speed with slag
  
  Enemies also hit way harder, i had moments where my on level pangolin shield got 2 shot by non electric weapon from bandits with guns from full
  Combined with obnoxious health sponge nature of enemies you can only imagine how bad the combat balancing is

- Story -

• The only other weaker aspect than combat of this game is the story
  Pure evil characters dont need much depth, but Jack is so badly written hes just falls completely flat
  
  Just like most of the cast writing is completely one dimensional, at best game only gives you side objective that wont do anything, just more reward
  
  
• Story is completely straight line, you can start to easily predict what will happen and there is only ONE mission where you can get bad ending - Failing to rescue Roland, which makes you raid a prison to save him
  
  Yes thats the only mission with multiple endings, rest are just choice of delivering item to one of the two npc's from sidequests
  
  
• The final fight is a complete joke compared to BL1, mechanically its a complete downgrade as you can just hug one rock and kill the Warrior...

The game is so boring i had to come back almost 8 years later to finish and i forced myself to do it
First time i went into after finishing BL1 and got bored before meeting Slab King with Gaige

This new playthorugh that i actually finished the game with Axton i was already forcing myself after i entered Eridium Blight..

BL2 as a game has nothing to offer and fails to capture the spirit of the first game

After i finished BL2 i went back to OG BL1 (non enhanced ver) and did the mentioned Brick run and remembered why i loved the first game so much more compared to this slop

This is more of "Mixed Feelings" review than negative
(Cmon valve gives us middle option for reviews already)

I cant fully condemn the game, but i cant praise it as well due to the sad state of it
I will say that as the game currently is it should not cost more than 10Euro instead of the 21Euro price tag without discounts, at this pricing its bordering extortion considering the game is unfinished
Get this only on a heavy discount or alternative stores with cheaper pricing

Fabledom is a city builder with obscene amounts of potential as Grenaa managed to nail quite a few core aspects of these games quite well
Clearly shows that at first this project has seen quite a bit of love that slowly faded during development process before dev stopped working on it, left it in id say 50-70% finished state
From what i could find without joining discord server they moved on to work on a new project
Truly a shame considering the gem this game could have been

UPDATE: 2025 March 20 they actually updated the game
Added UI scaling and new Fairies mechanic to help with logistical horrors this game has
(I have not tested them out, maybe later if ill feel like it or there is more major content update if it happens)

Game really could have been as good as ANNO 1701, a 2006 city building classic that withstood test of time only be soiled by ubislop launcher and released on steam because they are on verge of bankruptcy...

Fabledom is aesthetically pleasing game that requires quite a bit of planning up ahead if you want to reap the best benefits that is dragged down by lackluster management systems that will show their ugly side and few bugs as well as being unfinished

Pawns or well Fablings are to put it bluntly not the brightest with the AI priorities
I have failed quite a few missions because builders would keep bringing resource 1 by 1 to construction from the nearest stockpile when a bit further one was almost full of resources needed

Seems like they give highest priority to nearest things to them, they can completely ignore priority build order and work on some building without it as long its closer to them
Sometimes 2 builder camps will work together towards the same build and sometimes they will not, its so random i couldnt get it to happen consistently, hell sometimes 1 fawn will laze around instead of working in the same builders camp without their status changing into "enjoying free time"

We have basically 0 management tools apart stockpile stock controls, building priorities and fawn assignment to workplace
Workplace assignments are based on direct line to the job site and not travel distance
I had fishery worker that was "green" while having to travel x3 the distance around peninsula while other workers were "orange" because house was placed 2 tiles from the green distance check...

Resource logistics is basically nonexistent
We got Granary, Stockpile and Marketplace and thats it.
They follow the same basic rules of nearest = highest priority and will ignore completely full production buildings
We only can limit what they can store and set it to emptying mode where workers from other stockpiles may come to take resources.
Unless you build multiple market buildings you have no way of having centralized resource hub, also removing fawns from market would delete whatever stock that fawn was responsible for, this is the only resource stockpile building that will actively take from stockpiles/granaries to fill its storage
Creating supply chains is extremely tedious thanks to that and the size the marketplace (5x5)
Due to randomized nature of maps it can influence the city planning negative ways

Game has quite a few aspects that clearly feel unfinished or cut:
- 8th screenshot in steam preview shows interaction menu with other kingdoms
Spy and Declare war are cut from the game as i have not seen them in my last 2 runs where i had embassy built before i even reached out to other rulers
- Last steam preview picture contains Winged Pigs that are in the game but also sheep that are not in the game...
- I have seen some people get cut from the game resources / events to spawn during map generation like Clay that have no use or cut interactions

Negative actions against other kingdoms have 0 repercussions outside the standing loss and whole system seems to be simplified to be pushed as full release and forgotten

Some random events have 0 counterplay, either you pay up or deal with penalty until you can pay up
Dragon one is silly as there is no option to outright kill it because they probably didnt finish it, i had built such a strong fortification that would delete its health bar in 1 volley but it would just retreat..

Its truly a shame to see this game being left in unfinished state
We can only hope devs will come back to this later down the road to finish it but how the industry is acting these days its probably not happening...

Currently during the Free Demo period atrocious performance on AMD GPU systems
Seen people report quite bad performance on 7900XTX cards as well and some RTX 4090 owners also report rather bad performance

As the Demo currently stands cannot recommend preordering the game at all
Save your money and keep a close eye on this game on launch day and only then make decision to buy this or not

And before you even bother saying its a demo, look up what a game demo definition stands for..
Its not a test nor it was listed as one, and game demo should be relatively polished version of a game with limited progression


5800X3D @3.6GHz
6700XT 12GB Driver ver. 24.10.1
48GB RAM @ 3GHz
Game is on Gen4 m.2
Win10

I have:
2-4 fps on FSR2 Native @1440p Window
6-8 fps on FSR2 Quality @1440p Window
5-7 fps on FSR2 Balanced @1440p Window
6-10 fps on FSR2 Performance @1440p Window
8-13 fps on FSR2 Ultra Performance @1440p Window

Doesnt matter if its in menu, settings or ingame
Best ive seen was 38fps during loading screen
Similar performance @4K at well but i didnt bother with 1080p as i usually game @1440p Window

Rest of settings are at:
Quality - High
Texture Filtering - x4
Texture Quality - High
Shadow Quality - High
SSAO - Low
Screen-Space Reflections - Low
Volumetrics - Medium
Effects Quality - High
Details - High

No Artifacting like some 7900XTX users report

Palia is cozy little sandbox multiplayer game that has quite a lot of potential but as it is - very basic experience
Its completely free to play and the only things you can buy are cosmetics, no season pass or premium membership

And its cross-platform as well with cross-save, you can play on switch and hop into your account on PC and other way around and play with PC friends when on console, as long as you both share the same region (EU, NA, Asia and ect)
(This is however a bit problematic aspect of this project)

If you need simple game that you can play on the side Palia fits the spot quite well

You will see Basic used quite a lot in this review because thats what Palia currently is when you look at the current market
Its not a bad or good thing
Its hard to describe really but to keep it simple Palia has quite the spirit but is really lacking
Bones are strong but the muscles are weak..

This is basically what you would get if you took Stardew Valley and similar type of games and turned it into 3D MMO game

We got NPCs with reputation and romance system that have their own backstories (they still honestly need some polishing and tying up loose ends)
We got skilling
We got crafting and building
We got few minigames that are ingame time gated
We got recuring festival and seasonal events
We got material rarity which ofc affect the value of it
We Dont have combat for now

Cosmetics are bit overpriced for what they are
Personally had a hard time finding something i want to buy and community tends to gets annoyed by them as they are steadily released every month forgetting the fact that the game is completely free and they have to make money somehow

Im not saying overpriced cosmetics are good, im not saying them mostly putting effort into them is good, im just saying it could be worse.
There is no predatory monetization which is rare these days, i hope it stays this way

Character customization is relatively basic
Starting clothing is simple and nothing to brag about and you only get preset faces and ect
There is only so much you can do to not look like others but you will end up finding other looking like you after a while

Sadly no ways outside events / referral program to get free cosmetics as the only other option is spending money


Community is overall pretty decent
Its a rare sight to see someone trying to grief you and its quite hard to do it in the first place due to how the game works
Ingame tooltip that i really like is "There is no stupid question", someone will answer your question if they notice it
And while being selfish is not a crime its quite looked down upon (not that there are many ways you can be selfish in the first place)
Dont be a prick and you will be fine

Story is fine, still in its early stages considering how short it is, got few basic puzzles that are not too hard to figure out
I personally hate sliding puzzles but ones i had to do were easy enough i could crack them

Gameplay is basic and so are the other systems
Movement is fine, sometimes it feels lil bit clunky but overall ok.

Skills are somewhat nicely dependent on each other, which is really nice to see
Gives you something to work for and you get rewarded for it at the end
They are not complex however, cooking and fishing are the most complex skills currently

There is Focus system which you fill up by eating and provides double exp, really helps early on to get up to speed with others, there is no level limit so after you reach level 20 atm means you have access to everything

Not too long ago party system got updated to incentivize party gameplay with bonus giving you a low chance for double material gain when you collect the drop, you gain this buff by being within 35m from your party member
All kills, catches and gathered materials will be dropped for you if party member gathers some if you are within this distance
(You will have buff icon appear in your UI)

Sadly party system is still relatively buggy and tend to break.
Party might randomly disappear but if you see buff icon that means you are still in it and buff applies


A very nice design choice is however that apart the Bugs and Hunting animals everything is shared even outside party
Everyone gets their own ores or flowers in same spots, you can even help mine the same rock for others and you both get separately rolled reward for half the work, same applies to cutting trees

If you land at least 1 hit on animal and someone else kills it you both get rewards

We got skills such as Bug Catching, Cooking, Fishing, Foraging, Furniture Making, Gardening, Hunting and Mining

More fleshed out skills are Cooking and Fishing as rest are really basic, Bug Catching and Hunting can however give you plushies to decorate your home.

- Cooking
More interesting skill with ability to make food with your friends if you want to

During Co Op cooking you will use your own materials even if you are helping your friend so your friends can pitch in if you lack something, at the end if you dont fail creating the meal you both get same amount of same quality meal

One of more useful skills because all food restores Focus, some meals provide buff as well however currently limited to fishing which REALLY needs help

The more complex the meal is the more rare or different ingredients it will require but also restores more focus.
When you start cooking a meal timer will start going down, you will have to complete minigames based on processing action you do
My only gripe is that some meals have really short timers and friend i made ingame struggles making them on switch due to lackluster performance of it

- Fishing
Skill that is both relaxing and annoying at the same time due to how minigame of it works
You pick your bait and cast it, if you get a a nibble you wait and when it dives you pull to hook it

Its simple minigame with basic mechanic of fish moving the lure and you need to keep it in the zone while your reel it in, some fishes can use moves like jumping to interrupt you.
You got health bar that you need to not deplete before you reel in the fish, health recovers as long as lure is in the zone.

Now 60% of the cases fish will just pull to side so its easy to handle, but then sometimes they will do most erratic pulls before you can even stabilize
Even mid tier fish can get away from the best rod ingame due to pulling faster outside the zone than zone can move and its completely random.

Sometimes fish will be timid and play nice and sometimes you wont be able to do anything without food buffs and special lures that break
You can only craft one type and rest are reward from weekly activities you unlock at level 10 of the skill.
Some rare fish get so bad that even with buffs you cant do anything about it


Now game is not perfect.
There are a lot of bugs, certain places have holes in the map
Developers are trying to tackle the most problematic issues but due to how game is game would probably need massive rework to fix.

Palia is suffering from lack of content even for sandbox game, this is where cross-play/platform problems poke their ugly head.
Cross-play is double edged sword that gives and takes especially for MMO where if you want to have cross-play/save you have to keep game same for console and pc players..

In this case as per usual it slows down game updates severely, there is usually a patch once a month that also brings bug fixes that may or may not work, i havent really seen them push hotfix outside monthly update unless its severe issue.

That means we sometimes have to live with some feature broken for a month
I dont believe developer team is that bad and cant figure out what broke, as Singularity 6 is not a small company
Their Linked In currently lists 73 employees and currently hiring more

Story updates are SLOW, in 5 months i havent see a single story expansion..

AI is really basic, sometimes bugs bug into ground and ect.

Recommend to try as side game as lack of content and slow updates really drags it down

Update to my current impressions after 49 hours of gameplay in Lesser Zone, Garbage, Wild Island and Cordon

After dealing with absolutely atrocious game design choices and pure unbalanced mess at 49h playtime mark my save got irredeemably corrupted while doing a side quest that branched off MSQ
This seems to be quite common issue currently (launch ver of the game)


Avoid this at all costs, not only this is currently the worst stalker game feature and balance wise but unsurmountable amounts of bugs is atrocious considering the time it took them to birth this abomination.

Lack of almost all core features that made the previous games such a great experience turns this game into Fallout / Farcry with anomalies but actually worse

If you want a proper stalker experience go grab the old games and give it a go if you didnt, and if you did try modpacks if you didnt try any even "soup modpacks" are better experience than whatever the hell is this

For me this game turned into "problem gacha":

One day i had random performance issues
Next day i couldnt even play at all
Then next day it magically works but now AI doesnt react or is friendly
Friendly bloodsucker was a weird experience that later just bum rushed me when AI "woke up" and interaction range was messed up that day..
You get the gist i hope


Steam rating for this game is a joke, it should be around 50% or lower, but community is too hyped up and ignore issues or just straight up coping, quite a few positive reviews listing negative things (Steam where the hell is neutral scoring)

There is quite a bit of talking atm that after certain MSQ your game will just softlock itself or crash non stop, its like they didnt test their game after that point in the story, and i mean the issues with the game will start going down the hill at MACH 10


This game is nothing more of a husk of its former self as series go
Just like the poor people that got caught in the emission and turned into zombies left to wander in pain and agony against their will in the zone until someone puts them out of their misery


They have removed A-Life from steam listing 2-3 weeks before launch and the said ".. A-life 2.0 is still in the game" in their discord, but as any stalker vet can tell its clearly not there.
Their excuse was ofc that its broken and they are working on fixing it
Sure buddy its clearly not A-Lie 2.0 and you have to work on it right now as people only found like 11 lines of code mentioning it in the files...

Game doesnt keep track of squads at all, the second they are outside your perimeter and you wait like a minute and run back to check if they are there, they already are in the backrooms never to be seen again and if you stick around they will do nothing, not even sit by nearby campfire or box and ect...


AI is more lobotomized than the one in SoC
95% of the time they will run towards you not flanking throwing grenades, on rare occasion they might take wider turn but no proper flanking like in older games

AI accuracy is too perfect, im talking about 0 spread on any of their shots.
I happened to see TOZ buckshot shot flying at me over absurd distance packed like it was in a box refusing to spread like mine at all slapping me in 2.5/5 armor + low protection artifact for 10% hp + bleed....

Day or middle of the night, dark tunnel or whatever, they will just beam you with their little SMG's or AKS's over great distances that even sniper rifles dont guarantee hit when in your hands


Enemies spawn around you whatever they want with almost nonexistent cooldown

Fought some snorks in one of story areas before quest took me there
While licking my wounds and reloading weapons another horde came at me
Then after i dealt with those ones ANOTHER wave came
After dealing with those i was about to leave and then bandit squad jumps me
Kill the bandits and climb down into the tunnel with only 1 way out
Another squad of bandits spawn right behind me in the tunnel..

It was most obnoxious experience i had in gaming..

These "events" also prevent enemies that spawned from leaving the area, snorks refused to walk beyond wide open gate and just ran around like headless chickens

Enemies also keep aggro for unlimited time, i had sat in some corner none of AI seen me go there for 10 IRL minutes but aggro didnt go away but they didnt come to me as well, when enemy spawns they will just walk towards you and spot over a mile away, sometimes ignoring walls...


Day and Night cycle is too quick, this is apparently intended design choice as it was confirmed in their discord by QA bot with reply from Mol1t and then they give update notice that they are looking into extending the duration couple days later 🤡


The combat is worse than any of the OG games, they took CoP combat and tightened it up
Bound penetration to a weapon instead of bullets and called it a day
Damage drop over the distance is quite significant and quite noticeable when dealing with mutants at close-medium distance

Flesh on Stalker difficulty took +4 shots over close-medium distance, but only 2 shots while almost hugging it, boars also took only 2 shots when up their bum..

Speaking of...
All enemies are quite tanky but mutants are absurd, dog can survive back leg area close range buchshot from M870 at 50/50 rate

You will stop counting your shots when dealing with poltergeist as its a brick wall that can 90% your health with a tin can and im not even talking about variants of it.
Bloodsuckers need absurd amount of shots to die and usually come in pairs
I had burer stuck behind 2 boxes, he took +10 RGD's and still lived (yes they were gifted upon him when shield was down)

Currently its literally best to just run and hope muties dont catch up and hit despawn range

It also feels almost like most mutants lost their weakspots, bloodsuckers take as many shots to the head as anywhere else, same with controllers

Community already had game rebalance mods that nerf mutant health in less than 24h from launch...

Some mutant damage output is dumb
Some mutants can straight up insta kill you like burer, he can 2 shot you as well if he pushes you down on the ground and does it again, or just tap you 2-3 extra times as each lil nugget arm tap is 20-25% hp gone...


Story is not great as much as i managed to experience it
Usually boils down to pick from 2 options, kill or spare and ect with minimal consequences.
Some parts were just bad and forced specific route down my throat with no alternatives
Garbage questline was dumb, no way to turn it around on one npc at all, enemy of my enemy is my friend didnt apply to writing at all there, just plain bad linear story

I also managed to break sequence of MSQ in garbage somehow that also led me into discovering one of the most dirty things in the game:
Essential NPC's
I ran into two of them during my play (im ignoring pidorovich btw) and they will be fully immortal but shooting them will loose you their faction rep

The beauty of stalker was that NPC's are on same playing field as you, but now we got absurd aimbots and certain side npc's being immortal..


Game doesnt even look that great considering requirements and the current performance
Kingdom Come Deliverance looks amazing to this day and i played that on my old RX480 8GB pushing it to run at 1440p or 4k
Hell ignoring the dated textures, Anomaly with some simple shader looks better than whatever the hell we got atm

Also Emissions ARE PATHETIC, They are not even as violent as CoP one due to lack of the rumble and everything shaking, its just rgb show with thunder, so its more like Clear Sky emission with added thunderstorm which is DOWNGRADE

Weather however does look nice, the random lightning strikes and hitting power poles looks quite satisfying to watch and can catch you off guard when it strike close to you
It can kill you or any unlucky npc as well

Many more eyesore level issues but this is too long already so this is it
Avoid and play OG's over this hollow experience

So Andrew Gowers (and rest of the Gower Brothers) new passion project just like how Runescape was..

Currently as the game stands its quite bad.
It looks good, we have some basic systems but the more you scratch at it you start seeing how basic it is especially when you consider it took them 8 years to develop and release as early access

For example:
Until 2024-11-13 Update the lobby menu didnt have something as basic as Close Game button...
Yes im serious the game came out into early access being practically lacking features like late dev alpha build so you were basically forced to alt f4 if you dared to play in fullscreen

I will give them few things before i start ripping on them however:
- They keep patching and addressing community concerns as since release there were almost daily patches with some sort of feature that community found problematic
- They know that if they want this project to succeed they have to put a lot of work consistently now, some early access titles could learn from them if anything
- The subscription currently is quite cheap thanks to them funding this from their own pockets

Now.. Where to even begin..

Character creator:
- UI/UX is decently made, simple to use however customization selection is severely lacking but kinda expected i guess

Poor female characters.. No matter what you do you look like +40y old woman
You are supposed to be young recruit not a single mother with midlife crisis....

Also why in 2024 we cant just have colour slider and have to deal with preset selection of colors....

- Later down the story you will be forced to select a class that is a permanent choice, no trying it out or anything so if you dont like the current class later down the road too bad, you either make new char and regrind those stats and overall loose time or just drop the game...
This archaic system needs to die, especially in this type of progression game where you want to focus on a single account if anything i wish we had similar class system like FF14

Combat:
While basic doesnt mean its bad, however there are severe balancing issues and some bad aspects to the current system

- Extremely bad aspect of combat is that its full commit, the second either you or monster engage in it, its a death match unless you use "Immunity" spell that takes quite a bit to cast, there were cases there my combat skill leveled up naturally aggressive enemy and i almost died while trying to finish casting the spell to leave combat because he kept rolling damage in 15-20+ range with each hit

Immunity spell itself will only last for the room you cast it in, even if you are on the other side of the room by the exit combat wont disengage without the spell or one of you dying

- Combat rolls are random so you can just get screwed by rng itself into a loosing battle
Currently death has no penalties, and hopefully wont have until they iron out the issues

- Ranged weapons have limited shots 3-4 to act as a tool to turn combat onto your favour, however this doesnt apply enemies with ranged attacks, they just dont have a limit of shots and will gladly rip you a new one while you slowly crawl towards them..

- Armor feels pointless as some enemies will rip into you even if you spooned 3/5 Epic 4* armor pieces that are as good as purple gear 20 levels later.

- Weakness seems to not do anything particular as long as enemy is not immune to that damage type
I had tried to kill enemies using on level weapons with 60% element they are weak to and ive hit almost same as same rarity and bit lower level "neutral element to them" weapon

- The healing potions are utterly useless due to how long they take to consume, you try to heal and enemy undoes your healing potion with 2 attacks while you chug the bloody thing..
There are few rare cases where they might save you, but outside boss fights they are borderline useless especially at lower combat skill levels

The "Chapter" content system:
- As it currently stands its not good, there is lack of fleshed out content like quests in current 4 chapters we got and developer seems keen on rushing out chapter 5 without even bothering to flesh out the current chapters more

We get main story quest that spread through all the chapters as main driving force but only get 2-3 side quests that are usually locked by regional skill requirement and are region contained

- Yes, every single chapter region boasts its own skills, that includes combat as well which irks majority of people currently.
They can have dependencies on previous regions or the next regions resources to a degree as to give us reason to go back

As it is currently its quite badly implemented but maybe the system itself is just outright bad and the reason nobody wanted to try it apart CubeWorld which launch was just a tragedy and developed is recreating the game again due to how badly it "flopped"

Skilling:
This is a weird one

- Unlike combat skilling is in even worse spot, there is no cross chapter skilling, meaning you cant train fishing or woodcutting outside the regions they were introduced and ect because for some dumb reason each region will have its own variation of them..

Each skill has a level cap of 500

We go from Guard in chapter 1 "Hopeport" to Scout in chapter 2 "Hopeforest", then as stupid as it sounds Minefighter in chapter 3 "Mine of Mantuban" and Watchperson in chapter 4 "Crenopolis"
Each give health and combat bonuses in their respected region, so you can guess developmental mess they are digging themselves into..

- Some skills depend on each other while some not really

Alchemist / Cooking might want some herb from other region for some new recipe that depends on that regions gathering skill, while some just dont...

- Every skill has obnoxious exp required jump after you reach level 20, im talking about x3 required exp jump, leaving some skills quite hard to level until you reach next gatherable in 3-5 levels..
The jump is around 50% of the exp required to reach level 20 for level 21 where it slowly creeps small amounts again
Worst part is that there might be more severe jumps like that down the road, remember if we got one at level 20 and we got 500 levels to go it can only get worse...

- Speaking of the level unlocks, they are nothing more than just different model / shade of the lower tiers, there are not that many unique unlocks before you hit copy-paste city, basically grinds for the sake of grinding and nothing more.

Its just not satisfying to work weeks on a skill to just unlock better herb / crop that is practially the same, you can easily infinitely scale it as it currently stand which makes it worthless for a game that aims for "number go up, get new content unlock" game

- Some skills got ingredients locked by quite high skilling requirements early....
Alchemist 10 unlocks "Strenght Tempestae" potion that requires level 41 gathering for one of the ingredients.
For such an early unlock thats absurd
There are quite a lot of filler potions for each region like +Region XP potions

Cooking 18 "Appetizing Sausage and Mash" requires 35 gathering for "tier 2" potato
Buying gatherable ingredients usually leads into monetary loss and whole point of cooking is to generate money....

Seems like little attention was paid when introducing them.

Visuals and Sounds and Writing:

Simple sounds, decent ambient music that hopefully gets expanded more

Visuals are great and you can tell that some models like trees were made by someone who cares for detail

Writing is good, sometimes it shines but sometimes its on weaker side, filled with some good british grade humor, sadly the npc reactions are timid so some of the jokes dont really work out and do need some work
Some dialogue doesnt feel impactful really, and give a feeling you are interacting with disinterested party

Gower Brothers i really wish the game success, but Andrew dont try too hard to not be Runescape, artists tend to create things in certain style after all

Stalker Call of Pripyat or CoP

Honestly there is a bit of the new lore about the zone however nothing too significant, like post SoC Monolith and what happened to them after the "True Ending" and i would have told to skip it

However this game is now important because of upcoming Heart of Chernobyl.
This game introduced character named Strider and sheds some light about him - The same one that appears in the "Strider Trailer" for HoC

This game also gives rather interesting bit of lore about Duty faction and its origins which makes the whole faction look like clowns
This game is approved by #Freedom

Also whoever was responsible for EN VA script for the opening needs to be fed to bloodsuckers because he messed up almost every date in the intro

Story:

You play as Major Degtyarev, agent of SBU (basically FBI equivalent for ukraine)
Born in Pripyat, and forced to evacuate during the first disaster while being a kid, after the second disaster returning back to the zone as regular stalker.
Due to having lots of experience and skills in the zone Degtyarev has been recruited by SBU as undercover agent
Now sent on a mission to discover the reason why airborne assault force which was part of "Operation Fairway" headed to CNPP has gone missing and reason why operation itself was a failure loosing communication with the HQ left to do independent investigation

Game features ending similar to Fallout New Vegas where your choices during the gameplay affect the ending cinematic
Im not too sure but i think some "endings" have 3 outcomes: Good , Neutral and Bad

However the story is the shortest of the whole trilogy as it took me only 35h to beat it while doing every sidequest and quite a lot of artifact hunting / exploring (i raked whole Jupiter plant)

The sidequests writing is more down to earth feeling like Skadovsk mechanic or Vano storyline so its pretty nice change

Gameplay:

Honestly probably the best one in the series for the gameplay
Melding good features from SoC and CS, however some changes are a bit questionable design wise

-- The Good --

UI upgrade from Clear Sky is really welcome one however we lost the indicator bar of how badly irradiated we are

Game got rid of the stupid Warfare mode from Clear Sky but kept the good things like upgrade / repair system but also expanded more on it and made it that now you have to unlock certain upgrades by getting tools for the mechanics and some get specialized upgrade unlocked when you give them all 3 sets like Exosuit Sprint
Calm down there are enough tools in the game for both mechanics that ask for them

The Chimera and probably the most annoying mutant ingame Burer finally are officially in the game

Oasis puzzle bit is pretty nice as you have to figure out what the hell is happening and once you find the hint its a simple and quick puzzle with no hand holding

This game is the first one in the series that you can do last story mission but stay playing in Sandbox mode, and later finish the game as devs accounted for it giving option via npc

Multiple ways to approach some of the situations
You can either do the good ol bullet issue solving or a peaceful solution

-- The Neutral --

Chimeras are somewhat super allergic to explosives which i found to be a bit disappointing them dying to 1 grenade

Achievement system:
A welcome feature as your actions will unlock them
They come with positives but also negatives
Trader price drops / increases, artifact respawn rates and whatever and will affect the ending cards
However some are super easy to miss from the start of the game or game just screws you out from them
For example Pripyat 1 bound achievements that affect the story, if some characters die in that section of the game you will get the "bad ending" slide for the character and my god i had to restart and run infront of the whole team because the AI just die so easy (even with achievement that makes their survivability better) as to my horror Zulu kept getting 1 shot by the first snork you encounter

Svarog artifact detector:
Direct upgrade to Veles detector in functionality allowing you to see the anomalies on it comes with a downside of the artifact indicator size being artifact grade dependent.
More rarer artifacts will be a bigger blimp, while more common ones are A ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ PIXEL that gets hidden by anomaly indicators, multiple times i have found artifacts that were not on the indicator screen and i cant put my finger on it if its just a bug or what and this made me to carry Veles on me all the time as backup

Also while Svarog can detect artifacts not known to science there are only story ones that will be detectable and they havent expanded on this feature which is a shame

-- The Bad --

Some weapons with Grenade launchers which are actually useful in this game to deal with new threats AGAIN dont have the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sight like in Clear Sky even when you can clearly see them on the launcher itself modeled

You think Clear Sky Bloodsucker change was bad? Think again!
While they reverted them back to us being able to damage them while they are cloaked their camouflage ability got overbuffed and now they are perfectly invisible until certain distance and with few issues i found with combat inconsistencies in this game they are almost as annoying to deal as Burers while being more common
Bloodsuckers are now been moved from highly aggressive threat to a cheap "surprise" if you fail to see them from the distance that is more annoying than scary
Reveal distance being further wouldnt make them as annoying as its hard to react to them sometimes if there is no grass/water to give them away better than sound

The Burers are just absolute waste of bullets because they are almost as tanky as Pseudogiant being way more dangerous due to sharing same attack style as Poltergeist while also having a shield ability and trying to rip the weapon out of your hands and drain stamina
Whatever i ran into burer i just started to eat meds like candy and stab their ugly mugs with a knife to save my time and ammo however their stupid shield also protects them from melee attacks..

No matter how much i bullied the Bandits there were no overall consequences, even CS did it better..
Only way to get some bandits to be hostile is to get achievement for finding every artifact or well shoot them first

Only 3 Areas:
Zaton, Jupiter and Pripyat (the Residential part of it)
They are somewhat lacking in things to do and feel empty sometimes due to lack of mutant spawn density, Pripyat is suffering the worst from this as i have not even seen a single Monolith patrol at all
This leads into relatively short game and i wish we have gotten the Palace of Culture Pripyat from SoC as well as i wanted to see the aftermath of Operation Fairway and ect

90% of stashes are now preset items in the open field.

Combat:

This is one big mixed bag of good and bad, miles ahead of CS one but not as consistent as SoC
Weapons got reverted to SoC levels but with upgrades they are better

Nade spam is now toned down but still rather accurate

However inconsistencies is what hurts this game in combat
Sometimes you can 1 shot a dog with a buckshot to the head but then the next dog might take 3 or 4 shots, even broad side shots
And this is spread with every enemy in the game, making Bloodsuckers and Burers super obnoxious
Armored bandits can die to one shot from spas buckshot but regular jacket one might refuse to die to 3 shots at the same distance

NATO weapons are way better right off the bat making Warsaw pact weapons almost a joke which is shame

Artifacts:
Copy Paste from CS nothing special
At least they now respawn but sadly only in certain anomalies only
Wish there was more to them as its basic compared to SoC

Id say try it if you finished SoC

Stalker Clear Sky is the second game in the series and is a prequel to Shadow of Chernobyl (SoC)

Honestly this game is epitome of 1 step forward and 2 steps back.
Its safe to say that story wise this game brings so little its safe to actually skip it and read summary somewhere like wiki
As you dont really learn anything new about zone itself

Game introduces quite a few new mechanics that are welcome but at the same time downgrades some aspects of the previous game and some gameplay design choices left me flabbergasted and pissed off

Finished the game with starter AK-74, Scar's VSS and TOZ-34 and Fora-12 pistol that i later swapped for Kora that came with some modifications completely ignoring and not joining any faction

No mods or anything apart changing voice acting to russian while keeping the english text (Steam version needs to unpack the game files and game localization changes)

-- Story --

Set before the events of SoC
You play as Scar

A mercenary out in the swamps escorting some eggheads (Scientists) on some expedition suddenly getting caught in unpredicted emission
You somehow survive the emission which usually kills anyone outside and get saved by the faction called Clear Sky before psydogs dig in on you
Group that seeks co existence with the zone as they believe zone is a living being and the emission that caught you outside was caused by something pissing it off due to it being way stronger than usual ones

Whole premise of the story is you helping Clear Sky figuring in out who pissed off the zone, how they did it and preventing them from doing it again because next super emission might wipe out all life in the zone

-- Gameplay --

Game introduces bunch of new mechanics that are welcome but also some that are just bad or bland or outright dumb

The Good:

- Few new anomaly types including brand new Psy field anomaly

- New areas like Red Forest that is actual forest with red leaves and not a Duga Radar called red forest like in SoC

- Small bundle of new weapons, including my all time favorite: TOZ-34 which was cut from the last game

- Gear repair and upgrade systems, now not only we can repair the weapons we like but also modify them.
Some more than others, including branching paths.
However some specific upgrades require you to find blueprints and bring them to specific technicians to unlock them.
Its all fun and games until you during the story ruin the factions reputation and find out the technician that can upgrade your armor is now hostile and you cant do anything about it or if you cant find that pesky blueprint but you already went the path in weapon / armor upgrades
Honestly i didnt find too many of them and you in a way can completely ignore them unless you want some specific setup

- Artifact hunting now requires Detector, a device that help you find the artifacts in anomaly fields
There are 3 tiers of them. the better the detector the better artifacts you could find.

- Weapons are a bit more accurate with all weapons across the board getting stat increases compared to SoC

- The new inventory layout which is while not a huge upgrade its not as basic as the previous game (not that being basic was bad)

The Neutral:

- Actual emission happening. I do love seeing them happen but honestly feels like the screen effects are bugged or whatever, you get all this world light change and it blacks out your screen for a second and turns into normal lighting until timer is like at 5 ingame minutes left where some other effects play

Sometimes you get hit by emission and it sit out, move to other map and get hit by another one...
They give you time to hide but instead of actual seconds irl you get ingame clock minutes.
The only part of emission that kills you is when the timer hits 0 otherwise you can just run around in before timer runs out
Did plenty of running from far edge of Dark Valley to Agroprom with 30 second timer for emissions

- Stamina bar is now at other side of the screen and game doesnt even explain that its stamina bar, i genuinely was thinking it was Psy health due to me having played Anomaly and it being above the geiger counter

- New rads indicator is good and bad and i cant tell if its due to bug so it goes here.
I like seeing how many rads i take but at same time sometimes geiger ticking is not playing and you get hella irradiated without any notification, honestly died few times to this because didnt notice geiger rad bar being full and that i stood in radiation pocked that didnt give screen effect

- Artifacts respawning but only in set locations?
As far ive read on it quite a few people called it a bug and they were supposed to respawn but they just dont

- Some building changes like Agroprom walls.
This is a prequel to SoC, that means you dont just remove some of the walls because this is supposed to be before and not after. Only reason this is neutral because i like the swamp part leading to yantar more than the SoC one.

The Bad:

- Removal of pistol ironsights...
It now just zooms in little more than default holding while rest of the weapons have their ironsights, sure they are bulky and ugly looking but changing aiming style for one weapon type is stupid and ruins immersion

- The PDA change or whatever is actually left after lobotomizing one worse than SoC one by a mile
You lost quite a lot of things on it including encyclopedia which while not super useful would been a nice to have while encountering the new anomalies, as i found new chemical anomaly and was super confused about it because it looks weird

No new personal notes is a missed opportunity to expand already lacking story with some sniplets of whats happening

- Whole stupid faction war system.
Im up for experimenting a bit with new game systems but this is too much.
Not only you can just ignore it, it also ruined the element of surprise encounters of the game

Now every single group of enemies unless its story mission spawn are marked on the map, you can see every group from the pda map even in other zones
Whole map is practically unpopulated as there are no roaming mutants and only roaming done on preset path to specific points in the map and if its not story location you can walk completely safe apart anomalies
It completely killed the immersion

With exception of Red Forest - there are few "wild" scripted spawns that reappear sometimes and are not marked

Actually managed to kill myself more in anomalies because of it as if i had to go anywhere i would shut down my brain and just run towards the direction i need to go without looking at my screen because i dont need to be on the lookout all the time

Its also stupid as hell when you clear the area sometime there is no delay and new pack of enemies spawns on it
Best example is Cordon, the house and hillcamp at other side of the Loner farm base usually yielded 3-4 missions in a row for me of just clearing mutants

The troglodyte:

The final fight forcing weapon on you, my god i hope dev that decided its good idea catches a bullet
The initial swap into EM1 is fine and kinda expected as its main weapon you have to use
However going trough portal to get angle on target forcibly changes weapon into FT200, its fun when you run full AP AK with 0 nato rounds, get teleported with enemies already spraying your ass and you have to swap into you main gun via inventory.
Died so many times to this because it happens at every portal entry i lost some of my hairline

-- Combat --

Honestly its almost same as SoC but with the new "glancing" mechanic that makes it worse than SoC by a mile

I had bandits live after point blank buckshot to the face and just kill me, but then next time some pellets hitting their head instakills them

- Shotgun slugs completely useless, after certain distance they just vaporize in the air with a flash
Its bad with TOZ-34 but Spas and Chaser have even less range

- Enemies are more reluctant to leave their stupid points to rush you and kobe grenades at you

Stalker Shadow of Chernobyl or SoC

The first entry to the Stalker series and the most important one lore wise

Set in alternative timeline where there was second catastrophe in Chernobyl Exclusion Zone or as game implies - "The Zone" in 2006 due to some "shenanigans" that you uncover during the gameplay which turned the area into territory full of anomalous phenomena and twisted the local wildlife into "mutants" in order to adapt to new living conditions

To be frank its crucial game to have better understanding of the Zone especially for the people that looking forward for the Stalker 2 HoC

Some gatekeepers will say you need to play whole trilogy, but i say ignore them and at least play this game.
As you get a lot of explanations of what zone truly is in this game.

Also to answer the elephant in the room question:
Can i just jump blindly into Stalker Anomaly / its mods and ignore the OG games?
(Community made standalone mod that glues all 3 games into one and turns it into survival shooter with updated xray engine fork to support 64bit instructions called Monolith engine)

Stalker Anomaly picks up after the trilogy events happened so you would only know outcome of some events that you play through in the trilogy but not really the real explanations and its rather low in details for the puzzle what zone is.
If you dont care about understanding what zone is go ahead and just do it.
If you want deeper understanding at least try to play this game.

Finished this game for 3 endings without any mods / overhauls apart getting russian voice pack to override english ones because i understand some russian and prefer it this way

Now back to SoC:

The game that truly was ahead of its time with the concept but severely held down by something.
Im not sure if it was due to dev lacking the skills for the rpg shooter game due to them making mostly RTS games prior to this game, the funding or the technology of the time
Then again the first Witcher game released the same year so im more leaning towards inexperience

For first timers jumping into the game this will be confusing experience and combat is rather dated even by 2007 standards so prepare for "jank"
But this game doesnt play as your generic RPG's even from today.
That stalker npc you helped out defend himself from bandits might die in some shootout or mutant herd later on and all you will be able to find is hes corpse this also includes some of the quest npcs that are more in the open

The game world doesnt turn around you which is what makes this game a hidden gem of its time.
Hell i havent seen other modern game that does this.
There will be something happening all the time without you being there, so there are no "eternal battles" like in some rpgs where if you show up suddenly problem fixes itself.
If there is a shootout whoever side was more accurate and does less mistakes and gets lucky most likely will win the encounter without you even being there, it will sort itself out one way or another without you
(I saw loner chad being last of hes squad just gun down 4 bandits with automatic guns alone and live)

Combat:

Combat is one of the core aspects of the game, like it or not you will end up in a shootout, some you cant ignore.

Combat boils down to just trying to hit the headshots, because difficulty settings just change how much health enemies have (they are rather bullet spongy) and head is the most effective way to kill humanoid enemies so honestly difficulty setting is rather useless be it Novice or Master

However its not that easy to hit heads due to gunplay being really bad, in a way this forces you to take risk and close in distance where your bullet spread is better until you get your hands on more accurate weapons, but even then sometimes it boils down how many bullets you can send your enemies way and hoping they hit due to enemy placement in specific encounters
But honestly its manageable once you get used to it and you understand the distances your weapons are effective at and the game tends to throw supplies in your face if you take a minute and loot the bodies

Cover use in combat is a must because if you wont take it your enemies will to make your life harder and they will gun you down really fast if you are caught in the open. You are not special, just another stalker that dies like others.
You gear and choices will lead to encounters conclusion.

AI NPC's:

The AI is somewhat smart and will try to flank / overrun you so early game shootouts are the most engaging due to you lacking the weapons to help you to deal with them more effectively.
I got blasted to heaven by a bandit with shotgun behind the corner few times because i was not careful.

But at same time AI doesnt try to avoid anomalies so sometimes you can see squad of patrolling enemies / allies / mutants casually walking into their deaths or just walk slowly while being shot by you towards you.
Hell i have massacred whole military outpost using cover and silenced ppm because they just walked towards me slowly but didnt react to me shooting them (honestly a waste of time but i enjoyed doing it due to satisfaction at the end of it)

Some animals will run around before charging at you, some will just charge at you.
You can avoid some of the mutant encounters by just sneaking and keeping noise low.

There are some encounters you will have to learn to just run away from / ignore especially if one "funny" bug happens

Artifacts:

Game early on teaches you about the artifacts, some are not as useful as others however they are a game changer.
For example they allow you to have infinite sprint which really helps traversing maps that you will be doing missions in to make money.

They have their downsides as well you its left for you to find you own set that you like and balance them out
One warning however - artifacts while abundant in some maps do not respawn

Story:

Now the story telling of this game is not a generic lore dump, its honestly not super deep but you get bits and pieces during the gameplay and story missions, sometimes you get some sniplet that can be useful from bodies of stalkers that will be logged in your pda but also quite a good chunk of environmental storytelling but its left for you to assemble the puzzle.
So if you find locked door that has stuff behind it maybe its time to check your pda if you picked up some clue

You play as "Marked One" with your main goal set from the get go. To kill Strelok.
This being your only lead and suffering from amnesia you depart on the journey to find him

Game has 7 endings, that are reflected by your actions however only two are "True Endings" and only one of them is "Lore Accurate Ending" due to other games in the series.
Each ending is accompanied by a short cinematic, there will be few story cinematics but they are generally used sparingly.

Visuals:

Visually outdoors is nothing special and honestly some areas look like a badly receding hairline (Im looking at you Yantar) with not much to them.
Story locations however are set with quite good atmosphere to keep you on your toes, sometimes it truly feels like survival horror game and are populated with objects and enemies.
Devs seemingly concentrated more on the indoor locations than the outdoors.

Now surprisingly this game for me ran without any problems.
For the game this old running on windows 10 normally you run into issues but i only crashed once.
I have encountered a "funny" bug that affects enemy spawns and sometimes game either endlessly spawn encounters from one point or the initial encounter number of enemies get doubled / tripled.
Its all fun and games until you get rushed by 20-30 dogs in Rostok (truly a Duty moment)

My only gripe with the game is that you cant repair gear.

PS.
Duty stinks #Freedom

Developer is a clown and should not be trusted

Update:
Airship is deleting steam forum comments that are negative or calling them out
Clearly trying to sweep a problem under a rug

Anyways because AS cant put in protection for founder pack items you can save edit them in.
If i cant get my money back, then everyone will know how to get the exclusive items.

If you want to get them just looking up Wayfinder Save Editor on reddit
Thread creator should be "3nvy9"
It will have a link to updated github repository for the tool to do it

Sincerely,
Exalted Founder that got Scammed


The review:

We were promised MORPG
(Yes MORPG not MMORPG as their single room couldnt handle more than 50 players really so)
That would be somewhat similar to C9 (Continent of the Ninth Seal) just to name one with having safezones/lobby and open world with enemies but also mostly randomly generated dungeons for content with miniboses at the end of them.
Basically like many people compared it to: Warframe the High Fantasy Version with a bit better open world sections

Hell launch itself was a mess and their incompetence kinda showed how they kept failing over and over to fix the server capacity and stability issues, its like they never truly stress tested the game with more than 500 people online or something

After the launch mess solved itself by most people loosing the interest the updates started to slow down and settled with ~1-2months on average between them
Crucial game big fixes that bricked some people from playing were not even pushed really and you had to wait for the patch day...

Should have not ignored this red flag honestly..
But devs sounded promising and showed update teasers and ect, i guess even caucious consumers are quite gullible after all in the end of the day

Month after month they kept failing to deliver promises made on the roadmap, with delays left and right to point roadmap was pointless and turned more into "to do" list
The updates slowly started coming out more and more scarce and playerbase numbers dwindled slowly into basically nonexistent

After failing to meet the roadmap goal of early 2024 F2P release as well as other goals they didnt really said much outside they are working on it and content updates game severely lacked

Players were kinda annoyed with the devs for the update speed, and it was easy to spark conversation and bring official discord server chat back to life for few hours if you mentioned how annoying the lack of communication and content was

Servers even with probably average player number being around 1-2k including the console bros had some instability and their solution to it was to limit player inventory capacity.

But that just showed how bad their whole storage system was and the fact you couldnt sell items in bulk.
There was a limit how many items game would display for you in your inventory, so you could never see your full inventory and you couldnt tell how many items you actually had there...

You had to sell items one by one as well and it was a nightmare at which point i dropped the game as i had ~700-1.2k items in my inventory, selling one took around 10 seconds on average so yeah....

We got bigger updates every month or so until the last big update that dropped on early February, then there was complete silence from the devs with basically no updates even on the state of the game really outside them trying to get hold of publishing rights after whole deal with Digital Extremes (DE for Short) deal went bad and failing to find anyone else interested in publishing this mess.
(Their terms were probably pretty bad unless they didnt even consider bottom of the barrel publishers like Nexon and ect or the project was already dead and they were trying to kick the dead horse back to life)

So after 2 months since the last update they come out randomly saying there will be Major changes but dont really tell community in what way as they finally getting their hands on publishing rights and pulling the game from sale for now.

Quite a few people expected to finally get constant content updates and or finally coming out as F2P with bit more MTX to boost the dying breed this games population was since the start of 2024 and ect..

Month passes and they drop that they are stopping development of the game as MORPG and turning this into Peer-to-Peer hosted game Co Op capable Singleplayer game
Devs didnt even really considered a lobby search function until community asked for it.

There was not a single word in the announcement what will happen with founder pack content as people bought it to support the game and get some exclusivity to flex on the F2P crowd in the long run as it was expected they will follow the roadmap..
You are supposed to tell the people who dished out money worth two AAA titles what happens on day 1 of such announcement which they didnt...

Community managers had quite a stressful week trying to damage control while discord server seen the most activity since the launch day....

Lets just say people werent happy, especially founder pack owners considering the top pack was 130 Euro

Feeling scammed the player outrage started, followed by massive wave of refunds, but due to DE washing their hands off this project while being publisher this ended up with mixed success

AS started blaming DE for it WHILE there was still a window before publisher rights were moved, said they were working with steam for a solution but as far as im aware no more info on whole situation was given
They started funneling all refund talks into one thread under player help as if to silence the "bad blood" in general chat

My guess now is that they are trying to pull off the "glow up" of No Mans Sky success story, but for all i can see i doubt they can and long term support for this game is now questionable as they showed being incapable of consistent content updates and following up the roadmap they set up, let alone fixing major bugs quickly...
Or they are trying to avoid some legal problems and this was a planned out scam since the day 1 and reason why DE bailed out and closed their whole publishing department for the other games

For all we know they might create a barebones game after selling some copies once they open the changed game for sale and after bit of time bail with the money later down the road.

There is part of community that is happy with the changes, but sounds like they are just coping and ignoring the elephant in the room, happy even with little handout after getting railed from behind, then again some of them probably consider 130Euro / 150$ to be chump change and dont care

I dont think ill get my money back considering i have Exalted Founder myself as their test server announced at 2024-05-31 which includes info what founders are getting looks pathetic

Hopefully if there will be Class Action done against them in EU i dont miss it because im joining it for sure..