Even a decade and a half later in a new engine, a specific bit of jank still abides.
I don’t use YouTube much, but back in 2010 I posted a clip called Radiation Side Effects in STALKER. It’s 30 seconds of footage I recorded while playing Stalker: Call of Pripyat, and not to brag, but over the past 14 years it’s gotten over 6,000 views. How am I not making mad bank as an influencer?
In the video I follow a fellow Stalker who is walking a bit weirdly (because his head is on backwards) to a bunkbed, where he clips through it, lies down, sinks to the floor, and then levitates, in the supine position, to hover a few inches above the mattress.
Look, it was a Stalker game. You’re gonna get jank like a guy floating above the bed he’s supposed to be sleeping on.
This week I began playing Stalker 2, fully expecting the jank to continue even though it’s a decade and a half later and it’s a whole new game engine. And I wasn’t disappointed! Even better, the first legitimate piece of jank I ran into in Stalker 2 was almost that same jank from Call of Pripyat I saw back in 2010.
In an early mission I was sent to locate a missing Stalker, and I found him wounded in a house, lying on a bed. At least he was lying on a bed for the first few moments. As soon as I started interacting with him, whoops! He began levitating. Years may have passed, but in the Zone, nothing really changes. His head wasn’t on the wrong way, but I guess you can’t have everything.
Here’s a clip of both bits of jank for you to compare:
That’s not the only bit of jank I’ve seen in GSC Game World’s new FPS. As Joshua pointed out in his Stalker 2 review, there are “bugs aplenty.” I killed a guy only to see his body hang stiffly in the air before going completely transparent (except for his mask). I keep finding injured Stalkers embedded halfway into the ground, which I suppose could be due to an anomaly but is more likely another goofy glitch.
There are issues with the UI, too. Quest markers straight up don’t work sometimes. I routinely lose my HUD completely and have to reload a save to get it back. Sometimes these little bugs make me chuckle, sometimes they make me sigh.
And quite frankly, sometimes they’re irritating as hell. Early on I was on a mission to find an artifact, and I used my detector and bolts to pinpoint its location in the anomaly-strewn field. But I couldn’t find it. I wandered more, searching, scanning, listening to beeps and boops, and always winding up in the same spot but with no artifact. I died a few times searching, once by stepping into the anomalies too many times, once by wandering too far afield and getting killed by a distant gunman, but even reloading my save didn’t make the anomaly appear. Finally I had to reload a much older save, re-accept the entire mission, and this time the artifact popped out the moment I reached it.
That kinda jank isn’t so heartwarming. That was about an hour of wasted time.
But, same as with the original Stalker games when some malfunction caused me to lose progress, I just can’t stay mad. All it takes for me to forgive Stalker 2 is to see a guy slowly levitate off his bed. It’s good to be back in the Zone.
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