God I miss this game so much. I had so much fun and met so many great people, many of which I am still friends with to this day... And that's all despite how woefully bad the game itself actually is. It is a genuine case study in bad game design for a million different reasons, but I would be willing (and was for thousands of hours) to look past them all if it weren't for these two salient issues;

-- The game is dead.

Excluding a few Russian servers, the servers are home only to a few lost ghosts aimlessly drifting around, repeating their last few actions. Some stand like stoic watchmen guarding canyon bases nobody will attack. If they speak, it is only in past-tense, of people long since gone, or of times long since transpired. They're hollow shadows, sustained by memberberries that have long since withered into raisins.

-- The developers cannot bring it back.

You'd think this is one of those "the developers killed the game by doing X" type of scenarios, but it isn't. Yes they made a number of questionable changes that certainly did impact player sentiment, (hello RPGs and Testing Grounds), but it's really a matter of developer competence. For one, the game doesn't really know what it is trying to be. It advertises itself to be a survival STALKER type game with harsh PvE, artifacts and factions, but the PvE is just a brief EXP treadmill serving to gatekeep new gear, the artifacts are entirely irrelevant and your faction choice comes down to whether you want to always win or always lose in every PvP engagement. And don't think that you can avoid joining a faction. You can, but you're cutting yourself off from the entirety of the mid-to-late level content.

Not only is there uncertainty to the direction of the game, but the developers themselves seem incapable of actually making anything themselves. The bulk of the game assets come from epic store asset packs 1.[www.fab.com] 2.[www.fab.com] 3.[www.fab.com], 4.[www.fab.com] including an entire prefab portion of one of the main player hubs. This is true not only for old content but new as well. Overall game polish is in the absolute dumpster, with large swathes of the world map being entirely devoid of anything (literally just bushes and trees), and other parts just having no reason to ever go to beyond a single quest. Localization as a whole is abysmal. Microtransactions and predatory MTX is rife, with certain store-only items being basically mandatory for game-progression (class change certs and weapon repair kits). The early game player experience is brutal for the uninformed, blatant hacking is everywhere, there is no incentive to join the weaker faction so PvP quickly dries up as everyone just piles into the winning team, entire skill systems may as well not exist (mining) or are too hard to level legitimately (repair). Endgame PvP viability requires being permanently online or RMTing (grinding heal stims, V4 chips, foothills, clan dailies). So, so much more..

As a whole;
- The lack of polish in almost every area of the game implies the developers don't really care.
- The lack of general direction and cohesion implies the developers aren't intelligent or creative enough to envision one.
- And the overuse of asset packs and prefabs implies the developers aren't technically capable of making fresh content themselves.

So even if they did care, they don't know what to do, and if they did know what to do, they wouldn't have the technical know-how to actually do it.

That is why I believe the game will never be able to improve. They captured lightning in a bottle when they cobbled together the first early access builds. Something that, while very scuffed, was ultimately a fun time with friends which then blossomed into a fun time with a community. If you have a group of friends willing to try out some trash, by all means, give it a try. Just take it at face value, and don't fool yourself into believing it will ever get better, like I foolishly did.

good

ts suck booty