Many new Stalker mods like Dead Air and Misery are adding countless new features to their mods, but are forgetting about stability and gameplay. Lost Alpha DC has a good mix of gameplay and features. Some parts are very hard, but it is rewarding to play when you get past X-18 and are on to Yantar. The alpha version of this map is huge and worth exploring. The underground areas are part of the main map, and are massive to boot. Dead City is another map with massive areas to explore. The passage to Army Warehouses is a bridge over a river and it can be explored underneath. I hope Stalker 2 has such massive areas. 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. 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. As long as the loading is smooth. Many Stalker mods suffer from stuttering.
This is due to AI loading in when you approach them. This needs to be smoothed out to avoid such micro-stuttering events. The same with loading terrain and objects. Dynamically load and unload parts of the map on a separate thread and it can handle it flawlessly. Trickier to render distant landscape but you could probably do the same but a lower quality for further away. This is why having a game that is multithreaded would really help if you had a large world with no loading screens. 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. That would work perfectly for an in-depth simulation of a living breathing zone. That is if the developers want to include a working A-Life simulation. That is what players will expect from a new Stalker game. This is what can make or break Stalker 2. One more consideration is making important NPC characters invincible, or at least some of them. It is very annoying when they are killed and the player has to start again. So protect them somehow.
Stalker Dead Air has this problem. Mutants in Yanov can get into the Yanov railway station and kill the Barkeep, then the player cannot use the trader. That is ridiculous. Make it a proper safezone. Sure, have enemies hanging around outside, but the inside should be a safezone. That would make sense. 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. So that is very strange indeed. But I guess, this is a gameplay consideration, to avoid the player becoming bored in a map with nothing to fight. But it is not just fighting, there are also faction considerations. 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. With no infighting. And this is in vanilla Call of Pripyat. Pretty good I think, would have been great if they had expanded on the faction wars like in Clear Sky. That worked pretty well, the player was able to see the strength of the Clear Sky faction compared to the Renegade faction in the swamps.
Will a Stalker game made in 2021 have a lot of enemies in each fight? Stalker Soup had a fight where you had to take on 30 Pseudogiants in one go, and you have to kill off ALL of them. That is impressive. Объединенный пак 2.1 has a task where you loot a stash in the Cordon and then 60 zombies spawn, and you have to kill all of them. But if the player uses the Sledge hammer, you can sometimes kill 2 at once. And eventually, they are all dead. A fun and rewarding battle, you just need to stay light on your feet, and keep moving backwards and forwards to avoid zombie slap attacks. It helps to get a few artifacts first to regenerate health faster, and be able to move very fast. The Forgotten Forest map has a lot of artifacts, but it is very dangerous to navigate, due to the amount of strong mutants and anomalies. There is a task given by Sidorovitch to retrieve an Inferno artifact from this map, but I have no idea where it is. And there are so many ways to get surrounded and die in this map. Better to do side tasks and collector stashes to get better gear before tackling this map.
The Lost Alpha DC 1.4.007 mod for Stalker Shadow of Chernobyl has the biggest maps of any Stalker mod. The North Hills map is immense, this is just a very long winding country road, with a water channel and dam halfway along. This map is very nice and quiet looking, but there are a lot of Pseudodogs, Boars and Blind Dogs along the road, this makes it difficult to navigate on foot. That is why you need a car. Although, when I came along the road, I was hit by a scripted emission, and then woke up in the Concrete factory map, which is the retail version of Yantar. This is beset by a psi emission field, and this requires a tuned psi helmet, otherwise the player will have a sepia toned blurry screen. Lost Alpha shows how maps should be made, there are many nice touches in various maps, even in the Pripyat outskirts map, it has a room with white powder piled all over the floor. This looks like the room in the Stalker movie.
