The difficulty you choose in STALKER 2 significantly affects your experience with the game. It’s not a game that has minor differences between the difficulty options, and moving from easy to normal substantially steps up the challenge. We’ll list what changes between the difficulties below and which one you should choose for your first playthrough.
What’s the difference between difficulties in STALKER 2?
Your choice of difficulty in STALKER 2 dramatically affects the challenge. Only three settings are available in the game, and the options are much less granular than with some other titles. Here’s how the game defines each difficulty:
- Rookie: Suitable for beginners and players who are more interested in the story.
- Stalker: Suitable for players looking for a balance between story and combat.
- Veteran: Suitable for players who crave intense, challenging battles.
Unfortunately, these descriptions are incredibly vague and don’t describe the difference between each difficulty setting.
As far as we can tell so far, here’s what happens when you raise the difficulty:
- You have less health (or take more damage).
- Enemies have slightly more health (or take less damage).
- Loot drops at a lower rate.
There are likely more changes, but those are the major ones we’ve noticed so far.
Which STALKER 2 difficulty should I choose for my first playthrough?
If there were a difficulty setting between Rookie and Stalker, that’s what we’d suggest. Unfortunately, enemies take ridiculous amounts of ammo to kill in Stalker and Veteran, which killed a lot of the fun for us. Even unarmored human enemies can take 10+ rifle rounds in the stomach, and 2 or more in the head to go down. It’s incredibly immersion-breaking for someone to take an AKM round in their bare face and continue shooting you with little or no pause.
The issue with enemies being bullet sponges is a bit better on Rookie difficulty, but much of the challenge is removed as well. You have so much health (or enemies cause so little damage) that there’s little risk of dying if you pay a bit of attention. You also get so much loot that there’s no need to manage your resources.
Hopefully, GSC will tune the difficulty more in STALKER 2 or allow you to set a custom one. For now, we lean toward choosing Rookie for first-time players because of how irritating the bullet sponge enemies are on higher difficulties.
