S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (Stalker) Thread

[National Defense Advocate]

If you want an SoC experience, Anomaly is not that. Anomaly is a regurgitated mess of Call of Chernobyl, a freeplay mod and MISERY, a masochist mod. It's an autistic overhyped mess.
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You can always look up 4chan's /sg/, people there actually give a shit about STALKER outside of your typical 4chan spergery, rare case where a vidya thread is actually about vidya and has a level of quality to it. It helped me out a lot learning about stalkan. People there will surely give some nicer pointers if the usual WhatMod graphics and link trees aren't enough. Just remember that Anomaly, GAMMA, OP-2.2 and OLR 3.0 are memes.

I'm gonna disagree with Slav here, I think GAMMA, EFP, REALITY, ect are perfectly fine if that's the type of game you like.
He's right in the fact that it IS autistic and demands a lot of patience, it isn't at all like Vanilla.

But I'm a sperg and I enjoy having to buy new kevlar plates after I get shot, and walking with a limp because an acid anomaly burned my foot. I especially like having to think about the weather because sickness and freezing is a thing there.

 

[Slav Power]

if that's the type of game you like

Yes, if you're a masochist that thinks """realistic""" grinding and bullshit unbalanced difficulty is """fun""" then by all means, go for it. Maybe even install MISERY 2.0 if your definition of "fun" is the video game equivalent cock and ball torture. Just remember that you're not playing STALKER, you're playing some milsim bastardization that uses STALKER as a set piece. STALKER was always a story driven arcade shooter.

Hell, you want a miserable cock and ball torture experience? Dive into vasyanshit like OP-2.2 that is an insane clusterfuck of mods, where you'll need to F5-F9 all the time and read the wiki to not lock yourself out of one of the many endings, or try OLR 3.0 Open Beta and experience the highest concentration of vasyanshit in STALKER's history as hi_flyer painstakingly recreates every single fart that ever came out of GSC's ass with no consideration of sensible gameplay. Maybe that's the STALKER mod experience you were always looking for.

But if you want something closer to SoC, I'd recommend staying closer to mods that didn't go batshit insane with what they're adding.

 

[National Defense Advocate]

Yes, if you're a masochist that thinks """realistic""" grinding and bullshit unbalanced difficulty is """fun""" then by all means, go for it. Maybe even install MISERY 2.0 if your definition of "fun" is the video game equivalent cock and ball torture. Just remember that you're not playing STALKER, you're playing some milsim bastardization that uses STALKER as a set piece. STALKER was always a story driven arcade shooter.

Hell, you want a miserable cock and ball torture experience? Dive into vasyanshit like OP-2.2 that is an insane clusterfuck of mods, where you'll need to F5-F9 all the time and read the wiki to not lock yourself out of one of the many endings, or try OLR 3.0 Open Beta and experience the highest concentration of vasyanshit in STALKER's history as hi_flyer painstakingly recreates every single fart that ever came out of GSC's ass with no consideration of sensible gameplay. Maybe that's the STALKER mod experience you were always looking for.

But if you want something closer to SoC, I'd recommend staying closer to mods that didn't go batshit insane with what they're adding.

I was rocking MISERY when I was in middle school, it ain't that hard. And I'm no stranger to OP 2.2 or STALKER Soup either.

But Lost Alpha is trash, don't play it. It's just weird.

 

[Slav Power]

But Lost Alpha is trash, don't play it. It's just weird.

Nonono, not Lost Alpha, Oblivion Lost Remake. Lost Alpha was infamous because the niggers at Dezowave started adding their own bullshit with an asinine plotline about Freemasons and shit like that. Director's Cut rectified it but the maps there are just too fucking big and empty and it's boring as shit.

Oblivion Lost Remake is the old concept restoration mod that actually does a good job at being faithful to the original vision. The last version, OLR 2.5 came out almost 10 years ago, and now hi_flyer came out with 3.0 Open Beta. And it is a very faithful restoration. Too faithful. He re-added just about every retarded concept that GSC ever had in mind with no consideration for gameplay and enjoyment.

It's an impressive mod, the A-Life is arguably the best where every stalker does what you can do, but he also added shit that GSC only ever theorized about because they knew it would be bad gameplay wise, but hi_flyer didn't care, so you have shit like getting sick and having to pay Toad 500$ to get healed, your backpack having limited space, yes, space, and so do stashes, every item having a potential to be irradiated where you need a detector to make sure the random gun or loaf of bread won't kill you when you carry it, and the list goes on and on.

hi_flyer is also very pissy about criticism towards his decisions, so the only hope is that once 3.0 gets out of beta, people will patch out all the stupid vasyanshit he threw in there and we'll have the best buildo mod ever conceived.

 

[IrishGuy088]

As far as "hardcore" difficulty goes in games, all I want is:

• if I shoot them in the head, they die; if they shoot me in the head, I die

That's it. Anything else more or less blows immersion out of the water.

 

[Checkerboard Hero]

Anomaly is cool in that it's on a 64-bit engine of STALKER but much like CoC it will probably never get any more meaningful updates and be left in a "Let the mods make the experience" state. GAMMA always came off as a low-effort continuation of Anomaly, taking community mods and throwing them in to "expand" on the experience when it's just bloatware, Dead Air was also like this and its only real claim to fame was glowsticks.

The biggest disappointment in the STALKER scene is Wormwood, if I remember correctly it used CoC as a base with the goal of expanding on the world by opening up pretty much every fake building and and fully detailing areas of the game that were lacking. The mod eventually died and didn't release any of the work they had done so the whole thing was a gigantic waste of time.

 

[Mega Black]

I was kind of craving some free-form Stalkan after finishing the series a couple years ago, but now I'm unsure of what mod to use. I guess that's the one problem with huge mod communities. Water everywhere and not a drop to drink.

 

[ce gars]

I think the real question should be: is STALKER's sandbox strong enough to prop up a pure, open-world experience? I think it works better as a curated one, to be honest. The story does a good enough job of pushing you forward to new set pieces and getting you invested, but having been trying to play GAMMA for the last week, I don't think it works without that structure, because STALKER's sandbox doesn't have enough going on to prop up an entire game on its own, not to me at least.

To say nothing of a lot of the genuinely tedious aspects that GAMMA adds, such as all the diffierent healing and the requirement for eating and drinking every time I turn around, the having to lug around a box to store artifacts in so they don't irradiate me over time, the constant gun and armor maintenance. It all blends together to completely fuck the pacing. It genuinely feels like whatever milsim fag made it has no understanding of why STALKER actually works as well as it does.

 

[Osama Bin Laden]

not sure if this has been said but the game needs a patrick s tomlinson mod

 

[Slav Power]

I don't think it works without that structure, because STALKER's sandbox doesn't have enough going on to prop up an entire game on its own, not to me at least.

This is the issue with all freeplay mods. The trilogy has always gave you an objective and strung you along to explore the world, there was an incentive to do something. In SoC, it was Marked One's journey to find Strelok. In CS, it was Scar's journey to stop Strelok. In CoP, it was Degtyarev's mission to figure out why Operation Fairway was a failure. GSC took care to hand craft STALKER's world, and A-Life wasn't what they wanted it to be, or what people thought it would be. hi_flyer managed to create the A-Life that GSC wanted in OLR 3.0, but at the same time fucked up everything else.

For example, in SoC, when you're going through Garbage to reach Rostok, first you'll have the encounter with the bandits, then you'll be fending off the vehicle graveyard from bandits, and then you'll be fending off the Duty outpost from mutants. It's all scripted events, but they incentivize the player to do them despite the game being open world, and it builds this feeling of the Zone being alive. Or in CoP, when you first approach the fire anomaly in Zaton, you'll encounter the scripted event of Petruha hunting for artefacts, getting harmed by the anomaly and you have the option to help him out like you did Tolik in SoC. It's the little touches like that that made the games feel alive.

But in freeplay mods, all of that is stripped out, because it's a freeplay mod, you can wander around and do anything you want, but there's no incentive to do so. Any story mode in freeplay mods boils down to some Mary Sue bullshit of you meeting Strelok and Degtyarev and fighting alongside them, because it's there only so there's some sort of incentive for you to go through the same fucking locations and missions you did in the trilogy. Get the documents from X-18, disable the Miracle Machine, fend off the Barrier, disable the Brain Scorcher and so on and so forth. It's repetitive and boring and doesn't understand what made STALKER what it is.

To say nothing of a lot of the genuinely tedious aspects that GAMMA adds, such as all the diffierent healing and the requirement for eating and drinking every time I turn around, the having to lug around a box to store artifacts in so they don't irradiate me over time, the constant gun and armor maintenance. It all blends together to completely fuck the pacing. It genuinely feels like whatever milsim fag made it has no understanding of why STALKER actually works as well as it does.

Grok doesn't understand STALKER because he's a French faggot that wanted to create his own vision of vasyanshit MISERYshit tedium with some milsim faggotry sprinkled on top. CoC devs didn't understand that STALKER is what it is thanks to the linear story, MISERY devs didn't understand that STALKER's essence isn't being a masochistic tedium, then both of those got combined, regurgitated a few times to create Anomaly, and then Grok made it even worse with GAMMA.

There's this post from /sg/ that perfectly describes the issue:


Also, here's some fun facts about Grok that I posted in the EFT thread that I can't be bothered to repost here:

You know what's the worst part about GAMMA being """hosted""" on Discord?

This is what you go for to Grok's Discord:

GAMMA is just a script. You go to his Discord just for a few links and a readme. The mod indexes are hosted on GitHub, the mods are downloaded from ModDB, the scripts are hosted on 3rd party sites. Grok could've moved all of that to a fucking GitHub page, but he won't. Because Grok is an narcissistic egotistical French faggot and he bathes in the attention he got thanks to OperatorDrewski. Each rando that wants to play GAMMA joins his Discord and boosts the member count, and it gives him a hardon.

Here are some fun facts about Grokitach:

He's over 30 with a PhD and the only notable thing he has done in his life with it is a vidya mod that for the most part leeches off of other people's work.

He starts fights with other modders because his ego is so large that anyone else making a modpack that's not him is emotionally damaging to him.

His egoism in full view. Newfags coming from OperatorDrewski's channel and Grok salivating over the idea of his Discord clique being bigger than the official STALKER Discord clique.

This is the creme de la creme of Grok's faggotry. His very first thought after hearing the news that Russia invaded Ukraine was his mod. His mod and people playing it. No thought of people dying or anything like that. It's all about him.

Grokitach is a despicable piece of shit and you shouldn't give him any attention by joining his Discord clique to play GAMMA because that's all he lives for.

 

[WULULULULU]

Freeplay STALKER is just Gmod but with an enemy spawner on different parts of the map.

 

[The tired cat]

You have got to be fuckin' kiddin' me. This dreck is comin' out in September an they STILL can't get the enemy AI to work properly.

 

[Arminius]

You have got to be fuckin' kiddin' me. This dreck is comin' out in September an they STILL can't get the enemy AI to work properly.

Бармен негр. Ясно, понятно. А, что с геями, кроме разработчиков?

 

[The tired cat]

Бармен негр. Ясно, понятно. А, что с геями, кроме разработчиков?

Ну, этих пока небыло видно. Меня больше вгоняит в ступор, что ИИ всё ещё не работает. Они сколько трейлеров выкатили, и постоянно видно что ИИшку вообще никто не трогал даже.

 

[DeadwastePrime]

You have got to be fuckin' kiddin' me. This dreck is comin' out in September an they STILL can't get the enemy AI to work properly.

so its gonna be like the original games then. perfect

 

[The tired cat]

so its gonna be like the original games then. perfect

Honestly, I'd say even in the OG games the AI wasn't this retarded at times. They would least sometimes go for cover and not stand in the open..or literally walk into things WHILE shooting at you.

 

[Twin Blades of Ventspils]

Not a big fan of the gun feeling. It looks like some basic Unreal Engine store asset. The Malyuk gun reminds me of guns in Trepang2 or other indie Unreal Engine games you see on YT. Even that shotgun feeling is crappy. It lacks something. I also fear it won't be as moddable as the previous games, so this will never be fixed.

The map looks fine though.

 

[Evil Peter Griffin]

You have got to be fuckin' kiddin' me. This dreck is comin' out in September an they STILL can't get the enemy AI to work properly.

Complaining about how buggy a STALKER game is like complaining about how buggy a Bethsaida game is.

 

[Snekposter]

Complaining about how buggy a STALKER game is like complaining about how buggy a Bethsaida game is.

I just hope the mod tools are decent, since much like a Bugethsda game that's going to make or break this.

 

[The tired cat]

Complaining about how buggy a STALKER game is like complaining about how buggy a Bethsaida game is.

Its not that its buggy, its the fact that with all these trailers, they still havent coded the AI at all.