I want to finish it some day but I also kind of get sick of it quickly whenever I try to play it for extended periods and actually do main story missions.

Fucking around in the open world and fishing and hunting and all that is great though.

I think OLR is based around circa build 1935, but it’s using stuff from all the early builds and also incorporating material from the design documents heavily.

Anyway, as long as older versions are available it’s fine. At least they aren’t trying to justify those new changes as “lore accurate” and push them on everyone like a certain Skyrim modder who shall not be named, right? Please say yes.

I’m not sure about this honestly as a lot of the community is in russian, but they have the older version up at least so that’s a good sign.

I heard the A-life implementation in 3.0 is very impressive, so there’s that. But yeah it’s kind of unavoidable with projects like this. Same thing goes for the Unofficial Patch of VtM: Bloodlines. Eventually the fan group dev team starts running low on material to restore but want to keep working and so start extrapolating single lines of unimplemented code references into full fledged quests and taking throwaway sentences from design documents and turning them into wholesale mechanics and stuff like that.

You’re welcome, always happy to talk STALKER! If you want to try OLR, make sure you grab the 2.5 version as they apparently started inserting more liberal/fanfictiony changes in version 3+. You can download it here (don’t worry, the installer lets you chose English as language).

CPU has been a bottleneck for CoC/Anomaly forever since Xray was originally made in that time when people thought super fast single core processing was the future. So GSC optimised it for that idea. Instead it turned out clock speed has pretty much flatlined since then and multithreading was the future. Plus it doesn’t help that all the offline simulation of what the world is doing in the background offsceen is incredibly CPU heavy.

STALKER modding is absolutely crazy, not quite as large as Skyrim but also harder to quantify since in addition to the by-now massive Anomaly scene there is also a massive scene that’s still spread out over other older offshoots, particularly in eastern Europe. They’re very big on modding and remaking the original trilogy there (STALKER is huge there in general). Hell, I actually have Oblivion Lost Remake installed and ready to go, which is a fan-recreation of the original vision of Shadow or Chernobyl, recreated from design documents and early dev builds that have been leaked. GSC famously had to cut down their vision massively to get the game out the door and OLR 2.5 has been described by many as the closest thing we’re ever going to get to what they actually wanted to make (Oblivion Lost was the original title before it became SoC).

Yep, Anomaly is built on the 64-bit Xray-Monolith engine, which is derived from GSC open sourcing the X-ray Engine back in the day. Though a lot of work has been done on it over the years at this point. Hell, there are two recent further engine forks being worked on right now that will hopefully be merged into main one day: one implementing dual-render PiP scopes in a very smart way with negligible performance loss and one implementing rudimentary multithreading that can give particularly weaker systems a huge performance boost.

The engine guys working on Anomaly are wizards. Those and the guys making custom shaders. The game looks absolutely fantastic these days, almost as good as STALKER 2 - and that is UE5.

Best way to think of Anomaly is as the successor to Call of Chernobyl. It’s really an incredibly impressive project. As I’m sure you know from your time modding the landscape used to be a complete clusterfuck with CoC and Misery and hundreds of forks and submods and what have you. Anomaly basically collected and unified everything into a single stable common platform to work from.

At this point the modding scene of STALKER is probably on the level of non-Skyrim Bethesda games and there are not only thousands of mods but dozens of high quality precompiled modpacks that let you plug-and-play modlists with hundreds of mods without issue. Or you can be a deranged nutter like me and setup your own modpack.

If you used to play close to vanilla CoC back in the day you’ll be amazed what the community have been able to wring out of this old ass engine.

You get as far as 75%? Impressive.

This is far from my first time in Anomaly, so I think that’s a reason my posts have been a bit briefer than my usual rambling. But I can try to be a bit more elaborate going forward. What to do in Anomaly is so heavily dependent on what modpack (or custom modlist) you’re running though. They can play out completely differently and sometimes have entirely different approaches. Like, playing GAMMA and playing EFP are entirely different animals.

How much have you played before?

Still dividing my time between trudging through the Chernobyl exclusion zone in STALKER: Anomaly and perusing scripts and configs to resolve conflicts and crashes as I either discover them or provoke them by continuing to either tweak existing mods on my list or add more to the pile.

I get like this frequently with modding, I don’t know if it’s a latent perfectionist streak or just your garden variety hyperfixation but I tend to lose myself in the desire to make everything just right and get stuck on that over actually playing. But I think I’m having fun with it as I’m hacking my way through making compatibility patches so maybe it doesn’t matter?

It would be fun to actually finish the Mercenary storyline though. I haven’t even progress past the starting areas of Cordon/Meadow/Garbage yet…

Remedy made some GTA slop?

Even better, Remedy themselves are! Rockstar are publishing it though as they own the rights to the IP. I’m super curious about how they’ll turn out, especially with James McCaffrey’s passing.

I agree about giving it a shot, but not about not being able to mess up. The second half/third of the game has a ton or forced combat and it you went into it expecting to be able to avoid fighting then you might end up soft locked.

As long as you pick at least one way of fighting - whether unarmed or melee or guns or disciplines (vampire magic) - and invest in it then you’ll be fine.

The original still holds up in many ways, but it’s less mind blowing now than it was back then - although now it’s actually possible to finish thanks to the Unofficial Patch.

When it came out, it was a breath of fresh air with its writing and voice acting (at least the major roles) and the combination of a cartoony art direction with being an early Source game meant the characters faces were unbelievably expressive.

It’s also a game that absolutely shows the importance of “vibes”. The soundtrack, environment design and general atmosphere is just stellar and probably the single part of the game that truly holds up. From the run-down sadness of Hollywood to watching the rain outside the windows of your Santa Monica apartment and listening to the Deb of Night.

I think the choices-matter part is a little less prominent than some may lead you to believe - it’s a fairly linear game with missable sidequests, not a branching story - but the roleplaying is excellent and pretty much every single clan has unique dialogue and moments that play out differently. Particularly Nosferatu and Malkavian have a lot of unique stuff, enough so that there is probably grounds for 3 playthroughs (normal clan, then Malkavian and Nosferatu) which is fairly impressive.

The Malkavian playthrough in general is one of the best second playthroughs of any game, as your own dialogue choices are littered with spoilers about the story that your character knows before the player thanks to the clan’s madness/insight. There are also unique versions of many TV shows specifically for Malkavian - and more.

It was literally the only way Alan Wake 2 was getting made, no other publisher would finance the project after Alan Wake 1 sold poorly and Sam Lake/Remedy really wanted to make it.

I mean… as with all Remedy games the writing, tone and style is pretty much the draw. MP3 is a great third-person shooter, but it’s not a great Max Payne.

Unbelievable game for its age, it looks bonkers good for a 2005 release with some really impressive particle effects and particularly distortion effects. Shockwaves from explosions and slow motion bullet traces look phenomenal still and really smooth, clean and sharp.

Gunplay is great and holds its own against most modern releases, with literally every weapon barring the oddly anemic assault rifle feeling amazing to use. The combination of extremely intentional level design and the insane-for-its-time AI makes every fight fun and different.

If you haven’t played it yet it’s regularly sold on GOG for like a dollar and I consider it a must-play. Make sure to grab the Echo Patch and dont forget to play the Extraction Point expansion too, which is included in the GOG edition and is phenomenal - perhaps even better than the base game.

I really loved FFTA. Is it your first time playing it?

STALKER: Anomaly. Finally finished up my modlist, landed on a grand total of about 430, so now it’s time to playtest and see if it actually works without crashing and feels good and balanced to play. Just started a Mercenary playthrough yesterday and so far so good. Managed to clear out the bandits at the vehicle station in Cordon as is custom but the real test will be the first handful of missions over in Meadow. I’ve been wanting to do a Merc playthrough for a while but the start is rough in this modlist setup as you can’t get Fanatic as a free companion and you don’t get to start with a shotgun. At least starting off as neutral with the loners means you can start out in Cordon. It’s going to be rough until I get a working gas mask, dosimeter, detector and repair the first shotgun I find.

All in all though it feels great to be back in the Zone.

We need a remaster of that absolute classic.