Thoughts About Various STALKER Mods blog - PsyWarVeteran

Thoughts About Various STALKER Mods

Someone recently asked me what my thoughts are about Lost Alpha, Radiophobia and Anomaly in my comments section. Instead of writing a wall of text and filling up my comments section, I decided to answer it like this. Here's what I think:

Lost Alpha:

My first disappointment when it comes to STALKER modding. Imagine a group of developers that not only have a treasure trove of development information, playable builds, files etc. available to them and the rest of the world but also given more, never before seen resources by non-other than the STALKER developers themselves, alongside other technical help. You'd think the mod born out of these circumstances would be the most well researched, understood and faithfully realized cut content restoration mod ever, right? Certainly it would, under different management that is.

How the developers of Lost Alpha, team "Dezowave" handled what they so fortunately had is criminal. A project that would shine in hands of another team has turned into a far-cry from what was initially promised. They jumped the shark for whatever reason and created a badly put together fanfiction about nonsense that was never present or planned to be included in STALKER, ever. Instead of creating what was promised: The old, forgotten STALKER given new life, we got a story about Illuminati, made up, unfitting missions and characters that were never there in the pre-release versions, needlessly complicated gameplay elements, great looking but terribly handled maps, awful gameplay loop that's made 90% of back and forth plus fetch quests, and much more.

I remember installing the "Developer's Cut" years later, thinking maybe they learned their lesson and realized that they lost focus. The second I left Sidorovich's bunker a pointless, fanfic character that has the face of Jake Muller from RE6 forcefully spoke to me, talking using proverbs. It was at that moment I realized that they had moved away from the original goal even more. The rest of the experience was the same old boring gameplay loop with a tacked on levelling system, a "haha so funny" slavic Youtuber cameo and other similar nonsense that has nothing to do with pre-release version of STALKER.

The only good things about Lost Alpha is its very well crafted maps, nice graphics and some other minor content. None of which makes it a very enjoyable experience. If you want to experience the real pre-release STALKER and see what could have been, "Oblivion Lost Remake (OLR)" is the mod to try and look forward to.

Radiophobia:

No need to write yet another wall of text for this one, as I'm not nearly as frustrated with it when compared to the rest of the mods I'm talking about here. Instead, I'll talk about my thoughts on "modding the mods". Here's what I think: I'm generally not a fan of the aforementioned "modding the mods", as in, people taking existing modifications, adding features to them and calling it something else. We see this a lot with CoC forks nowadays where people just add a bunch of addons on top of the existing base and call it something like "ProSTALKER's Epic Merge" or to sound more professional "Gloom" or "Scorched Zone". Unless the addition is absolutely incredible (which hasn't happened yet and I doubt it'll happen in the future), I'm not playing the same thing just because you called it something different.

Radiophobia isn't really like those CoC forks but it's still something I played and loved (OGSE) with different features implemented. While I would have preferred a completely original story mod, what this mod does isn't bad at all. It's not a simple "mod of a mod" but has original quests and other things to do added which is good too see. Overall, I enjoyed Radiophobia and have no issues with it. It's far from mods that only add eye-candy, the so-called hardcore features and shiny tacticool weapons with new animations, which are meaningless to me.

Anomaly:

Bow down! Here comes the big cheese! A mod that single-handedly destroyed any hope for western STALKER modding. While our Slavic brothers and sisters enthusiastically work on breaking the mold, aiming to create new adventures filled with interesting new quests, maps, items etc. we, the English speaking community are drowning in CoC forks that pop out weekly, and many seem to enjoy this situation.

Call me crazy, but I don't find roaming the Zone again and again, doing menial tasks such as bringing a medkit to a guy that's six maps away from me, fun. That whole "create your own adventure" thing translates to me as "aimless busywork without an end goal". If you ever visit a foreign forum such as AP-PRO, check out what they think about Anomaly and freeplay mods in general. Nine times out of ten you'll find people talking about how pointless and overhyped it all is, and I fully agree.

Anomaly (or any CoC fork for that matter) is an extremely overhyped, aimless, busywork simulators that mostly made popular by newcomers who watched their favorite Youtuber talk about it being "All three STALKER games combined into one, and it's FREE!!!". The whole freeplay thing was a fun idea that was even planned by the STALKER developers way back when, not the norm or how STALKER should be, nowadays people go as far as saying "this is the real STALKER" when they haven't even touched the original trilogy to begin with.

I played CoC and Anomaly quite a few times and it always ended with me removing it after a day or two. While the main idea and some additions are neat, for me there is no fun in visiting the same maps over and over, increasing some numbers up like faction respect, money or ranking when it all amounts to nothing in the end. There is a barebones story here that's nothing more than "talk to this guy, now this guy, now this guy" in essence, so I can't even base my goal around that.

I wish this series stayed niche and the community tightly knit. Some call this gatekeeping, my answer to them is: "If this'll prevent newcomers who haven't played the actual games and don't have even a smidge of interest in this series to invade every forum, server etc. and talk about how fantastic the mod is, then you can call it whatever shiny word as you like, I will prefer that, everytime. By all means, call me a gatekeeper". Sometimes I see newcomers who are actually interested in what this series is about and looking for guidance or simply popping up to say hello to the community, only to get drown in posts about Anomaly, Misery, Gamma and general freeplay nonsense. It really is a terrible time to become a fan of STALKER. The Reddit page of STALKER is a lost cause, they should just rename it to "r/Anomaly" instead, Youtube videos and streams about the game are the same old "look how great this mod is!" nonsense created by hack Youtubers and streamers, fake fans. Not even Steam forums are safe with hyper popular mod topics popping up every now and again.

To end this rant, Anomaly (or any freeplay mod) is a boring, gimmicky experience that's blown way out of proportion and overhyped to heavens by certain groups of people. I refuse to believe this could ever be the future of STALKER nor do I believe it's a good mod to spend time in.

There you go "Guest", I hope this post has answered your question.