"RTTN has that Roadside Picnic feeling. Everyone entered the Zone for their own reasons and everyone is connected to eachother in some way. The game adapts to your choices and world events, changing dialogs and missions. Characters you meet have their own interests and personalities, some will tell you their story. Everything included is lorefriendly to stalker, based on the information we can find in the original games and will take you on a well written journey. The world's size allows you to choose your own path, the order in which you play missions and write your own story as well. The Zone is an unforgiving place and it will be difficult to survive. Take your time, explore, roleplay and.. Good hunting, Stalker."
This is gonna be a honest review.
So in the term of gameplay elements and features it's on the same level as Dead Air but somehow in this mod the zone feels much more populated. So with gameplay elements I would like to give this a 10/10
The story is amazing. And most of the CoC or CoM based story driven mods are a mess but this is really nice to play so far. It has both a decent story and freeplay at the same time so that's a 10/10 again. (Also seda did a good job using all the maps as much as he can.)
Now about bugs. We have the good old X-ray bugs, but the stability is way below Anomaly and Dead Air. Now keep in mind this mod just got released so it's still not that bad. I will give a strong 8/10 for the stability. I am playing on 1080p maxed with dx11. My rig is a I7 6700k 16gb ram GTX 1080 and i put the game on the hard drive. (edit: with the new patch most of the bugs have been fixed. The only bug I still see is the duplicated special NPCs so there goes +1 point) (edit2: 'orighty. With the dec 5 patches all of the bugs are gone and only the xray bugs still in game so here comes another +1)
About the dev team. Seda is a nice guy who listen to the fans. He tries his best to fix everything and he also credits those who helped or helping him. So that's a bonus for me.
So pretty much that's it. It's really good mod and it's really worth your time.
Edit: i will change the point and rating based on how Seda will patch and develop the game.
Last edit for now: So I finally finished the camping as a Loner. After this I gonna start doing another run with CS. And about the story. It was amazing. The way the story draged you around the zone and helped you meet with a lot of people was amazing. Nice job Seda. The cut-scenes were amazing. Not as good as the original ones but way better then what we saw in Lost Alpha. The ending was kinda a let-down for me, but atleast it wasn't as mind ******* as Lost Alpha. This mod really made my year and these are the mods that still keeps me in the stalker universe. One guy with a little help made a mod that is way better then a mod that was made for 5-6 years, and it was made by a team as well. Lost Alpha was my fav story driven no-russian-mod, but after playing this... I kinda lost hope it LA... but that's only me. If anything new come around the corner I will list it here, but I will not update this review, unless it's really important. Good hunting stalkers.
Most fun i've had since lurk when it was good, AN94 crew checkin in!
I finally finished playing RTTN (V1.0 + V1.3 Emergency Patch)
(I played Dead Air before this)
RTTN was one of the best experiences I had with STALKER for a long time.
Story:
The story starts kind of slow and really picks up somewhere around midgame. For me that worked pretty fine, as the early game in CoC-based mods is all about venturing out into the wild, collecting better gear and getting ready for bigger adventures. It picks you up on the midpoint when you begin to think: Where to next? And it fills that void exactly when needed, giving you space to do all kinds of other things to do while you are in a particular area. Especially in late game when you don't know what to, there are still some main quests open, and you can continue playing with a red line to follow.
At that point RTTN kept my interest where any other mod would have lost me.
Gear Progression:
I think what most mods struggle with is a good progression when it comes to gear. In DA once you farmed enough to get past Rostok, you pretty much slaughtered Monolith and were able to get to your desired gear pretty fast. There was no need to explore all of Jupiter, Zaton, Pripyat or the Reactor. Pick 1 or 2 and you are pretty much set.
In RTTN Monolith have decent loot, but there is almost always something left to be desired. On occasion you'll find a pristine Rifle, which makes every body searched still interesting (in contrast to Misery, where everything on bodies is ****).
Late Game:
I was surprised how motivating the late game still was. This is where many mods (including Misery) fail for me. Usually I get bored somewhere in the third act. In CoC (+DA) I usually quit somewhere at this point. But RTTN kept things interesting, mainly because of aforementioned loot progression and the main story line, which keeps you moving around the zone.
Quest design:
There are dynamic kill/loot quests based on CoC. But where RTTN really shines, are its custom created quests. Most of them are main quests, but they are truly something different. I was amazed of what a single modder could do with scripting, and relatively bug-free in addition. For future playthroughs my wish would be to have more custom side quests to replace some of the automated quests.
Map Layout:
Some might take issue with the rearrangement of the map, but personally I really like it. For one it's more accurate compared to real Chernobyl, but it's also something different gameplay-wise. In my opinion the CoP areas are the most beautiful maps and more like what the devs originally envisioned for their map size. To place them all at the top of the map, never to be visited, that doesn't make much sense to me. That said, according to canon Pripyat is the second most dangerous area despite the NPP, so what I would appreciate in the future is some kind of natural blocking. In canon those are unavoidable anomaly fields, which I always loved. In my vision getting to Pripyat could only be achieved by the underground route and collecting a "Navigator" artifact, which lets you pass those anomalies. For that matter, a permanent settlement in laundromat with traders and personal would be really cool. I really loved the "stranded in a hostile environment" feeling in CoP.
Bug Section:
In general, their were far less bugs that I would have anticipated. Nevertheless, I'll list some from the most severe to the least important:
- Sometimes upgrades disappear from my gear. In early game I spent a lot of my money on upgrading my gas mask to full and somehow it reverted back to normal. I noticed after 2 hours of tedious hauling of gear, so I decided to let it go, but I really got angry at that moment.
- I found a single ecologist in Red Forest which somehow was shown to be hostile to me. I checked previous saves, I never shot him. Once I killed him, ecologists became hostile to me (an open quest failed). So I reloaded and avoided him all together. That would have been fine, but someday he turned up at the 100Rads bar and it became very tedious to finish my business there without getting shot.
- At some point, the whole duty guard section at the northern checkpoint in Rostok got wiped out by mutants, followed by regular attacks inside the camp grounds. I turned up stalker spawn rate in the options, but the post never get re manned. I feared my mechanic with all tool kits would die. He never did, but that would have been a great loss. Since Rostok is neutral ground, maybe re-spawns for duty guards could be done?
- Even with armor disguise deactivated duty guards called me dirty freedom scum. I never joined any faction. Also I always considered the Sunrise suit to be a neutral stalker suit. Apparently in this mod it is considered a Freedom suit?
Possible Spoilers:
- I lost my Monolith suit after one quest involving a certain artifact. That one got me angry, because I spent 65k on repairing it, and another 20k on upgrading
Conclusion: Best mod in a long time!
There are much better reviews than I can write already here but I am a long time Loner and have played many mod. I can say hands down this is the most optimized, exciting and well written story I have come across including the actual stories from GSG. Play this and enjoy!
In summary,
Best story line I have played in a Stalker game.
I love this mod! It gives me such a feeling of true exploration.
Packing my bag with everything I need while keeping it as light as possible and then pitting myself against the elements and denizens of the zone is incredibly satisfying. Not to mention, returning from an expedition battered and bruised, but with all the riches of the wastes is so rewarding.
All the combined mods and added features really enhance the survival adventure feel of the game, and the balance of all things is impeccable.
I've loved playing COP in the past but this mod feels like how it's truly meant to be played. I just hope the upcoming Stalker 2 can come close to this.
Thanks again Seda!
Dead Air and Anomaly are both great, but this mod stands out. It keeps the harsh survival aspects, but reduces some tedious aspects of those two. Incredible environment, textures, map, and gameplay. I've had the most enjoyment with RttN out of any other large-scale mods. I see this eventually taking the top spot, provided the author keeps updating.
Great story, Also great freeplay 10/10 in my book.
Its Awesome, nuff said.
its one of the best freeplay mods