S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat: Redux - Refocusing Redux news

First off, I'll allay fears over the ominous title: Redux is not cancelled!

With that taken care of, I'll explain what has been going on in my mind recently.


I feel like in the last year, I've lost track of what Redux is about.



The cancellation of Way of the Wolf and the sad news about GSC and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 have swayed me towards a policy of 'content content content'. Lately I've been crafting Redux as a pseudo-replacement for a new sequel, and that's not what the mod is for.


Content is important, but even more-so is remaining true to the original vision of the mod.
Because of this, I'm going to be scrapping the implementation of the Southern Zone and its associated storyline extension into Redux.


It's a hard decision, but one I feel is right for a number of reasons. I've laid out some points with elaboration below.

• Less development time - adding new levels and everything associated with them is hideously time consuming, especially with only one person (me) working within the SDK. Not having to create all the life in these levels and the new storyline will cut literally months and months from development.
• Expanded interiors – instead of adding all these levels, we're going to flesh out the places GSC missed. Pripyat's apartment blocks, factory buildings, houses, etc etc, there'll be a load more building interiors to explore, all filled with interesting items and available to NPCs.
• More new missions in the CoP levels – we were adding a host of new missions to Zaton, Jupiter and Pripyat anyway, but since we don't need to do dozens and dozens of them for new levels, we can refocus and make more of them in the North.
• Smaller mod size - literally, the mod's files will be smaller. We don't have to include all the CS/SoC textures (gigabytes oh god) and the level files/folders themselves are pretty big as well. This leaves us room to maybe include Absolute Nature 3 or something. What do you think?
• New underground level – as a little something to lessen the sting of removing the South from Redux, we'll be moving an underground level planned for the Red Forest to one of the vanilla CoP levels. It's all new, and it's going to be atmospheric as hell.
• More focus on the Redux experience – we need to give you what you want. 

  We're going to give you stashes back in style, revamped and tweaked for Redux. We're also introducing SoC-style caches. You'll find cache locations (with names and descriptions) on corpses just like in SoC, and they'll contain interesting flavour items as well as supplies.

  We're going to give you upgrades again. Weapons and outfits will have specially tweaked upgrade trees so you can customize your items as you like.

  There's loads more we can focus on again now – PDAs, flavour items, script systems, missions, A-Life improvements, and so much more.

I hope you can understand the reasons for this difficult decision, and rest assured, Redux will be a hell of a lot better off with a laser-focused vision and no excess fat.

'Til next time,

- Beacon

Redux Development Lead