Stalker: Call of Pripyat modding

I played this game a bit and like it a lot, but the writing and the Russian accents are bothering me and the graphics could be prettier. Also I am getting too much money too quickly and survival isn't much of a concern.

So I was thinking I'll try one of the many, highly praised mods to enhance my experience and start fresh. But here's the problem: there's tons of them. Which one do you recommend, all-knowing Codex?

* Misery?
* Complete?
* Reloaded?
* SMRTER?
* I Work Alone?
* Swartz?

There's so many that I really don't know which one! Everyone recommends a different one. Help me, Codex! You're my only hope.

Edit: I just found Trash's thread in a search- but even that one isn't conclusive. One guy says Misery rocks, another says wait for Swartz 1.2 (which is out tomorrow), another says Complete, and quite a few say it's fine unmodded (though the ammo/bandage/money bloat is bothering me and I'm only just starting out).

 

Reading through all their feature lists it seems as if Misery contains pretty much everything the other mods contain, just with a cherry on top. The Swartz mod seems pretty interesting too, but I bet it's only a matter of time until someone makes Another Cool Name mod that combines their best features...

 

Well just done use Complete it's unfinished and buggy.

 

You will spend money very quickly too.

Repairs of quality weapons can cost north of 5000 rubles or even 10000 rubles. You'd need 60000 rubles to get armour with proper bullet protection, but even then you'd need 5000 rubles for an upgrade that allows you to move quickly with that armour.

All this aside, you don't have access to superior ammunition without a minimum buffer of 100000 rubles. Which means that in order to get the best stuff, you'd need whatever you need to spend on that stuff PLUS a buffer of hundred thousand rubles to prove to merchants that you are worthy of selling high level equipment. That means you must have a large pool of rubles which you must keep but never spend.

For example, this powerful gun:



requires an ammunition that is so rare, that you will only find 10 seconds worth of ammunition freely lying around the entire game. (It fires quickly). Unless you have a buffer of 100,000 rubles, nobody will sell ammo for it to you.

 

the misery mod sounds pretty shit.

 

I'm playing through it right now with only Atmosfear, a texture pack to make LOD ground look better (looks unbelievably shit in vanilla), and the no-prefetch mod. I'm having fun. Tried CoP Complete, but ran into a gamebreaking bug that doesn't let you travel to Zaton, so I wouldn't recommend it.

As far as survival goes, I'm conditioned by SoC Complete to just accept the ultimate packrat feel of vanilla Stalker games. CoP is actually much better than SoC in that it doesn't allow you to just sell the weapons of human enemies and earn millions instantly. Also, proper equipment upgrades actually cost a fair bit, repairing/upgrading is a nice moneysink, and there's a bunch of plot-related expenses along the way. I'm almost on my way to Pripyat, and I had to do a full artifact-sweep of Yanov just to get more money.

The bigger problem is that you get infinite medkits, bandages, and ammo. It's not that bad insofar as on Master they only heal over time, so you can't spam them to bruteforce encounters; the proper resistance drugs are also relatively scarce. Still, you can basically shrug off anything that doesn't outright kill you, which is not fun at all. What is fun, is that a shitload of stuff can kill you easily even with the best gear Zaton/Yanov can get you. I'm not sure how far you've played, but just today I spent like 10 minutes patiently wearing down a pair of Burers, cause any kind of proper frontal assault would leave me dead in under two seconds - and apparently they can throw shit in my face without being able to see me, which was simply great. Overall the mutants are pretty dangerous and a huge incline over SoC.

I guess you could try Misery if being the ultimate packrat bothers you that much.

 

Burers were my favourite mutants in Pripyat. They just terrified me the first time I dealt with them. But when I dealt with them in Pripyat city and the Pripyat lab, they were killed instantly.

I believe the second last part of CoP had a room with four or five Burers. But by then, you could one shot each of them, walking straight into the room with a gauss rifle.

 

I liked hunting the Chimera too. "Watch out, it can jump very far.", they told me. I was like, ok, I'll just dodge, I've killed snorks before. They really should have qualified that statement. For instance "It can jump on your head from outside of your flashlight's range" would have been helpful.

Also, the first time you meet psy dogs is fun too.

 

I think I will try this setup & trust Wyrmlord that there'll be plenty chance to spend my rubels.
Q: What texture pack are you using? Absolute Nature 2?

Edit: Also getting Russian voices, this "bro here, bro there" is ridiculous.
Edit 2: Misery is just crashing my game no matter my settings; it was hard enough to get the game to run on vanilla so this one is out.

 

Or you could just go play Fallout 3.

 

Complete is ez. It's even easier then vanilla. I'd say avoid like hell.
IWA is a precursor of Misery made by the same guy.

Misery is p. good, if you like bleak, prolonged hobo phase and avoiding fights in the beginning (knife is useful). But it could run wonky on some machines. Some claims that powerful machines have some issues, others that ATI is a culprit.

If you can, go for the noob pack; it is very well rebalanced, has good retexturing and doesn't touch the story. Should be played on Master ofc.

 

Go with Atmosfear + Absolute Nature/Structures packs first time. And definitely replace voices with russian VA. It's good enough that way. I'm trying advanced 64 bit version of Complete now, and it seems to have integrated all of the graphics from Atmosfear and texture packs too, so far haven't run into any bugs but I'm only in first map so far.

 

The only one I've tried yet is Complete.

Have recently arrived at Yanov, played around there for a while and then went back to Zaton.
No problems with bugs so far, except I had to restart (the game not the playthrough) once because HDR was screwed up and fps got bad. Restart fixed it though.
Can't say much about difficulty. AI might be a bit better, overall it's not really hard though, but that might be because I allready knew what to do from my last playthrough.

Visuals are nice with it, other stuff isn't exactly very noticeable, although that might depend on what settings you choose on install.
Still, if you are looking for a really different experience, Complete is probably not the mod you are looking for.

 

I'm going to go with no gameplay changes for a while and see if the money doesn't get tighter later on. If I am not satisfied, I will try Misery again. Maybe if I do a clean install (again) and pick a different DoF than I did last time it might work.


Here's what I am using right now, in case someone needs a suggestion. I assembled this with your help.

* Absolute Structures 1.0 (Structure texture upgrade)
* Absolute Nature 2.0 (Nice ground texture upgrade)
* Stalker Russian Stop Sign (Changes Stop sign to be in Cyrillic script)
* AtmosFear 3 (Weather)
* Prefetch Options Mod (turn pre-fetch off or partially off)
* FoV Switcher 1.7
* No Intro mod
* 3GB Ram flag enable
* Russianmod (Change VA to Russian)
* Fixed Iron Sights

These all seem to work well together, even though they do screw up the way the main menu looks. (All my difficulties except Master are gone and the options like New Game and Load Game aren't where they should be, but rather, off to the right on the picture.)

 

You also need a mod to fix iron sights. They're off-center.

 

Good call. ty. I'll edit my posts with links... later.

Edit: Great, the game runs, but going into the Options menu crashes it. Is this normal? I think it's because of AtmosFear 3. I'm reinstalling so I can get back subtitles. (I don't speak any Russian!)

 

Both the misaligned menu and the crash is due to the hivemind translation. I know because I just installed it to check.

 

That is extremely helpful, thanks. I can live without them I think.

 

All right, I got it all up and running. It looks lovely. Some notes:

* Apparently the game on Master is brutally hard. I don't mind the money bloat anymore because it's a struggle just to survive any firefight. I think I will be struggling for money and medkits soon enough at this rate.

* The Russian speech mod got rid of subtitles and there is no option to turn them back on. Can anyone help? Aside of Привет! and Пожалуйста my spoken Russian isn't very good.

* AtmosFear skybox kicks major ass

 

If you press 0 a few times, an indicator will change on the bottom of the screen. If it shows "1" instead of "A", you can do single shots. Rapid single shots do more damage with more accuracy than automatic firing, even if you are roughly firing at the same speed by clicking very fast.

Unless you have already done so. Then never mind.

It's not brutally hard; I feel these games are average or balanced on the highest difficulty, except with some terrifying mutant fights.

 

I don't know. I feel they are. I just started a fresh game to try the mods- the first mission for me is to find an altered wheel and some guy wants to have it. If you don't give it, he and three goons attack. Since I die in 1-2 hits - and they are very accurate - it's hard for me to survive that early fight on Master. They seem to aim at me much faster than I can aim at them, and even though I can kill them in one head-shot, so can they kill me.

Now, in Deus Ex it was the same, but I usually had the option to sneak past, or surprise them. But in that encounter, my only cover is a radiated ship which happens to be a cul-de-sac. So all I can do is try to popamole in and out of cover trying to pop them in the head before they pop me- and they can pop me extremely fast.

Please note I am not good at FPS games.

 

Honestly, you shouldn't be getting into any proper firefights with anyone in Zaton, or at least none without any allies, which are quite effective. Just do some missions that don't involve fighting other humans. The game isn't that hard, there's the occasional stupid death from a headshot, but in general it simply punishes you for being reckless, stupid and unprepared. If you walk into a random building and a single bloodsucker kills you, take that as a hint that bloodsuckers are nasty and that you should go elsewhere. The one exception to this in Zaton is the mission to find the missing hunter, cause it gives you an ally to explore the bloodsucker lair, and rewards a Veles detector. Also leads to cool stuff later on.

Besides, you can always just buy a better detector and tour the anomalies. Most of them don't have any special requirements, so you just need to not die from dogs/boars as you travel around. And, of course, not fail at navigating the anomaly, but that's really not hard.

Edit: And if you can't kill those dudes, just give up the artifact. Life's harsh in the Zone.
I turned around, headshotted the guy in front of me, and then popamoled the other two down while using the ship entrance for cover. But if you can't Rambo-Schwarzenegger it up, just larp a grudge against the dude who fucks you over.

 

Those dudes are meant to be hard - it's an ambush after all, they wanted to leave you no choice but to give up teh lewts.

Still better than getting surprise RPG to the face from Monolithians in SoC.

 

I was personally very fond of the Gauss rifle snipers on balconies in Pripyat. That was very fun. Also, SoC Complete enabled grenades for NPCs without putting in any visual indicator for grenades close to you, save for a dot zipping across your minimap. The NPCs could also throw them like 100m forward. About halfway through I developed a sort of sixth sense, where I would run to a different cover spot for no discernible reason, and a grenade would explode behind me 5 seconds later. Good times.

Btw. Jasede, if you're still having trouble with subtitles, you can try http://code.google.com/p/s-cop/downloads/list. I don't know if it actually translates the subtitles, but it doesn't crash the game, and does seem to work in general.

 

Jasede
If you are still looking for mods, check this compilation: http://jumbofiles.com/whrkhqqfmo1u
It includes: AtmosFear3, AbsoluteNature2, Absolute Structures, IronSight Fix 1.1, plus few other fixes.