STALKER Shadow of Chernobyl Mod Thread

[Gerrard]

It's extra funny because even S2 kept the multi-block inventory despite the bland as hell UI.

I'll probably check it out anyway, but the first impression isn't good.

 

[Taim]

So far True Stalker is very much a one step forward, two steps back kinda thing.

The good:

• The engine is great.
• There's a ton of polish - no CTDs or long loading times or anything like that.
• Game also looks gorgeous.
• It's super nice to have a story driven mod instead of Tarkov Simulator #73.

The bad:

• There is no A-Life. Biggest gripe with NLC was all the static spawns, but at least the game was dangerous enough to keep even the static spawns interesting for a while. Not the case here.
• Tons of unkillable NPCs. Massive pack of mutants swarm the rookie village? no worries you can just hide if you want since every stalker is invulnerable.
• Want to do a quicksave and test out some weapons on the unfortunate rookies at the camp? Nope - you can point blank shoot them - it does no damage and they don't react.
• New music is nice but its a pale imitation of Mooze's work on SoC so far.

All of this is minor and tolerable except...

THE QUEST DESIGN IS ATROCIOUS

• It took like 5-6 hours to get through the Cordon (more?). Due to all the fucking backtracking. Hilariously enough I leave the rookie camp FINALLY to go to Garbage, all the quests + story side quests are done - and then BAM! Right at the entrance to the garbage i get a sidequest to go all the way back to the rookie camp. No actual interesting stuff on the way back or anything, just literally run back and forth. Even NLC with all of its running around somehow kept it interesting for me.
• Some quests are so heavily scripted that you don't actually have any influence into what happens.
• Finally go to garbage and I get a quest that spawns me in front of two bandits with full assault weapons open firing on me. At that point I had to put the game down - not sure if i'll pick it up again.

It's good to see people doing great stuff with OpenXray but I really wish we could get some new levels and some actual quest design in the mix.

I might look into Prosectors next but I don't know if I'm feeling Vanilla+ right now.

 

[cretin]

I might look into Prosectors next but I don't know if I'm feeling Vanilla+ right now.

Same here man, prosectors sounds great on paper technical features wise but really im going to go to fucking cordon and rescue nimble again and all that shit for the 1000th time goddamn

 

[V17]

So far True Stalker is very much a one step forward, two steps back kinda thing.

The good:

• The engine is great.
• There's a ton of polish - no CTDs or long loading times or anything like that.
• Game also looks gorgeous.
• It's super nice to have a story driven mod instead of Tarkov Simulator #73.

The bad:

• There is no A-Life. Biggest gripe with NLC was all the static spawns, but at least the game was dangerous enough to keep even the static spawns interesting for a while. Not the case here.
• Tons of unkillable NPCs. Massive pack of mutants swarm the rookie village? no worries you can just hide if you want since every stalker is invulnerable.
• Want to do a quicksave and test out some weapons on the unfortunate rookies at the camp? Nope - you can point blank shoot them - it does no damage and they don't react.
• New music is nice but its a pale imitation of Mooze's work on SoC so far.

All of this is minor and tolerable except...

THE QUEST DESIGN IS ATROCIOUS

• It took like 5-6 hours to get through the Cordon (more?). Due to all the fucking backtracking. Hilariously enough I leave the rookie camp FINALLY to go to Garbage, all the quests + story side quests are done - and then BAM! Right at the entrance to the garbage i get a sidequest to go all the way back to the rookie camp. No actual interesting stuff on the way back or anything, just literally run back and forth. Even NLC with all of its running around somehow kept it interesting for me.
• Some quests are so heavily scripted that you don't actually have any influence into what happens.
• Finally go to garbage and I get a quest that spawns me in front of two bandits with full assault weapons open firing on me. At that point I had to put the game down - not sure if i'll pick it up again.

It's good to see people doing great stuff with OpenXray but I really wish we could get some new levels and some actual quest design in the mix.

I might look into Prosectors next but I don't know if I'm feeling Vanilla+ right now.

I got through the quest you mention, took me about 6 reloads. It's doable because you should already have something like an AK74M with armor piercing bullets, just be careful to reload before you go and teleport to the cutscene, and then immediately turn left to shoot the guy who's 10 cm from you, the rest you can survive.

But the problems don't end there: there are some situations in which you cannot reasonably know what to say or do and if you say or do the wrong thing, the only solution is to reload. This happens a bit later on - you escort someone through garbage, which despite being an escort quest is no problem, but at the end you meet a few people who want to kill him. If you try to have a chat with them and convince them to let you go through various means, afaik the only result is that they start shooting at you both, which means you get a shotgun in the face and die immediately, faster than in the situation you mention above.

The best solution is to not talk to them at all and just shoot the leader in the face and then kill the other two. Which you only know after trying it first and reloading.

The amount of backtracking in Cordon is ridiculous, but it seems to be considerably less bad in Garbage so far, though partly because the Garbage map is not as fucking long and doesn't have a military checkpoint in the middle. I also think the map traversal is not as terrible because the maps are actually different and interesting and the anomalies are less visible and more dangerous, so you do have to stay careful.

Despite the weird-ass "modern" GUI and shortcomings mentioned it does feel like a return to classic Stalker in many ways after playing GAMMA, so I'm giving it a chance to see if it opens up after reaching the Bar.

 

[Ol' Willy]

THE QUEST DESIGN IS ATROCIOUS

• It took like 5-6 hours to get through the Cordon (more?). Due to all the fucking backtracking. Hilariously enough I leave the rookie camp FINALLY to go to Garbage, all the quests + story side quests are done - and then BAM! Right at the entrance to the garbage i get a sidequest to go all the way back to the rookie camp. No actual interesting stuff on the way back or anything, just literally run back and forth. Even NLC with all of its running around somehow kept it interesting for me.
• Some quests are so heavily scripted that you don't actually have any influence into what happens.
• Finally go to garbage and I get a quest that spawns me in front of two bandits with full assault weapons open firing on me. At that point I had to put the game down - not sure if i'll pick it up again.

This is why I don't play story mods anymore. Dialogues range from cringe to mediocre, plot ranges from cringe to tolerable, but quest design is almost always universally awful.

And of course the scripting, it either locks you solid on the given path or out of sequence action ruins the entire scrips order, softblocking you

Even NLC with all of its running around somehow kept it interesting for me.

NLC has a point to running around. It is designed so you will be pwned by anomalies or mutants while moving back and forth if you don't prepare accordingly and get careless. Of course, this gets tiresome after a while, but running through locations mostly devoid of threats is completely pointless

 

[V17]

Playing further, I do enjoy the little stories. But gameplay-wise, the quest design does not really get better. Still a lot of walking back and forth and quests that are just "go here and watch a cutscene".
Another weird-ass speciality is being knocked out in various ways as a part of the story. I'm only in Dark Valley, 4th map and 3rd chapter, and I've already been unconscious 4 times as a part of some quest. Apparently this goes on and you keep getting knocked out again and again.
Bonus points for another "get shot in the face immediately as the cutscene ends", unavoidable of course.

 

[Iucounu]

True Stalker

There is no A-Life.

 

[Ol' Willy]

GitHub blocked OpenXray

Not clear if GSC made the request or GitHub's own initiative

 

[V17]

They already denied it on twatter.

 

[Baron Dupek]

Another results of reds malding about S2?

 

[jebsmoker]

the buildo department has called me today... they told me: "jeb-sama.... oblivion lost remake 3.0 is HERE"

.... okay, it's not actually fully released - it's a public beta, but still, this is *huge* news for anyone who is into the original vision of STALKER

you can procure it here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/11RFIRu5LBI3Y8JBDxwcGWQmKKayzINdz/view

and the AI-done translation for it here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UZKDnNxojkUU1iKWEdXXI_SSoe9-dimo/view

this probably won't reach 'gold' status for several months - and it is largely unrefined, so expect bugs

also: i'm slowly working on a hand-written translation for Dester's Arsenal Mod, but after i finish and release that, i'm gonna dedicate my translation effort towards OLR 3.0

 

[V17]

I finished True Stalker. It looks great and it's a great feeling to walk through the reworked areas that evoke nostalgia and yet are sufficiently new and interesting through both new looks and new context, plus the one new overworld map is great as well. The authors focused more on things looking good than on realism, and it does often work, especially at night. Night in bloodsucker village was just gorgeous.
However gameplay-wise it's profoundly meh.

There's been a significant deserved pushback against people who call Anomaly or GAMMA the definitive Stalker experience, because those mods strip away too many things that made Stalker what it is, focus on the sandbox aspects and just make it into a game with considerably different fundaments than the trilogy. True Stalker has the same problem in the opposite direction. It strips away all the semi-openworld sandbox elements, any feeling of agency and A-Life and focuses on entirely linear story focused gameplay.

The overall story and world building isn't bad. But the quest design is mostly shit, so even if the story subjects of the quests are interesting (and they often are, both in the main quests and side quests that are numerous and often large), the gameplay is often close to "watch a cutscene, get teleported to a place, shoot a few enemies, watch a cutscene, end". At least in the mid to late game - early game doesn't teleport you anywhere and instead features a very boring amount of walking back and forth. There are no fast travel guides like in CS and CoP.

And while the story itself is fine and has good ideas, the execution is lacking imo. I only played the english translation, which is serviceable but not great (though I've heard that the writing isn't that great in russian either). There is a controversial decision where in about 2/3 of the game you suddenly swap characters and play as someone else for the rest of the game. I think I can understand what they were going for, but the context just didn't feel that well done. The overall message of the ending seems to be kind of "you don't always get a happy ending or even a catharsis because the zone and its inhabitants don't give a fuck about you", which is not a bad point at all, but for me personally it didn't really have an impact, ending felt more like "well, this is it I guess, okay bye".

From a technical standpoint, the game is incredibly polished. More polished than many commercial games. You can feel that a ton of work went into it. But as with the weird new inventory system, it feels like the work was sometimes misplaced.

edit: Oh, and as a part of the story you lose consciousness I think over 20 times through the whole game. Sometimes by getting shitfaced, sometimes by getting shot, sometimes completely nonsensically. Sure, you can knockout a trained military stalker in an exosuit with a single pistol-whip. Maybe they thought it was a funny running joke.

 

[Ol' Willy]

the buildo department has called me today... they told me: "jeb-sama.... oblivion lost remake 3.0 is HERE"

From the first glance it looks like the same 2.5 but with ubiquitous muh survival mechanics crammed all over the game

 

[Baron Dupek]

Seems like they entertain the old concept of undergound labs being connected with the series of massive series of tunnels

 

[jebsmoker]

i've finished a hand-written English translation for Dester's Arsenal Mod

before you ask 'why the fuck did you translate a mod from 2008' - this mod represents a major milestone in STALKER modding and is absolutely worth preserving and remembering

download it here and follow the instructions in the readme file:

https://mega.nz/file/taVT3bDQ#o9GMYiBNr62zDYJU-PNZv9kVGdpls422Y8ExjYBrdp0

now that this is done, i'm gonna start working on a translation for Oblivion Lost Remake 3.0

 

[HumanTotemPole]

i've finished a hand-written English translation for Dester's Arsenal Mod

before you ask 'why the fuck did you translate a mod from 2008' - this mod represents a major milestone in STALKER modding and is absolutely worth preserving and remembering

download it here and follow the instructions in the readme file:

https://mega.nz/file/taVT3bDQ#o9GMYiBNr62zDYJU-PNZv9kVGdpls422Y8ExjYBrdp0

now that this is done, i'm gonna start working on a translation for Oblivion Lost Remake 3.0

Truly is. Still have an old 1.2 archive from 2008 on an external HDD.

I was so hyped for an early RC I was checking for updates daily on the mod's GSC thread in a French internet cafe whilst on holiday.

 

[jebsmoker]

the old GSC forums are long-gone now sadly - you can only view them on archive.org now

i remember Kanyhalos hyping up his Oblivion Lost mod there, and i also remember him mentioning that he wanted to put music from World of Warcraft into it for whatever reason

 

[KeAShizuku]

Personally I'll just play vanilla with the community fixes and a few HD textures.

 

[HumanTotemPole]

the old GSC forums are long-gone now sadly - you can only view them on archive.org now

i remember Kanyhalos hyping up his Oblivion Lost mod there, and i also remember him mentioning that he wanted to put music from World of Warcraft into it for whatever reason

To be fair to Kany one of the old versions of Oblivion Lost I played remains the only S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series mod ever to get the health loss from bleeding/bandaging speed/bandage availability dynamic totally right for me. Random military spawns in the bar with bizarrely OP Saiga12s weren't so well judged.

Edit: he was a real old-fashioned type of modder you don't see that much anymore. The enthusiastic sperg with a fragmentary understanding of the game engine they are modifying and plenty of bad ideas but who occasionally gets something on point. Usually mechanically because they do love and tend to actually play their chosen game a lot.

 

[cretin]

So since I can't get NLC7 to work on linux for the life of me, I've committed to doing a Prosectors Project playthrough

So far, I'm really impressed by the engine and features that set it apart from the crowd. I'll do a more detailed report when I've gotten more hours into it,

 

[Baron Dupek]

Someone ported mobile (pre-Android/iPhone era) STALKER game to PC
https://alex1197.itch.io/pito

 

[jebsmoker]

https://www.moddb.com/mods/nlc7-he23/downloads

someone bothered to make a better, hand-revised translation for NLC 7 (although ChatGPT did most of the heavy lifting in this case)

sharing this here because it seems like the translation that everyone has been waiting for, more or less - AI-done translations aren't perfect, but they're getting better