Howdy Folks! Thanks for taking the time to watch this explanation video on each faction in the STALKER franchise. What's your favorite faction and why? I appreciate you! All the best!
And for your information, renegades are mainly ex-faction members or just rogue people in general, they are WAY worse then bandits, doing such horrid, horrific shit NOBODY accepts them. bandits, barely tolerate them at all
Renegades are a technical faction to be able to join the Bandits in the Depot in the Faction War against Loners Nice to find one more channel with Stalker Retrospecrive :)
Neat video, first video I saw from your channel and I must say its a neat & easy to understand your faction debrief/rundown. Here are some notes to each faction: Miliatry & Ecologist have these sub-faction people called either Eco-stalkers or Military stalkers that are more affiliated with them. Its quite unsure if they are provided Legal enterance (probably after some service & being a good asset). They are however in the ecologist/military faction but still do their job more closer to basic Loner duties. For eco-stalkers, it would be taking data or field research and you can find such a group at Yanov near the bunker, that will later get ambushed by a controller. For the Military stalkers, you can imagine the main protagonist from CoP Maj. D. , but he isnt as HOSTILE as any other military stalker is, due to them being now in the UA military and serving the cause which other stalkers dont see that welcoming. They either go undercover, if they wanna go to famous places like 100 Rad's bar or they grab their military provided Skat9 suit and rock the ZONE with it, providing scouting on safe paths and such stuff (sometimes snatching an artifact to sell it to provide funds for the local base commander if tasked to do so) Mercs are quite the odd bunch as they should be (to my knowledge) all easter european UA/RU/Belorus etc. speaking and professionals in the killing business. Their counterpart from west should have been the UNISG/ISG or UN/NATO forces, which were basically fully western and hate by all due to them being outsiders unwanted in the local area doing who knows what. note: ISG => international scientific group => western researchers UNISG => stalker anomaly faction of UN mercs that reorganized the group into a western secretive merc faction interested in documents (basically western mercs with no researchers anymore) NATO => like UA military but from the West, here to do the same as UNISG but they are NOT mercenaries, just professional soldiers - in the end, UNISG is just the best well known acronym for any western faction, due to the ISG armor existing in the ClearSky (game) files Freedom, Loners and Bandits share a common thing, they came to the ZONE to make money (Mercs too but they are not a point of my yappin here :D) While Loners are more honest and noble with their goals, mostly trying to get money as a poor lonley man to find an artifact that will get him a large sum of money to cure his daughter/son back on the mainland, bandits are there to take the money from people like him. They have done this before and they are in the ZONE because they either got sent here by their contacts or they fuc*ked up on the mainland and need a SECOND CHANCE on life as a thug. Now to my point => Freedom values the ZONE as a 2nd chance a LIFE in a lawfulles ZONE with no police and no rules, just pure anarchy. That portraied in the Clear Sky, these first Freedom members were just your basic Loners who did something wrong and had to bail, but still had their redemption in them, knowing they did nothing wrong and wanted just a 2nd chance at living and being in some group that would take them in, rather being a loner and getting robbed 24/7 xd In SoCh the group is more shady and seems filled with people of probably the same criminal past like the bandits, just dont openly talk about it (you can find & talk to the Freedom cannibal at their base....or well he talks to you haha). This boosts the faction combat power at the cost of making them look more anarchistic/partisan like & that just brings a bad name to the faction , making it almost look like Freedom is some neutral bandit faction. Duty & Military dont go hand in hand but its well known that high ranking Duty members have connections to some officers on the Mainland and get shipping of military grade gear for them, as you can find the downed chopper in SoCh "Red Forest" aka Radar (later renamed) Bandits are depicted amazingly, just if you wish to talk to borov, I think your best bet is either mod SoCh or play trough some old mod like Lost Alpha (I DO NOT RECOMMEND => its a walking simulator lmao) and you be able to get a different view on the entire SoCh game from some pre-launch game build experience. Renegades are just depicted weird imo, as if they are deserters, why they should wear the same armor/coats like the bandits? I understand that the game has this easy armor/color scheme for you to know your friend & foe, however for the renegades it seems kinda sad. I think it would make sense to see them wearing Duty, Freedom, Merc, Ecologist and other outfits (like zombified stalkers), more teardown as they lack any supplies (unlike the bandits who got their group Bosses to order stuff for them) and just chill in the swamps. Sad there isnt any mod about this. Imagine you are known to be the most scumbag faction and you dont fight that/try to exploit it by hiding your identity, you just wear some shitty black tracksuit and hide in swamps xD There is a HUGE debate on what is a Loner/Free stalker etc. In my opinion, if you come to the zone, you are NOT a Loner, as this implies you joined the ranks of the group called Loners (such in Clear Sky), you are a Free stalker (as is anyone called in the ZONE) and merely a tourist that is just factionless. You need to earn this right to join the faction. My point being that bandits have easier job picking on these lonley factionless rookies in the zone than on Loners, as Loners are a faction and therefore would go into some sort of faction X faction conflict between them, such is portraied in the Clear Sky games and at the garbage location in SoCh. Clear Sky faction is neat and to be TLDR: Its basically ductaping ecologist and duty factions together. They just wish to destroy the zone but actually use a brain before making any push to the center, while being underpowered they can still take on foes like monolith. The commanders of CS are also wanted by the UA military and therefore welcome the help from Loner recruits (that they trust ofc). Also its speculated that the Contractor in CoP plot is actually some Clear Sky commander like Lebedev, Suslov or Beanpolev, who survived and are now (like in the Clear Sky plot) using mercenaries to obtain said X lab documents to probably fight the C-Con their old way. Monolith were a faction before that was very friendly but still fanatical in belief the ZONE was created by aliens (something like the Hubologists from fallout lmap). They then marched into the center of the ZONE and when they either found the wishgranter OR crossed the brain scorcher, they got brainwashed at that time and turned into the hostile and well armed monolith members we know today, duing their biding for C-Con as their new masters disguised as the alien crystal called monolith. Just a sidenote, in SoCh you can see different variants of monolith fighters that look like zombified stalkers => its said that the brainscorchers has more settings to what to do with your brain . Some of them are: fry it and kill you, turn you into a zombie, brain wash you...but I speculate these SoCh zombie monolithans are something of a between product of this setting or well just more OVERCOOKED monolith members :D About the SIN faction, I think that they have a great concept and its a shame they are not in the plot. In mod games like Lost Alpha they are portraied very well (by storytelling and not gameplay wise, fu*k that walking simulator mod lmao) but in games like stalker anomaly they are SOMEHOW neutral with monolith? Which makes 0 sense as their creators were the C-Con and I bet they would want ANYONE from the SIN faction just dead, as they believe the ZONE is some sort of a GOD and you are in the garden of EDEN. Taking artifacts is like taking the apples from the forbidden tree and you are hurting the GODs (ZONA) creation. Funnily enough, it is true as the ZONE is alive and they are more of some takecares for her, like we got white bloodcells in our body, which is kinda wild and makes the faction even more valid to the story. I would like to appologise for my SPAM but I just wanted to open my mind and knowledge to you all. I am happy for any discussion on the topics & facts I posted, if you deem them false OR just straigh up bull*hit. Most of the stuff I know is by my self OR from Anomalous Dugout, which makes really great videos on the stalker games lore in depth. Anyway, have a good luck hunting stalkers :)
Reading over this now. Truly thank you for taking the time to write all of this down. This is why I make the videos I do, so we can share our shared knowledge of topics and games we enjoy!!
I know there's a glitch (for sure on the PS4 version) in SoC that let's you join the Freedom faction. It's pretty much game-breaking since it makes the Bandits neutral and Duty and the Ecologists hostile. Unfortunately, most bandits just have a single line of generic dialogue and Borov himself just doesn’t react to you.
Thank you so much for explaining this! Now I don’t feel bad about destroying the camp for the X lab key. It is interesting they named them and even had the option. Hope all is well!
it is not really a glitch - it is left in the OG game since the release even with patches :D you can join freedom on PC too without any mods which makes duty hostile, so going back to 100rads bar much harder but makes you having access to literaly best guns in the game and best armor
A campaign mode and a free stalker mode would be cool. Campaign being the canonical ending and free stalker being a work with a faction of your choice and get a “what if” ending. It would be a nightmare, but I think it would be fun. “Mercenaries mode.” 😂
Back when I played Shadow of Chernobyl on release in 2007 as a kid about to start high-school, I thought Freedom were the coolest. Almost 20 years in, I get what Duty are about, but I still remain a loner. Good strategy, as you can use some useful exploits - get Freedom to engage the hardcore Duty soldiers at the army warehouses and boom you've got a g36 which is adequate af to the very end of Shadow of Chernobyl.
Thank you so much for sharing this!! Absolutely! After all the trudging around in the early/mid game, picking up after a huge firefight always felt amazing, and pays off! First time I cleared the military with loners in Agroprom, I felt this too. Great source of easy ammo and weapons. Hope all is well!
i don;t know why but, your voice is really quiet but the clips u show of the gameplay are normal volume, so i get jumpscared by the volume of the video. Don't know if this is on my behalf but please try to fix this😁
Howdy! Thank you for taking the time to write this. I test on three devices. My Sony studio headphones, my Sonos surround sound, and a regular tv. I try to make sure balancing is across the board mixed and on my end with testing, didn’t think the clips were overly loud or the voice quiet, but that’s with me. What sound system are you using? Was there a specific clip that was too loud or was it in general? Thanks for taking the time to reply and for taking the time out of your day!
As a ukrainian it's been always weird for me to have a firefight with ukrainian military. In that moments S.T.A.L.K.E.R. becomes a Spec Ops: The Line in a lot of senses...
Oh man Spec Ops might be a game I have to do a retrospective on.. very haunting. Thank you so much for taking the time to write your perspective. I hope your family is okay, and you’re doing well!
Howdy Folks! Thanks for taking the time to watch this explanation video on each faction in the STALKER franchise. What's your favorite faction and why? I appreciate you!
All the best!
And for your information, renegades are mainly ex-faction members or just rogue people in general, they are WAY worse then bandits, doing such horrid, horrific shit NOBODY accepts them. bandits, barely tolerate them at all
Thank you!!!
Source for that first part?
Renegades are a technical faction to be able to join the Bandits in the Depot in the Faction War against Loners
Nice to find one more channel with Stalker Retrospecrive :)
Much appreciated! Very excited I started to write the clear Sky retrospective! Hope all is well and thanks for taking the time to comment!
Neat video, first video I saw from your channel and I must say its a neat & easy to understand your faction debrief/rundown. Here are some notes to each faction:
Miliatry & Ecologist have these sub-faction people called either Eco-stalkers or Military stalkers that are more affiliated with them. Its quite unsure if they are provided Legal enterance (probably after some service & being a good asset). They are however in the ecologist/military faction but still do their job more closer to basic Loner duties. For eco-stalkers, it would be taking data or field research and you can find such a group at Yanov near the bunker, that will later get ambushed by a controller. For the Military stalkers, you can imagine the main protagonist from CoP Maj. D. , but he isnt as HOSTILE as any other military stalker is, due to them being now in the UA military and serving the cause which other stalkers dont see that welcoming. They either go undercover, if they wanna go to famous places like 100 Rad's bar or they grab their military provided Skat9 suit and rock the ZONE with it, providing scouting on safe paths and such stuff (sometimes snatching an artifact to sell it to provide funds for the local base commander if tasked to do so)
Mercs are quite the odd bunch as they should be (to my knowledge) all easter european UA/RU/Belorus etc. speaking and professionals in the killing business. Their counterpart from west should have been the UNISG/ISG or UN/NATO forces, which were basically fully western and hate by all due to them being outsiders unwanted in the local area doing who knows what.
note:
ISG => international scientific group => western researchers
UNISG => stalker anomaly faction of UN mercs that reorganized the group into a western secretive merc faction interested in documents (basically western mercs with no researchers anymore)
NATO => like UA military but from the West, here to do the same as UNISG but they are NOT mercenaries, just professional soldiers
- in the end, UNISG is just the best well known acronym for any western faction, due to the ISG armor existing in the ClearSky (game) files
Freedom, Loners and Bandits share a common thing, they came to the ZONE to make money (Mercs too but they are not a point of my yappin here :D)
While Loners are more honest and noble with their goals, mostly trying to get money as a poor lonley man to find an artifact that will get him a large sum of money to cure his daughter/son back on the mainland, bandits are there to take the money from people like him. They have done this before and they are in the ZONE because they either got sent here by their contacts or they fuc*ked up on the mainland and need a SECOND CHANCE on life as a thug.
Now to my point => Freedom values the ZONE as a 2nd chance a LIFE in a lawfulles ZONE with no police and no rules, just pure anarchy.
That portraied in the Clear Sky, these first Freedom members were just your basic Loners who did something wrong and had to bail, but still had their redemption in them, knowing they did nothing wrong and wanted just a 2nd chance at living and being in some group that would take them in, rather being a loner and getting robbed 24/7 xd
In SoCh the group is more shady and seems filled with people of probably the same criminal past like the bandits, just dont openly talk about it (you can find & talk to the Freedom cannibal at their base....or well he talks to you haha). This boosts the faction combat power at the cost of making them look more anarchistic/partisan like & that just brings a bad name to the faction , making it almost look like Freedom is some neutral bandit faction.
Duty & Military dont go hand in hand but its well known that high ranking Duty members have connections to some officers on the Mainland and get shipping of military grade gear for them, as you can find the downed chopper in SoCh "Red Forest" aka Radar (later renamed)
Bandits are depicted amazingly, just if you wish to talk to borov, I think your best bet is either mod SoCh or play trough some old mod like Lost Alpha (I DO NOT RECOMMEND => its a walking simulator lmao) and you be able to get a different view on the entire SoCh game from some pre-launch game build experience.
Renegades are just depicted weird imo, as if they are deserters, why they should wear the same armor/coats like the bandits? I understand that the game has this easy armor/color scheme for you to know your friend & foe, however for the renegades it seems kinda sad. I think it would make sense to see them wearing Duty, Freedom, Merc, Ecologist and other outfits (like zombified stalkers), more teardown as they lack any supplies (unlike the bandits who got their group Bosses to order stuff for them) and just chill in the swamps. Sad there isnt any mod about this. Imagine you are known to be the most scumbag faction and you dont fight that/try to exploit it by hiding your identity, you just wear some shitty black tracksuit and hide in swamps xD
There is a HUGE debate on what is a Loner/Free stalker etc. In my opinion, if you come to the zone, you are NOT a Loner, as this implies you joined the ranks of the group called Loners (such in Clear Sky), you are a Free stalker (as is anyone called in the ZONE) and merely a tourist that is just factionless. You need to earn this right to join the faction. My point being that bandits have easier job picking on these lonley factionless rookies in the zone than on Loners, as Loners are a faction and therefore would go into some sort of faction X faction conflict between them, such is portraied in the Clear Sky games and at the garbage location in SoCh.
Clear Sky faction is neat and to be TLDR: Its basically ductaping ecologist and duty factions together.
They just wish to destroy the zone but actually use a brain before making any push to the center, while being underpowered they can still take on foes like monolith. The commanders of CS are also wanted by the UA military and therefore welcome the help from Loner recruits (that they trust ofc).
Also its speculated that the Contractor in CoP plot is actually some Clear Sky commander like Lebedev, Suslov or Beanpolev, who survived and are now (like in the Clear Sky plot) using mercenaries to obtain said X lab documents to probably fight the C-Con their old way.
Monolith were a faction before that was very friendly but still fanatical in belief the ZONE was created by aliens (something like the Hubologists from fallout lmap). They then marched into the center of the ZONE and when they either found the wishgranter OR crossed the brain scorcher, they got brainwashed at that time and turned into the hostile and well armed monolith members we know today, duing their biding for C-Con as their new masters disguised as the alien crystal called monolith.
Just a sidenote, in SoCh you can see different variants of monolith fighters that look like zombified stalkers => its said that the brainscorchers has more settings to what to do with your brain . Some of them are: fry it and kill you, turn you into a zombie, brain wash you...but I speculate these SoCh zombie monolithans are something of a between product of this setting or well just more OVERCOOKED monolith members :D
About the SIN faction, I think that they have a great concept and its a shame they are not in the plot. In mod games like Lost Alpha they are portraied very well (by storytelling and not gameplay wise, fu*k that walking simulator mod lmao) but in games like stalker anomaly they are SOMEHOW neutral with monolith? Which makes 0 sense as their creators were the C-Con and I bet they would want ANYONE from the SIN faction just dead, as they believe the ZONE is some sort of a GOD and you are in the garden of EDEN. Taking artifacts is like taking the apples from the forbidden tree and you are hurting the GODs (ZONA) creation. Funnily enough, it is true as the ZONE is alive and they are more of some takecares for her, like we got white bloodcells in our body, which is kinda wild and makes the faction even more valid to the story.
I would like to appologise for my SPAM but I just wanted to open my mind and knowledge to you all. I am happy for any discussion on the topics & facts I posted, if you deem them false OR just straigh up bull*hit. Most of the stuff I know is by my self OR from Anomalous Dugout, which makes really great videos on the stalker games lore in depth.
Anyway, have a good luck hunting stalkers :)
Reading over this now. Truly thank you for taking the time to write all of this down. This is why I make the videos I do, so we can share our shared knowledge of topics and games we enjoy!!
Been looking forward to this, enjoy the STALKER videos!
Hope you enjoy! It was a lot of fun to make! Wishing you the best, and I appreciate you taking the time to comment this!
I just finished watching the mutants explained, saw you referenced the factions and saw this right after. :D
Thank you so much for taking the time to watch the videos! I truly appreciate it! Hope you enjoy!!
I know there's a glitch (for sure on the PS4 version) in SoC that let's you join the Freedom faction. It's pretty much game-breaking since it makes the Bandits neutral and Duty and the Ecologists hostile.
Unfortunately, most bandits just have a single line of generic dialogue and Borov himself just doesn’t react to you.
Thank you so much for explaining this! Now I don’t feel bad about destroying the camp for the X lab key. It is interesting they named them and even had the option. Hope all is well!
it is not really a glitch - it is left in the OG game since the release even with patches :D
you can join freedom on PC too without any mods
which makes duty hostile, so going back to 100rads bar much harder
but makes you having access to literaly best guns in the game and best armor
@@Karti200 thank you for the explanation!
Yep can confirm accidentally joined freedom i my first playthrough so i had to start all over again, welcome to the zone.
A campaign mode and a free stalker mode would be cool. Campaign being the canonical ending and free stalker being a work with a faction of your choice and get a “what if” ending.
It would be a nightmare, but I think it would be fun.
“Mercenaries mode.” 😂
If stalker were an MMO : )
Back when I played Shadow of Chernobyl on release in 2007 as a kid about to start high-school, I thought Freedom were the coolest. Almost 20 years in, I get what Duty are about, but I still remain a loner. Good strategy, as you can use some useful exploits - get Freedom to engage the hardcore Duty soldiers at the army warehouses and boom you've got a g36 which is adequate af to the very end of Shadow of Chernobyl.
Thank you so much for sharing this!! Absolutely! After all the trudging around in the early/mid game, picking up after a huge firefight always felt amazing, and pays off!
First time I cleared the military with loners in Agroprom, I felt this too. Great source of easy ammo and weapons.
Hope all is well!
thank you
Thank you for taking the time out of your day to watch the video and comment. Hope all is well!
i don;t know why but, your voice is really quiet but the clips u show of the gameplay are normal volume, so i get jumpscared by the volume of the video. Don't know if this is on my behalf but please try to fix this😁
Howdy! Thank you for taking the time to write this.
I test on three devices. My Sony studio headphones, my Sonos surround sound, and a regular tv. I try to make sure balancing is across the board mixed and on my end with testing, didn’t think the clips were overly loud or the voice quiet, but that’s with me.
What sound system are you using? Was there a specific clip that was too loud or was it in general? Thanks for taking the time to reply and for taking the time out of your day!
As a ukrainian it's been always weird for me to have a firefight with ukrainian military. In that moments S.T.A.L.K.E.R. becomes a Spec Ops: The Line in a lot of senses...
Oh man Spec Ops might be a game I have to do a retrospective on.. very haunting.
Thank you so much for taking the time to write your perspective. I hope your family is okay, and you’re doing well!
ok video