Hey guys the whole Stalker Series is on sale right now! If you were thinking about taking a trip to the zone, now's the time! Stalker SoC - af.gog.com/game/stalker_shadow_of_chernobyl?as=1672895661 Stalker Clear Sky - af.gog.com/game/stalker_clear_sky?as=1672895661 Stalker CoP - af.gog.com/game/stalker_call_of_pripyat?as=1672895661
@@IndieGamerMonkey not sure if it's specifically provaaks but it's definitely at least got a similar mod built in. Gunplay in recent versions is very different than I remember in old versions and certain things he mentions in the video like the long distance gunshot effects from provaaks are now included.
25:00 GSC is actually completely aware of anomaly (and by extension most popular mods), and they _love_ it. Really keeps my hopes up for STALKER 2 since they like what pretty much is the fans’ answer to that so much.
Yeah a lot of RUclips coverage of Anomaly lately, and thus STALKER 2 gets free advertising. I have high hopes too, at the very least they have already nailed the atmosphere.
I'd prefer it be a little more of an rpg, I'd like more social options with branching outcomes etc, but the gameplay is about as good as it's going to get.
GSC will not take it down just like they didn't take down Lost Alpha or Call of Chernobyl. They know that most of their success was also down to the modding community being so passionate about their games and unlike Bethesda or Take 2 they're not interested in alienating those that made Stalker what it is today. You are however correct in assuming that they're technically re-releasing parts of code that belongs to GSC without a license to do so (even if it's for free). However, GSC has been known to be more than friendlier with modders, to the point that they even supplied the Lost Alpha team with assets and other things that they needed to make that game/mod work. I believe their official stance on re-releasing the engine and the assets is that they will not legally pursue anybody as long as they make it for free AND don't accept any monetary donation in return for their efforts. They have to be 100% free projects. As long as these "simple" requirements are met, modders are good to go. Plus, Anomaly technically runs on the CoP engine, but it is actually a custom build of the X-Ray engine made by modders, so effectively the people that made that custom engine took CoP completely apart, figured out how it worked, reverse engineered most of it, fixed the billions of bugs that were present (or as many as they could, anyway) and came out with what served as the backbone of later total conversions like Call of Chernobyl or, indeed, Anomaly.
Anomaly runs on the Monolith engine. Which is an overhauled version of CoP's later engine. It's 64bit native so the game runs EXTREMELY well. The lack of crashes is almost...heresy.
If you concider, that former GSC Gameworld employees helped developing mods like Lost Alpha, it's safe to say that the devs of the official releases and the modding community have reached a state of symbiosis
you gotta remember that GSC gameworld came onto the scene with an illegal remake of warcraft 2 called warcraft 2000, i think they remember their roots too well lol
Yeah I gotta give it to GSC, they are way too cool about their IP and source. It's been like 15 years so I doubt they are losing any money, if anything it just pumps up stalker 2 -which will no doubt pull some influence from the modding community.
The only game where I can smoke a pack without getting lung cancer. All this while in the middle of gunfight, surrounded by Monolith, and listening to Viktor Tsoi on radio. This is some special immersion.
One of my favorite things about the “Stalker Twitter” is when I’ve just finished taking out a pack of dogs or something and someone pops up on the radio saying “I just saw a stalker kill a couple of dogs near the warehouse” The moment you realize that not only someone heard you shoot at something but they WATCHED you do it is both really cool and and panic inducing. You better believe I started doing 360’s trying to find the guy
What would be a nice touch could be hearing about some of your previous heroics being laid out as urban legends from chaps at a campfire or bumping into guys you helped out in a tight spot going nuts to see you again and shouting about it to other stalkers. That could be really immersive.
Anomaly is how i got to learn about S.T.A.L.K.E.R,the quality was soo insane to this day i can't believe this is a MOD,the amount of love and care put into this thing is out of this world,i can't stop playing it to this very day,its one of those games that will forever be a MUST in my PC this is easily the best MOD i've ever seen in my 23 years of gaming
I haven't played Anomaly in a year but I'm not going to delete it from my hard drive. Now I'm playing DayZ because I'm looking for Anomaly like games all the time
Same. Anomaly was my first Stalker experience and it made me buy the 3 OGs and play through them all. I still play Anomaly, but I also wanted a different Stalker experience in regards to story telling, so I'm currently playing Lost Alpha DC.
in my 25 years of gaming, when i decide it is time to format the pc and hook up everything from scratch, anomaly is the first game i install on my disk, and definitely still today the most satisfying game i play among all the games i have (and i have a ton of fps games)...the only thing i get bored with vanilla anomaly is the lack of action, but i solved it with a mod of my own, now i can have a zone that has more than 2000 stalkers/mutants present, spawns 3 times a day, and you never know what is coming next, if it is a controller, a pack of zombies, a squad of enemy stalkers, you really never know, you can be alive and 10 seconds after be dead...that is the fun of stalker anomaly to me...no cod fps style where you shoot 100 enemies and do not die even once, it is possible in anomaly to shoot 30 or 40 enemies dead, i've done it many times, even with starting protective gear which is shit, but i never get to shoot that many enemies without dying a few times trying to shoot them all...i've had times where was cornered by a lot of enemies, the most fun i've had is when i am short on ammo and eventually have to switch to a few different weapons only to continue shooting at them...it is so satisfying, i only have 10 rounds of .45 ammo, 20 rounds of 9x19mm ammo, 14 rounds of shotgun buckshot ammo, etc....only stalker makes me do that..
No offense, and I'm being serious this time and not using it to mock you, but you don't play a lot of mods. There are better mods out there that could do the same thing anomaly does, gameplay wise at least, but better. Some in the same community. The mod has a very large amount of game design problems and a lack of content.
Been going through this game recently: -I've been shot in the back 3 times while looting, by the AI, who seems to be at least decent at sneaking up on me, one of those times a bandit with a shotgun tried it and managed to point blank miss me, that was pretty funny since he had to reload as I turned around. I'm pretty sure this is the only game that I've been dynamically sneak attacked by AI in and I'm glad it's a thing, I've also killed enemies by sneaking up on them and stabbing them. -Got killed by mutants that seem to understand that I have a gun and that they need to run from cover to cover and zig zag as they close in to kill me. I've also learned to put obstacles and elevation between me and mutants, since not doing so could result in instant death. (Mutants in my game are common.) -I lowered my PDA after checking the map only to see a Chimera for a split second flying at my screen, didn't hear a single sound other than rain before the leap roar and death. -Got a grenade tossed at my feet while in cover multiple times. -Have seen AI comment on the "Stalker social network" about how the upgrade, for their gun, was expensive but worth it, as I was going to upgrade my gear, only to see the guy, who commented, exiting the shop, making me wonder if that's how upgrades pop up on some guns I find on enemies, since all factions have their own technicians that can do upgrades. -Had the military AI call in a chopper to kill a pig. -Had the rookie village massacred by military, maybe because they shot a soldier outside their camp, and he managed to scream for help before dying, which the AI in the area seem to respond to, not sure if based on proximity to the guy that asks for help only, or if also based off of a personality they are given, some stalkers will refuse to trade with you regardless of faction relations, while others will, so maybe some will help their faction members, while others won't bother helping their fellow stalkers. -Heard and witnessed multiple gunfights between factions happening all over the zone with decent frequency. -Witnessed the "Stalker social network" leader board change as, I'm guessing, stalkers I've never seen in the zone, died off screen and got replaced by the next person in line ... supposedly there's around 820 Human AI running around the game world, which I'm guessing constantly get replaced with newcomers once dead, making the zone pretty lively. -Have seen stalkers talk about finding an artefact and others complain they never find anything on the "Stalker social network", tho I've yet to follow a group around to see if they do go artefact hunting in anomalies, but since they go in the store when they talk about getting upgrades they might also go in anomalies when they talk about finding artefacts. -Have seen the AI walk up to fires and light them before sitting down, which makes me consider that there might be NPCs near by, if I find a fire burning with no one around. -And have had stalkers talk about a very large number of zombies closing in on a location after a psy-storm, request help to kill the incoming hoard, and then multiple stalkers from across the zone sounded off on weather they're close enough to help, if they'll make their way over, while others commented on weather they're ok or not with killing off their former faction members. And while roaming the area I did run into a large group of zombies. A-Life AI really shines through in this mod in many ways and the "Stalker social network" makes it even better. They really make the world feel more active/alive. I wish more games would try this, it seems when ever something does happen in other RPGs, it's always some kind of scripted sequence, rather than a dynamic event brought on by AI doing their own thing, independent of the player and the player is free to interact with it.
“Got killed by mutants that seem to understand that I have a gun and that they need to run from cover to cover and zig zag as they close in to kill me.” My god, so I’m not the only one who thinks that! They seem to know when to charge me is when I’m reloading my gun!
@@sebastianpost7237 Recently had a PsySucker kill me with hit and run tactics. I loaded in and ran up to a spot that was hard to reach and then ... nothing, silence, not a peep. I looked around. Nothing. I crawled down from my spot, and tried to make a run for it, only to have a shock anomaly go off right next to me, like 3 seconds after I ran from my spot. It was the PsySucker. It looks like it sat somewhere stalking me, waiting for me to get down. It didn't make the growl noises it normally makes while attacking, it didn't use its power, it just waited until it could reach me. The AI certainly seems to manage and make some mutants a real threat by the looks of things. Another big one is chimeras. From what I've noticed, if you don't see them, but they see you, they will try to stay in your blind spots until they can get to you. I was going to kill a merc for a mission, and was sneaking around, only to hear a few light taps behind me, as I turned it was sitting in the middle of the road in leap range and insta killed me. Reloaded, looked behind me, nothing. Walked a meter, turned around, nothing, a second later, it kills me from behind a gain. It ran AROUND the wall, and through a hole in a fence to get to my back when I was looking behind me. I finally got it when I put my back to a wall looking at the general area where it was at, it looks like it tried to rush me once it couldn't get a sneak attack going. AI seems pretty sneaky.
Oh yeah, the AI for Mercs, Military and Monolith is particularly fun to engage. They'll keep firing from a distance to keep you in cover while someone else will throw a grenade to where you are (thankfully announcing it out loud) to get you out of that cover and right into their fire, while yet another guy will circle around you and then walk up slowly behind you while you're busy and shoot you point blank in the back. Several times I died after thinking I took out a unit of Military dudes but missed that one guy that took the long way around and just quietly came up behind me while I was checking corpses, put a nice burst in me, and I was gone. They're also great when you try to be sneaky - they spread out and carefully go towards where they assume you're shooting from when they see one of their squad dropped, if they hear your noise, they try to find you and if you can avoid their like of sight and keep quiet you can circle around them, but even suppressed guns make noise (as they should, especially sniper rifles), so they will eventually pinpoint you. If new ones arrive from their base in response to the shooting, they won't immediately know where you are if you don't expose your position.
Yeah they actually do look for, and take artifacts if they announced it on the PDA Net then they will have it on them if they die, Unless if they make it to a trader and sell it. Since they also can interact buy and sell with traders. I remember seeing some Merc's at the Merc base going up to Dushman I believe it was? The main trader and waiting for a bit then talking about discounts etc.
I'm a "veteran" of this series. Played all three games on release and have sunk an unhealthy amount of time in this series. Haven't played it for some time. Your vids made me put the download on for this one Thanks for the vid
As an alternative to Provak's(Which is kinda jank even 4 stalker) Id recommend you get the BaS, sound overhaul (with one of the BaS sound replacer mods that integrate S.O. weapon sounds into BaS weapons), Hollywood FX and whatever addons installed b4 you start I also recommend the g36, saiga, mp7, and SVD model replacers the g36 ones are beautiful and add new variants like the g36c,k,and I and some have multiple sight options that can be switched with the grenade launcher button like the BaS weapons and the model replacers work without starting a new game as long as you don't have those guns on you or in a stash anywhere and they should work with provak's.
Honestly dude, these retrospectives are _such_ high quality. Sure it's a niche field perhaps but that just makes these all the more precious to S.T.A.L.K.E.R fans. Genuine thanks
I just have to tell my Azazel mod short story since you mentioned controlling a stalker that you could have already met. Start with me in the truck cemetery, random bandit who wakes up to getting ambushed by an army squad and obviously getting killed. Take over some random loner who's chilling by a campfire with two buddies of his not too far from the ambush. While getting my bearings we're set upon by a huge swarm of blind dogs and pseudodogs and in the panic accidently put a bullet through one of my buddies heads, the other immediately turning on me causing me to run away and blindly stumble into an anomaly proceeding to get torn apart. From there I took over a body of one of the army guys from earlier, thinking I now had it pretty easy we set off for the exit, armed to the teeth I figured we wouldn't run into any issues. Not even 50 meters out we're set upon by a brood of bloodsuckers, already weakened from the bandit fight we made easy prey and my last sight there was of my new squad dropping and a mess of tentacles closing around my neck. Fade from black and I'm looking at a bloodbath, lots of dead dogs and a dead person that I'm standing over. I've now just gone full circle and come back to the loner I left to fend for himself after I brained his buddy and got myself turned into a tube of toothpaste. Where chaos had taken all of my previous bodies and everyone around them, this sole undergeared and near dead loner survived and took about 10 dogs down with just a pistol and grief. Dude was an absolute chad and I couldn't bring myself to play that save anymore because I didn't feel like he deserved a fate similar to everyone else.
Those glowing electrical spheres are actually a type of anomaly; sort of like a rogue lighting strike, it is essentially one of psi storm discharges without the storm.
I loved them!! They would sometimes spawn inside of camps. I'd hear the noise and have to close out of the trader's inventory real quick to make sure it wasn't about to fry me.
@@AvalancheReviews Me too! One time I spent 10 minutes trying to climb this tree in the red forest, because someone threw a backpack up on one of the higher branches; just threw it up there like a pair of sneakers dangling from some power lines! Anyway, I finally got up to the branch and was just about to open the stash when one those whoring anomalies started charging up RIGHT OVER THE TREE lol. Even though I jumped off the tree, it discharged and turned me and the tree into popcorn. I quickload, climb the tree again, finally get to the stash and open it, expecting to see a goddamn Full-Empty artifact, and what'd I get? BEANS. 2 cans of beans, a half-eaten chocolate bar and some smokes! Ain't that the fuckinest thing you've ever heard? 😅 I watched your whole Stalker series and loved it! These are my favorite games too! I played Clear Sky first in 2009 and I was hooked ever since! Great work my man, I might just watch them all again!
The moment I fell in love with anomaly is when there's an emission and I had a guitar I looted from a bandit. Waiting by the campfire with other stalkers and playing the guitar is an entire mood.
Whats great about Anomaly is the Immersion, Being upstairs in the merc stronghold in Deadcity while it rains and hearing a stalker play the guitar in the background, Truly amazing.
WHAT! You took out mutants? WTF, that's the most enjoyable part! Getting caught at night in some run-down shack by a horde of bloodsuckers with your ammo and nvg/flashlight batteries running out is the most exhilarating feeling I've experienced in a game in a good while.
Dang it man, I just got started with STALKER. And now you are throwing the mods at me! Appreciate it though. All the talk about the series finally got me to get my PC working again and purchase these games.
If you ask the Clear Sky leader about how did they survive, he will tell you that when the major attack on the CPP was launched by Scar and the original leaders, many of the Clear Sky members were wandering the Zone on errands and patrol, unable to make it back in time to participate in the attack, and so they survived and banded together to maintain the faction even if it became a shadow of itself. As for the mutants? I understand where your oppinion is coming from. Firefights in the game is much more exciting. But its the presence of such lethal mutants that will make you need to carry exchange underwear with you. The fact that they are soo harsh and agressive will keep the players on their toes for damn sure. Most mutants have some sort of sound cue too and it will add insane immersion. Like when I was sneaking my way through the vehicle graveyard and I kept hearing odd noises that I did not recognize. The noises kept going and going until my nerves were busted and I climbed on top of an old BTR just to have the highground and relative safety. I did not recognize the mutants because a bunch of mutants in Anomaly never made it to the full games and they were restored from the files. Anomaly carried over the insane immersion of the STALKER games. I was afraid to go out during the nights until I could afford a proper nightvision which timed my adventures from dawn till dusk. My planned explorations were often had to be called off because I ran into something that drained my supplies or forced me to detour. Without noticing it, I was roleplaying. I developped an ingame "life". I planned my trips. I rationed my supplies. I always weighted the profits of my adventures based on if I could repair my gear and still had leftover money to add to my wallet. Its magical.
Bruh, my first and current play of a Stalker game. Vanilla Anomaly, mutant hunter. Started out with the basic TOZ-34 and so far have upgraded to the MP-153. Mutants are only hard if you let them get the drop on you. Turn your music down to 50% and keep an ear out and you will know about them before they know about you. Also I dont know if many people know this, but Garbage is a money making heaven if you want to get into mutant/artifact hunting. Sleep in Garbage, hunt artifacts, hunt mutants (Taking quests from the butcher. Not part quests tho, they take too long.), sell parts, head to science lab, sell artifacts, kill mutants near lab, sell those parts to butcher, sleep in Garbage, repeat.
Been playing this for about a year alone with no extra mods and I can say it quickly became one of my fav games of all time. I can’t get the other mods to work and I know my pc can handle it just don’t know how to. So glad you covered this and I recommended this vid to a friend I’m trying to get into it.
I love that you explained the settings and how you can tweak the game to be as punishing or as easy as youd like. Anomaly is a true chernobyl sandbox. I love turning on Debug mode and running around as Monolith with god mode wiping out the entire zone.
I have been looking for a video like this. I recently discovered stalker during the pandemic so I got to experience everything fresh with no nostalgia and I’m so glad I found stalker. It has become one of my favorite ips and seeing all the love the modding community has given these games is truly amazing.
YES, I am so incredibly happy that you're covering anomaly. With all of these stalker reviews, I have been entertained every second of the way. Great work man!
When i found about this game i was hooked for months. The freedom of the world AND the settings customization (you can make the right difficulty for you) it's what makes this a perfect Apocalyptic Survival game. Besides the ton of customization you can do in vanilla Anomaly, you can always install mods for everything else. Never played any STALKER original games (i know i should) but have them in my steam library. I sold my PC a couple of months ago and if there is a game i miss the most is this one.
It's kinda amazing that no "real" devs had the idea to stitch together their last few games and adding some new content for something like an "epic edition"
Not really amazing, GSC shut down for several years after the STALKER games were finished. STALKER, as an IP, was kinda in limbo for a long time, which is possibly part of why there's so many mods for the games. We weren't going to get a new one so the community basically decided to make the best out of what we had. Now GSC is back and they're making STALKER 2, so we'll see how that goes. Hopefully it's even more mod-friendly than the first 3 games were because the STALKER community has proven it can make some truly amazing stuff, I'm sure even if STALKER 2 turns out to be a flop the community can still turn it into something outstanding.
I'm glad I jumped right into Anomaly as a first-timer to the series, on hard difficulty and lots of tweaks. It's a challenge I haven't had in years but also as you perfectly put it, is very rewarding for it. After 30+ mods ontop of that this game is just blowing my mind, each day again. Thank your for this series. Very entertaining and looking forward to your next ones!
Great video, wasn't expecting you to cover Anomaly glad you did. I'd also suggest leaving a link to Mod Organizer 2, it's the best tool for adding mods to Anomaly, keeps your main gamedata folder intact. And...One thing I feel is worth mentioning... Provak's can lead to a lot of conflicts with other mods. If the game starts crashing after adding mods on top of it, look there for the problems.
This is one of those channels that, whenever I see the subscriber count, I do a little spit take - like how the hell does this not have a million subscribers by now? Happens every time.
A man like me is fully dedicated to the hardcore stalker experience where one mistake would make you die. With a variety of mods such as "The Body Health System Mod" Adds head, torso, arms and legs health system. instead of just having to heal one part of your body youll need to ensure all your limbs are in check. And another mod for realism is "Anomaly magazine redux" which makes you have to actually load in bullets into your magazine. This game has so much more you can do with it i highly recommend. Its very fun and you can spend hours into it
It really speaks volumes about just how perfect Anomaly (and the base Stalker series ofc) is, I completed the whole main storyline without ever enabling the fast-travel system and despite it increasing the time and back-and-forth running tenfold (I also wanted the perfect gear), it never fely like a chore. I only use fast travel during my UNISG playthrough, as it feels more appropriate to play like a series of Splinter Cell-like missions than the hardcore sandbox experience of the other factions.
im super new to the series just got about halfway through soc but this game rlly has me falling in love its such a refined experence that stays pretty faithful to what i have played of the series so far and i love it i wish i had found these games much earlier in life
Just started playing my first ever stalker game (call of pripyat) and I love that it doesn't explain anything. Makes me feel like I am back in titles like gothic which just doesn't explain anything, throws you in and leaves you.
Provak is not really recommended due to the issues you've mentioned. If you really want a modpack, Escape From Pripyat is the the really recommended one. It runs much smoother and stable, all addon incompatibilities are addressed, and has lot less bugs, if any.
Thanks for rec. New to the game and Provak looked jank af, and I'm not really sure what benefits it has other than too many guns to possibly use. I've heard enemies can be bullet spongey though without some kind of rebalancing?
@@57precision hope you are having fun already. Yeah they can be quite bullet spongy due to armor in mid game but late game you have enough money for AP ammo
Big note, Avalanche, There is a modpack named Escape from Pripyat for Anomaly, and the 3.0 update is coming soon. Its the best modpack I have ever tried to play in any game, you should try it...better warn you its hardcore as fuck from health based on body part to the Magazine system
A bit sad to hear that "stalker twitter" feat assigned to some other mod rather than AMK - the grandfather of most of global mods, that invented this dynamic news feed and offline A-life that was fueling it, also proper sleeping bag implementation and many other features that are now considered norm. It was such a strong and stable foundation, that eventually vanilla + AMK was considered a new vanilla and almost any other global mod later was by default including it into its core somewhere.
Jared I just want to say, it's always great to see people get into stalker and the free play mods, here's to hoping this video series has given many people a brand new discovery in the world of gaming
I sure hope so. I've receive a lot of comments on other videos saying I got them to play a Stalker game for the first time, and it's the coolest feeling.
@@AvalancheReviews excellent! While I've got your attention man I know you love anomaly but consider checking out Call of the Zone, the late doctor x's magnum opus version of call of chernobyl haha.
Anomaly is a great mod, but needs more story backed play. The freeplay is nice but it gets sort of aimless at times. If anything Lost Alpha needs a video. That mod is probably imo the best reimagining of the first game. It felt truly complete; as where Anomaly feels it will never be complete.
@@joshuakimmich9536 maps were too big for their own good. For a game with lots of backtracking there is nothing worse than running back and forth on an empty map.
@@Zeon081 it's only empty because devs didn't bother with setting up the AI grid which is actually a crazy amount of work. If it did, I'd pick LA maps over the current ones anytime
I feel like anomaly is placeholder, it it updates all the systems I don't see why you can't have the original campaign.. in fact I'm kind of waiting until that happens, I'd much rather replay that in anomaly than otherwise.. especially when this is there and everything's so close together and what not.. but at the same time this is this is kind of placeholder project cuz we have the sequel coming soon, and it does a lot of the things and and I think it's it's really a good way to start introducing people, unfortunately that also means you're not interesting people to the original campaign, which I actually really liked although that would be a tough sell on this modern age, like even I have trouble going through dialogue boxes anymore. Still, even back then when dialog boxes were definitely the exception not the rule at that point, the atmosphere for this game made up for it in spades, there was very hard to not feel like you were a part of that whole world, and given that the Ubisoft model basically has no actual context whatsoever to 99% of what it does.. maybe this is good to get people that are new into this thing, but they are used to those cinematics that you know pretend to have like some sort of vehicle for your random fucking automatically generated responding bots multiplayer map in the guise of a single player map that is now the concept of open world that we live with and are stuck with it seems, who would have thunk that every game now would be an open world game, and it would be a bad thing fucking monkeys paw right.... We were so desperate for nonlinear games back then, and then when prices came out we're like yeah this is the future and even crisis sucking was like no this is not the future we just did this to fuck with y'all at least that's what I'm assuming at this point cuz either somebody got possessed by a malicious Spirit or something like that it critic or something but they did a fucking 180 and burned the PC bridge on the way out, and I really understand like I think one of the arguments is the piracy thing it's like fuck, it's always been a thing but that could have died out a long time ago with the prevalation of steam and sales and like your this is always forcing it to come back around when everything sucks there's no demos anymore and the business model is to get people to buy the thing a year in advance because you've branded them into their cult and people are stupid nowadays on a mass scale that at least they pretended to hide back in the old days, LOL I have a sneaking suspicion they were just as dumb they just had shame back then LOL. either way price is sold more on the PC than crisis 2 ever sold on the console so like I said in one of my other posts on here fuck you cry tech, I'm so happy that there's a stalker too that might possibly happen I hope it's I hope it's a stalker game I hope it really is, even if it's a if it's a stalker light game with a better story, if it's got the spirit of stalker and that hypertactical shooter back when tactical shooters were tactical shooters and before they had basically either become mil Sims or call of duty, and that idea that you could do that in an RPG setting like that's that was born to happen.. and for all the people that are like oh it wasn't really an RPG cuz you didn't have stats yeah fuck yourself, go away.. role-playing is role playing you play a role, it's that simple there's more role-playing in stalker than you'll ever get in fucking Skyrim, shit I think stalker even has more endings which is kind of the real marker for an RPG, that can those days though and RPG was an rpg.. and then there was the action RPG where you had stats and now that's what we call a looter shooter unfortunately we now call everything in RPG that has stats so fuck,,.
I simply cannot believe that I've never played the stalker games (particularly anomaly) until now. Starting up a new game brought back a sense of excitement and immersion that I haven't felt since I was a kid. Absolute gem recommend it to anyone who is a fan of tactical shooters and survival/horrors.
Shameless plug for Call of the Zone, the late Doctor X's (RIP) Standalone version of Call of Chernobyl with some really good quests stuff built in, I think it basically integrates several of his mods into a standalone version of CoC. Hoping people will continue to patch it work on it etc.
I agree. I also think Call of the Zone is a lot better and does more than Anomoly. Anomoly's biggest mistake is it's too much of what people thought Stalker is without understanding what Stalker actually is, (ultra depressing atmosphere, ambiguously Russian, TRU HARDCOR L33T STALKING!) It goes so far that it comes off as comedic rather than serious. When you get past the improved graphics. It's just so much more shallow compared to other Call of Chernobyl compilations. Call of the Zone is just Call of Chernobyl with everything Stalker actually needed (reactive A-Life and story quests, more free form and open ended mission structure.) Not much needed to be changed or exaggerated.
i swore to not play anomaly until ive beaten the original trilogy, or practically finished it (nearly beaten CoP), and now, i got anomaly and stalker 2 to mess around with, cant wait to try out anomaly
The fact that the first enemy you fight in the tutorial mission can so easily kill you is an important lesson in it's own right. It tells you that running and gunning it not a viable tactic, and you need to be careful and use your surroundings to your advantage as well. Try getting enemies stuck on nearby stalkers, find cover, etc. The first stalker game did this as well, having you fight a group of bandits with shotguns while you had nothing but a dinky little peashooter.
I was hoping you would cover the mod, it's a hell of an experience. My favorite thing is the tension that grows the more you play and learn about the zone. For instance, in the beginning you've never had a Chimera or pack of lurkers sneak up behind you in red forest, once it happens... you never play quite the same. lol holy shit 95GB? And I thought my 44GB collection was ridiculous.
I had been slowly falling out of gaming, until I saw this. Admittedly I have never played the stalker games, but I couldn't resist giving Stalker Anomaly a try. . . . I'm friggin addicted. Thank you so much. Also~ despite this being free, I HAD to grab the whole bunch and experience this first hand. Super excited.
I'm a bit annoyed you called this the "original intention" of STALKER considering how little Anomaly actually adds. The closest thing to the "original intention" for STALKER is STALKER Oblivion Lost. A standalone mod that adds every single bit of cut content for STALKER that could be found. Including rival STALKERS, dynamic A-Life, the original plot and quests, and a whole bunch more. I'd love to see you check that out next.
The original shadow of chernobyl has had a major impact and impression on me alone, even for its simplicity compared to what the lost alpha has meant for my game experience of the stalker universe. It is crazy that anomaly lift this even further and I need to experience this too. Even if it kicks my ass for starters lol. Thanks for vid 👍
I think the most significant downside of this mod is that exploration is not rewarding enough. I would expect a new location, new camp, new place to have something unique, something that makes visiting it justified. A unique gun, NPC with a short questline, valuable artifact... anything. None of that is true. All maps are free of any content that is not randomly generated. Visiting a new location feels like seeing a ghost, a shadow of what it was before. Fetch-quests are somewhat ok, but can't keep me entertained for a long, and once you figure out how to abuse them - there is no coming back. I spent around ten hours trying to gear up and understand how to play this game. But once you have an exoskeleton and decent gun - it's just a matter of time till you start running through every single location in minutes. And yeah, the magic is now gone. This game needs just a little more of a real content, not just a few new'n'shiny mechanics. Lost Alpha did a much better job on this, so its still top 1 in my personal rating.
i started in the northern swamp by the power plant and some how got my hands on an apocalypse monolith suit, my main goal was to fix that suit so i could 1. sneak through monlith territory and 2. have one of the best suits in the game, i got it and soem good guns fixed and then still could get killed by basicly everything out there, the armor(atleast when i played last) was more of a you can tank 4 more bullets than normal, and if you get shot too much you need to spend more time and money fixing your armor agian, very fun thou
@@UT_SWAT that's why we need story mods for anomaly. There is one for Dead Air, called Book of the Dead, which came out recently, and I heard it's pretty good.
@@UT_SWATI'm not saying you cant die. Sure you can. But with a good armor it's easy enough to not bother with most of the threats. Repair kits and items are abundant so you should have no problem repairing your gear. That's exactly what I'm talking about, once you learn how to play - the game becomes easy enough to skip a lot of the content.
i think it goes more for the post apocalyptic realism - out in the world you're not gonna find new things every encampment you come across etc. sometimes you'll find bandits or creatures or whatever, and sometimes you won't. sometimes items, sometimes not. enemy types and items found will be pretty similar in the same areas. this mod is more of a way of life, than a game with the associated direct progression (though that progression is still in there somewhere) which is best if you want to be immersed in the world - not be on schedule to reach some promised land of endgame or something. it's about the journey - not the destination and shinies.
As a guy who spent 1000+ hours on Anomaly, it's definitely one of the best games ever made, it's what all of us stalker fans wanted, immersive and dead environments, dynamic faction relations, fun but challenging gunplay, it's without a doubt one of the best, even with 1000+ hours I still keep finding new stuff in every playthrough, and the Modding for Anomaly, god.... it's beautiful, if there's something you hate in anomaly well, you just need to dip your toe into anomaly's Moddb page and you'll find more than you bargained for, only annoying thing is trying to figure out a good load order for the mods you have installed, finding a good and working load order is like cooking, do it badly and you'll crash your game, and your sanity, but that's a small price to pay for the amazing experience you can get from mods, Anomaly rocks harder than my nan when I un-plugged her life support, 9.4/10 Game.
I have absolutly no clue how you can spend 1000 hours and still find a reason to play, after 1 playthrough I feel like I saw everything it had to offer and no matter how many addons I literally shower it with, it just deels... bland, the aspect of randomness is so much lower than CoC, where I had a 6 factions fight next to the freedom base. But in Anomaly the most unpredictable thing is if that boar that rushed me will magically hit me and one shot me on my 57th ironman playthrough. And dear god I hope they change the story because it's so garbage compared to any other proper story mod, as a main thing to work towards it really is just underwhelming and doesn't keep the drive for long
@@ross_boss "Oh it's boring and not hard just stupid and I wants more RNG, magic boars is dumb and I know what is good game" It's okay, you can play fallout, we won't judge ;P
@@2dollarchickenwings689 to be fair neither are wrong since that guy is only expressing what he feels, his opinion is not a fact, though I will agree the story is not the best, but as he said, I'd play other mods for story
Hehe~ when you were talking about main quest that didn't want to mark as a finish I saw that underground hideout. The quest fill finish when you pick up a document that lay somewhere in the middle of Strelok room.
I love that I got demolished by boars in the tutorial mission lol! Mutants hitting hard is kinda bad until you get the Soundscape Overhaul and it fixes the mutant sounds, therefore giving you a chance to use audio as a guide, which is dope af and essential in my oppinion when compared to the random non-existing mutant sounds from vanilla anomaly
This is one of the best games I have ever played. The modding team has really reached a pinnacle here. After playing STALKER for years, Iike to play Anomaly and pick a Mercenary with story mode off. I like to imagine I’m a new mercenary arriving in the zone and I am just trying to make a name for myself. What an unbelievable game. I mean the AI is great, you feel like you are consistently being hunted, and warfare is so cool. Additionally, the vanilla Anomaly is pretty perfect, but there are addons you can install that further the experience.
METRO NEXT HYPE. Love the retrospectives of all kinds, you do a great job with even stuff I've never heard of, present it in a way that's enjoyable and concise. Great video sir!
Having had zero prior knowledge of STALKER titles - playing through Anomaly has been a.....learning.....experience 😂 _"Oo! What's this?"_ - Dead _"Hey! Who's that?"_ - Dead _"Wait... wh-"_ - Dead
The framerate issues with the scopes is caused by the way the 3D scope functions internally. The game essentially has to render the screen frame twice. Once for everything outside the scope and once inside for the zoomed in effect inside the scope. This causes considerable frame rate dips for those reasons. Unfortunate but if you pc can handle it and it's not an issue it's a very welcomed addition in my opinion. Also absolutely fantastic review. 10/10
I think you will love Oblivion Lost Remake too. Not to be confused with the old OL mod. This is a playable version of one of the earlier STALKER builds, before it became Shadow of Chernobyl.
Ah, Anomaly... perfect Armed Hobo Simulator. I'm still mad that Misery got popular on CoCh while SGM (Sigerous Mod series) didn't. I always wondered what happened with addons-mods for Call of Chernobyl that are more focused on the story, iirc that's something you can find in Dead Air addons. Problem - lack of English translation, or even decent one.
I always thought the mutants shredding my armor were bullshit too, but then I learned how the crafting system actually worked. Going around and cannibalizing every corpses' outfit I never would've looked at twice, then investing in a couple good sewing kits for my Sunrise Suit has literally saved my life. In the Zone, if there's a will, there is a way.
Great video overall, though some things that should be mentioned i think. Most of the problems you encountered or the game sometimes feeling more hardcore than it should actually comes down to Provaks "Weapon" Overhaul. Its more than that, its a huge pack of mods compiled together, and sometimes done very poorly, therefore resulting in crashes or stuff not working as intended, take your weapon scope example, it renders differently because you have multiple weapon packs from multiple autors in there, as said sometimes very poorly merged, plus some scopes are rendered picture in picture, which results in the awful framerates sometimes. I´d rather recommend people check out Anomaly first and then take 30 minutes to browse the addons to determine what they really want and need, without having the game overloaded with things that they might not need from a modpack. There´s plenty of packs out there that do a good job without going overboard with it or adding too much. Hell i even uploaded one myself just because of that reason, to share my experience with Anomaly in the setup i have most fun with, without overloading people with stuff, and if anyone is interested i can share it here too. But to end this, im really glad you did that video series on the stalker games, cause it brings more attention to these awesome and highly customizable games, and hopefully lets more people enjoy them for long times to come, maybe with a little break in between for Stalker 2 :).
My thought on the original GSC games was that SoC was the story they wanted to tell, CoP was the game they wanted to make, and CS was an explanation for why the developer couldn't do both at the same time. I think the authors and developers are really proud that there is a dedicated community that merge the games to make something truer to the vision than they themselves could achieve in the early 2000s. I kind of wish there were some other styles of games set in the stalker universe. Wouldn't it be cool if you could make your own faction entirely, or have an x-com like game of controlling a team of agents?
It should also be stated how insanely customizable this game is. Along with the incredible amount of options they give you in vanilla Anomly, the add-ons for the game offer an insane amount of content as well. If there's any system you don't like there's a good chance there's an add-on that changes it. Highly recommend everyone give it a try.
This has been such a great series! I've loved the Stalker games for years now and haven't had a way to really explain to my fiends why I love them so much ( Slavic Jank Included). But now I can simply point to this series and it encapsulates all the stuff good and bad that make these games one of a kind! Thanks Jared! You've done a tremendous job!
Just a funny random trivia: Anomaly is an addon-friendly pack based on Last Day pack, which is based on Call of Misery pack, which is based on CoC and Misery mods, which is based on Call of Prypyat' addon, which is based on S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl game, which is based on S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Oblivion Lost concept builds, which is based on Oblivion Lost concept builds back from 2001(!). There is a heavy part of the OG code back from the beginning still present in the Anomaly as well as some mechanics and all the engine stuff. One could say, that Stalker has come a long way since it's birth and not only alive and breathing, but even being on the edge of open-world shooters for a 2 decades now! Also, Anomaly is amazing - S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s peak gameplay-wise (which is basically means best open-world looter-shooter on the market). Can't wait for a Dead Air 1.0 release to rival for that throne and, of course, the grand return of the series in the next year! (PC Gamer already played it and that means we will probably see full-gameplay trailer on The Game Awards) Anyway, thanks for YET ANOTHER cool review, Avalanche, keep it up!
I was always wanting to get into the stalker series an this finally pushed me into it. I do have one request, perhaps make a short video going over each series with the mods you use the mods for each.
I'm not saying your opinion is wrong, but this is a bad way to introduce people to Stalker. You're recommending Provak's weapon pack which has pages and pages of crashlogs on the Moddb, it stole a load of gun packs and slapped them together without any quality control or balance. This isn't the "true Stalker experience" - it's a freeplay mod where you do cyclic quests for npcs. It'd be much better for people to jump in with something like OGSE, which is a highly customisable AMK variant, which mods the original SoC and improves it, rather than replacing it with a new game with a totally new direction (which the actual Stalker games don't take). There's massive item bloat in Anomaly too, and the muddy textures don't help.
As someone who used Provaks mod soup for a month or two and suffered endless crashes despite all his " fixes " , I agree. It's also much better to make your own personal modlist.
Literally playing Anomaly while listening to this in the background. I keep checking my PDA every time I hear the notification sound go off even though it's in the video lol.
Its a nice mod but ONLY after you went through all original vanilla games. I just find zombies in cordon a bit too much, also some modified textures ruin the atmosphere imo ( for example walls of some buildings) - they had that old soviet style look in vanilla but some places look worse now. Just because the texture has higher resolution doesn't mean that it creates a good atmosphere or that it fits the style of surrounding buildings. I also prefer the original grass, ground and color palette in general. Some items are useless and create a strange feeling that they're put into the game just for the sake of it. Not to mention the insane amount of different ak guns which simply left me confused. Some new sound choices were questionable as well, but that might be just me, as Shadow of Chernobyl had great sound design already imo. I treat Anomaly more like a sandbox game with new elements, but for original atmosphere and story - Vanilla hands down.
I'm so glad you got around to bring in Anomaly as well on top of the base games :D awesome video as always bud, it's like a birthday present anytime you put up something new haha!
I loved every second I spent with all of the OG S.T.A.L.K.E.R. titles. Probably put in around 300+ hours into them, only ever finished the original though. At some point, my PC that I used to play it on, bit the dust and I just never got around to reinstalling either game after that. This looks so perfect, and I can't believe it's free. My new PC should have no problems running it either! What a world!
Have you ever hear from the EFP mod (Escape from Pripyat)? It´s a collection of mods for anomaly that it completely overhauls it, Imo it´s a new take on what stalker can be since it takes a lot of ideas from other games like Tarkov (the magazine and damage location on the body), you should check it out sometime :D Btw, sorry if my english sucks ass, not my native one lol
Exactly. Anomaly is really just a platform that allows you to create your own personalized version of open world STALKER, hence all the mod packs from different people creators.
The reason why provak's weapon overhaul feels cobbled together is because it is. It's a modpack, with a bunch of different gun mods all slapped together.
Theoretically if they're still working on it, getting the animations to work at the right frame rate shouldn't be too terribly hard, if my understanding is correct it's a matter of splining the frames... Now I'm not sure how many frames you need to have this work without hitches, it could be as simple as in-game parameters.. it's been a long since I did an x-ray dive, but initially when the engine shipped it was incredibly easy to just pull things out and modify them, they even provided little descriptions for everything.. this was how I played stalker and enjoyed it from day one, cuz day one I immediately opened up the script files took out the zoom on the iron sights.. and the tracers that was a big deal for me back then having tracers every round especially on silence weapons LOL this was before I had been broken into both just accepting the fact that all games are going to have fucking tracers cuz cuz I mean.. yeah whatever, and most games wouldn't let me adjust Minor details in the ini, OR Lua or whichever.. nowadays to do that you need to know c++ it seems, mostly on account that they don't want you doing it LOL, I have no idea why.. But yeah you could adjust pretty much every parameter you wanted on the weapons, but this is before 3D scopes or at the very least the original stalker had a hybrid of iron sights but optics were in 2D.. I remember one of my first mods was to do a two dimensional 3D scope to do hybrid scopes for the g36 and the susat l85.. and I think for that Gucci ar, tonight to my chagrin they're still up on the archived site that used to be the individual stalkerfiles.com etc hl2files.com I can't remember what it's called.. but they were in 1280x1024, the maximum resolution of the time LOL or at least the average certainly my maximum.. LOL actually CRTs used to go into the beyond 1440p range on a fairly regular basis, and to think if only digital foundry had done that retro game thing that had the CRTs from everyone's basement flying off shelves for thousands of dollars, most of them would have avoided the dump unfortunately.. all of them I assume are completely out of tune though which still cracks me up they they failed to mention that when they were talking about the power of CRTs LOL. fortunately this exists LOL it seems like it's solved the issue by rendering them in 3D LOL resolution is no longer a problem but frame rate shouldn't be either, and I do believe 30 frames per second could at least be splines kind of like quake when you run it on a modern API or well when you translate it to a modern API LOL. Like it's not that cutting paste, but it can be done externally from what I understand.. without needing to redo the animation, now the engine could be the issue and it just could be the parameter that they set up for it, again I'm not really sure but it's a real tribute to the X-ray engine how many things are just a part of it that were honestly never really incorporated into the main game, I remember we were doing all sorts of fun render techniques by the end of my time playing stalker... now I'm not saying that this was probably an easy project to update this engine, not by any means LOL but it is a tribute to the X-ray engine that it was something that you could do that with over 10 years later into basically a modern engine, but you know it's the X-ray engine so it's better lol it has all the systems and fun stuff that it was designed around, something that we still don't see a lot of today.. if only it had a terrain-destructibility engine like crisis you know used to have before well see my other post for my thoughts on that one.. Anyhow, given the amount of fucking weapons they seem to have added to this thing I can only imagine this might just be a matter of time and as they go through them .... Giving what you just scrolled through in the video it's like what for a normal games arsenal would probably be a few hours providing I am correct in one or the other and you know what you're doing and you have the right equipment to do it, hell even if it is an engine parameter just going through that many fucking things as a fucking week project pretty much like a whole week.... I really do wish games would incorporate the optic only fov more often, you thought that was going to be a standard after they did it with unreal 2 with red orchestra, and then it was in Half-Life 2 and source engine and a pretty long-standing feature for source engine.. now you barely ever see it at all, a lot of things you don't see that much, although at the very least 3D Scopes are a standard.. everything's a monkey spa though iron sights are a standard, but regardless guns are still you know so close to the face slide should be in the eyeball when it fires.. they can do amazing complex leaning like we saw on riddick and that machine games translated over to Wolfenstein where you can have your cake and eat it too without having to slow down one bit, and yet 99% of the time you see leaning it's a cover system of sorts anymore, barely do you ever actually have manual and almost only in like milsim style games, or stealth games and most of those use a cover system.. and thus the backlash against leaning has become a thing even though it should be in every game that yeah have a body in because you might want to lean around something that's just part of being immersed in the game, being able to do basic tasks LOL. we can render face details that show like the pock marks on people, but we no longer have physics environments like we did with crisis, hell it's kind of a kind of a specialty to see like cans rolling around or the kind of expectacular havoc physics that we used to see, never mind the physics stuff because that was cool when it while it lasted, although we are starting to see some of those simulations come make a comeback with like water at the very least.. deformable train, nothing has really surpassed anything other than the visuals though especially given the design of the console seems to dictate that.. and what people complain about being bad graphics I just don't even get, like they're fine like holy fuck they're fine now now why don't you go make your fucking good game, but yeah that would be complicated cuz making a good game or making at least innovative game or just copying the innovative shit that used to be you know cool that would be mind blowing for people that haven't seen it in 10 years, I'm ranting again aren't i...
A great video, like the other S.T.A.L.K.E.R. videos you made before. The only thing I didn't like too much is that, like many other reviews, it only shows Anomaly with addons that change many aspects of the mod and are the cause of some of the problems you criticized in the video. The unmodified Anomaly mod is certainly not without flaws, but for example the problems around scopes and frame rate are mostly caused by the fact that you are using addons. So it's quite difficult to make the distinction between issues that are to be expected by players that choose a different set of addons and issues that are more likely to show up only with the particular set of addons you are using for this review. Personally I prefer reviews that focus on the core of what Anomaly is and how much it can be customized and tweaked even without using addons. Of course the vast variety of available addons is a huge part of creating your own experience with the mod. So covering that as a separate part of a review would show how much the vanilla Anomaly experience can be enhanced using them. But in the end I guess the important take away is that you seem to be having a good time playing Anomaly and that is the main goal it tries to achieve and I'm of course heavily biased about the way I'd like reviews for the mod to be set up. Looking forward to watching more of your upcoming reviews. It seems you are planning to cover some other games that I really like in the near future.
god i loved the original stalker when i first played it 12 years ago, i just redownloaded shadow of Chernobyl and am playing through for a second time. this mod makes the game look like a sligthly older tarkov lol
Installed Escape from Pripyat after trying Provak's weapon overhaul, big difference in optimization and quality. Provak's is easier to install but not nearly as good as EFP.
Yeah Provak’s addon is just a janky pile of shit. I waited so long for it to download and it ended up causing so many issues in my game, I just replaced it with B&S.
GSC have been really forward thinking where these mods are concerned. It's been so long since the last original Stalker game they realised that these mods have kept the Stalker name alive for the people who loved the original games, so roll on, Stalker 2 could end up one of the most sought after releases ever.
This is a pretty terrible stalker mod: 1) The A-Life barely works or isn't even there, there's not much happening in the world. 2) No fast-travel and objectives are far away, prepare for long boring runs. 3) The vegetation is common and you can't see through it, but the enemy can, you will die a lot and it will be unfair. 4) Ridiculous amounts of different unnecessary loot than you cannot sell. 5)Your companions die a lot and engage in unnecessary fights, even if you micromanage them. 6) You will take so much damage a single dog can kill you, also you bleed to death after every hit. 7) Every enemy has an almost broken weapon, which you cannot use, and cannot sell, this is just idiotic. I've finished the trilogy about 3 times each, and this is not a good stalker game.
I may be late to the party here, but if anyone stumbles onto this comment, GAMMA takes Anomaly and makes it even better somehow. Like I never played Anomaly to start with but have watched tons and tons of gameplay of it, and there are just so many things in GAMMA that aren't in Anomaly that I honestly can't imagine playing a STALKER game without. Highly highly highly recommend that modpack for anyone interested in a fresh but familiar STALKER experience
![[#2024MAMA] G-DRAGON - 무제(Untitled, 2014)+POWER+HOME SWEET HOME+뱅뱅뱅+FANTASTIC BABY | Mnet 241123 방송](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Ox29z5Nf1Uk/mqdefault.jpg)
Hey guys the whole Stalker Series is on sale right now! If you were thinking about taking a trip to the zone, now's the time!
Stalker SoC - af.gog.com/game/stalker_shadow_of_chernobyl?as=1672895661
Stalker Clear Sky - af.gog.com/game/stalker_clear_sky?as=1672895661
Stalker CoP - af.gog.com/game/stalker_call_of_pripyat?as=1672895661
bought them all
@@moneymanofficial Me 2 and I only play anomalyXD.
the link to Provak's is gone. is it dead or has it been included into Anomaly proper?
@@IndieGamerMonkey not sure if it's specifically provaaks but it's definitely at least got a similar mod built in. Gunplay in recent versions is very different than I remember in old versions and certain things he mentions in the video like the long distance gunshot effects from provaaks are now included.
can someone help a new pc game how to install anomaly. Total newb here... thanx
25:00 GSC is actually completely aware of anomaly (and by extension most popular mods), and they _love_ it. Really keeps my hopes up for STALKER 2 since they like what pretty much is the fans’ answer to that so much.
Yeah a lot of RUclips coverage of Anomaly lately, and thus STALKER 2 gets free advertising. I have high hopes too, at the very least they have already nailed the atmosphere.
@@unarmored9973 they say Stalker 2 will be very mod-friendly too, so here’s hoping for Anomaly 2.
I'd prefer it be a little more of an rpg, I'd like more social options with branching outcomes etc, but the gameplay is about as good as it's going to get.
They can always implement a freeplay mode after you complete the main storyline.
@@YouDeserveToDie666 Lol it's much more than that
GSC will not take it down just like they didn't take down Lost Alpha or Call of Chernobyl. They know that most of their success was also down to the modding community being so passionate about their games and unlike Bethesda or Take 2 they're not interested in alienating those that made Stalker what it is today.
You are however correct in assuming that they're technically re-releasing parts of code that belongs to GSC without a license to do so (even if it's for free). However, GSC has been known to be more than friendlier with modders, to the point that they even supplied the Lost Alpha team with assets and other things that they needed to make that game/mod work. I believe their official stance on re-releasing the engine and the assets is that they will not legally pursue anybody as long as they make it for free AND don't accept any monetary donation in return for their efforts. They have to be 100% free projects. As long as these "simple" requirements are met, modders are good to go.
Plus, Anomaly technically runs on the CoP engine, but it is actually a custom build of the X-Ray engine made by modders, so effectively the people that made that custom engine took CoP completely apart, figured out how it worked, reverse engineered most of it, fixed the billions of bugs that were present (or as many as they could, anyway) and came out with what served as the backbone of later total conversions like Call of Chernobyl or, indeed, Anomaly.
Anomaly runs on the Monolith engine. Which is an overhauled version of CoP's later engine. It's 64bit native so the game runs EXTREMELY well.
The lack of crashes is almost...heresy.
If you concider, that former GSC Gameworld employees helped developing mods like Lost Alpha, it's safe to say that the devs of the official releases and the modding community have reached a state of symbiosis
you gotta remember that GSC gameworld came onto the scene with an illegal remake of warcraft 2 called warcraft 2000, i think they remember their roots too well lol
Yeah I gotta give it to GSC, they are way too cool about their IP and source. It's been like 15 years so I doubt they are losing any money, if anything it just pumps up stalker 2 -which will no doubt pull some influence from the modding community.
Luckily they aren't nintendo
The food, drug, and drinks animation mod is incredible
I won't lie, I turned the item use and pda animations off.
The only game where I can smoke a pack without getting lung cancer. All this while in the middle of gunfight, surrounded by Monolith, and listening to Viktor Tsoi on radio. This is some special immersion.
@@AvalancheReviews same, bandage and item equip animations can get you killed in combat
@@Overlord99762 yeah but its fun to have to time when you use bandages and medkits
@@AvalancheReviews "muh immersion"
hey bro, just imagine how good it gets with 3D PDA and all the HUD turned off.
One of my favorite things about the “Stalker Twitter” is when I’ve just finished taking out a pack of dogs or something and someone pops up on the radio saying “I just saw a stalker kill a couple of dogs near the warehouse”
The moment you realize that not only someone heard you shoot at something but they WATCHED you do it is both really cool and and panic inducing. You better believe I started doing 360’s trying to find the guy
holy shut that’s so spooky haha
@@rooknado yes, and if the guy that say that is of an enemy faction xd you will die if you don't look behind
What would be a nice touch could be hearing about some of your previous heroics being laid out as urban legends from chaps at a campfire or bumping into guys you helped out in a tight spot going nuts to see you again and shouting about it to other stalkers. That could be really immersive.
Anomaly is how i got to learn about S.T.A.L.K.E.R,the quality was soo insane to this day i can't believe this is a MOD,the amount of love and care put into this thing is out of this world,i can't stop playing it to this very day,its one of those games that will forever be a MUST in my PC
this is easily the best MOD i've ever seen in my 23 years of gaming
I haven't played Anomaly in a year but I'm not going to delete it from my hard drive. Now I'm playing DayZ because I'm looking for Anomaly like games all the time
Same. Anomaly was my first Stalker experience and it made me buy the 3 OGs and play through them all. I still play Anomaly, but I also wanted a different Stalker experience in regards to story telling, so I'm currently playing Lost Alpha DC.
@@rork75 play the metro 2033 series.
in my 25 years of gaming, when i decide it is time to format the pc and hook up everything from scratch, anomaly is the first game i install on my disk, and definitely still today the most satisfying game i play among all the games i have (and i have a ton of fps games)...the only thing i get bored with vanilla anomaly is the lack of action, but i solved it with a mod of my own, now i can have a zone that has more than 2000 stalkers/mutants present, spawns 3 times a day, and you never know what is coming next, if it is a controller, a pack of zombies, a squad of enemy stalkers, you really never know, you can be alive and 10 seconds after be dead...that is the fun of stalker anomaly to me...no cod fps style where you shoot 100 enemies and do not die even once, it is possible in anomaly to shoot 30 or 40 enemies dead, i've done it many times, even with starting protective gear which is shit, but i never get to shoot that many enemies without dying a few times trying to shoot them all...i've had times where was cornered by a lot of enemies, the most fun i've had is when i am short on ammo and eventually have to switch to a few different weapons only to continue shooting at them...it is so satisfying, i only have 10 rounds of .45 ammo, 20 rounds of 9x19mm ammo, 14 rounds of shotgun buckshot ammo, etc....only stalker makes me do that..
No offense, and I'm being serious this time and not using it to mock you, but you don't play a lot of mods. There are better mods out there that could do the same thing anomaly does, gameplay wise at least, but better. Some in the same community.
The mod has a very large amount of game design problems and a lack of content.
Nothing beats hunting chimera in the rain with 2 slug rounds and a knife. Not even Tarkov can give me the same kind of thrill.
Couldn't agree any harder if I tried.
Especially that part in the bog where you open fire, only to see a second Chimera making a beeline to your location
Wow I didn't know you were going to cover this 😭 this game is ridiculously good
So damn good!!!!
mod*
"game"
It's definitely a great game. Great sandbox experience.
@@khorkhi7107 modded game*
Been going through this game recently:
-I've been shot in the back 3 times while looting, by the AI, who seems to be at least decent at sneaking up on me, one of those times a bandit with a shotgun tried it and managed to point blank miss me, that was pretty funny since he had to reload as I turned around. I'm pretty sure this is the only game that I've been dynamically sneak attacked by AI in and I'm glad it's a thing, I've also killed enemies by sneaking up on them and stabbing them.
-Got killed by mutants that seem to understand that I have a gun and that they need to run from cover to cover and zig zag as they close in to kill me. I've also learned to put obstacles and elevation between me and mutants, since not doing so could result in instant death. (Mutants in my game are common.)
-I lowered my PDA after checking the map only to see a Chimera for a split second flying at my screen, didn't hear a single sound other than rain before the leap roar and death.
-Got a grenade tossed at my feet while in cover multiple times.
-Have seen AI comment on the "Stalker social network" about how the upgrade, for their gun, was expensive but worth it, as I was going to upgrade my gear, only to see the guy, who commented, exiting the shop, making me wonder if that's how upgrades pop up on some guns I find on enemies, since all factions have their own technicians that can do upgrades.
-Had the military AI call in a chopper to kill a pig.
-Had the rookie village massacred by military, maybe because they shot a soldier outside their camp, and he managed to scream for help before dying, which the AI in the area seem to respond to, not sure if based on proximity to the guy that asks for help only, or if also based off of a personality they are given, some stalkers will refuse to trade with you regardless of faction relations, while others will, so maybe some will help their faction members, while others won't bother helping their fellow stalkers.
-Heard and witnessed multiple gunfights between factions happening all over the zone with decent frequency.
-Witnessed the "Stalker social network" leader board change as, I'm guessing, stalkers I've never seen in the zone, died off screen and got replaced by the next person in line ... supposedly there's around 820 Human AI running around the game world, which I'm guessing constantly get replaced with newcomers once dead, making the zone pretty lively.
-Have seen stalkers talk about finding an artefact and others complain they never find anything on the "Stalker social network", tho I've yet to follow a group around to see if they do go artefact hunting in anomalies, but since they go in the store when they talk about getting upgrades they might also go in anomalies when they talk about finding artefacts.
-Have seen the AI walk up to fires and light them before sitting down, which makes me consider that there might be NPCs near by, if I find a fire burning with no one around.
-And have had stalkers talk about a very large number of zombies closing in on a location after a psy-storm, request help to kill the incoming hoard, and then multiple stalkers from across the zone sounded off on weather they're close enough to help, if they'll make their way over, while others commented on weather they're ok or not with killing off their former faction members. And while roaming the area I did run into a large group of zombies.
A-Life AI really shines through in this mod in many ways and the "Stalker social network" makes it even better. They really make the world feel more active/alive. I wish more games would try this, it seems when ever something does happen in other RPGs, it's always some kind of scripted sequence, rather than a dynamic event brought on by AI doing their own thing, independent of the player and the player is free to interact with it.
“Got killed by mutants that seem to understand that I have a gun and that they need to run from cover to cover and zig zag as they close in to kill me.”
My god, so I’m not the only one who thinks that! They seem to know when to charge me is when I’m reloading my gun!
@@sebastianpost7237 Recently had a PsySucker kill me with hit and run tactics. I loaded in and ran up to a spot that was hard to reach and then ... nothing, silence, not a peep. I looked around. Nothing. I crawled down from my spot, and tried to make a run for it, only to have a shock anomaly go off right next to me, like 3 seconds after I ran from my spot. It was the PsySucker. It looks like it sat somewhere stalking me, waiting for me to get down. It didn't make the growl noises it normally makes while attacking, it didn't use its power, it just waited until it could reach me. The AI certainly seems to manage and make some mutants a real threat by the looks of things. Another big one is chimeras. From what I've noticed, if you don't see them, but they see you, they will try to stay in your blind spots until they can get to you. I was going to kill a merc for a mission, and was sneaking around, only to hear a few light taps behind me, as I turned it was sitting in the middle of the road in leap range and insta killed me. Reloaded, looked behind me, nothing. Walked a meter, turned around, nothing, a second later, it kills me from behind a gain. It ran AROUND the wall, and through a hole in a fence to get to my back when I was looking behind me. I finally got it when I put my back to a wall looking at the general area where it was at, it looks like it tried to rush me once it couldn't get a sneak attack going. AI seems pretty sneaky.
Oh yeah, the AI for Mercs, Military and Monolith is particularly fun to engage. They'll keep firing from a distance to keep you in cover while someone else will throw a grenade to where you are (thankfully announcing it out loud) to get you out of that cover and right into their fire, while yet another guy will circle around you and then walk up slowly behind you while you're busy and shoot you point blank in the back. Several times I died after thinking I took out a unit of Military dudes but missed that one guy that took the long way around and just quietly came up behind me while I was checking corpses, put a nice burst in me, and I was gone.
They're also great when you try to be sneaky - they spread out and carefully go towards where they assume you're shooting from when they see one of their squad dropped, if they hear your noise, they try to find you and if you can avoid their like of sight and keep quiet you can circle around them, but even suppressed guns make noise (as they should, especially sniper rifles), so they will eventually pinpoint you. If new ones arrive from their base in response to the shooting, they won't immediately know where you are if you don't expose your position.
this comment got me mega hyped to play this
Yeah they actually do look for, and take artifacts if they announced it on the PDA Net then they will have it on them if they die, Unless if they make it to a trader and sell it. Since they also can interact buy and sell with traders. I remember seeing some Merc's at the Merc base going up to Dushman I believe it was? The main trader and waiting for a bit then talking about discounts etc.
I'm a "veteran" of this series. Played all three games on release and have sunk an unhealthy amount of time in this series. Haven't played it for some time.
Your vids made me put the download on for this one
Thanks for the vid
Same, when I saw this video release after the last one I was hyped. Imo though lost alpha deserves a video. It was a spectacular mod.
Try Escape From Pripyat. It’s a curated mod pack that adds most all of the elements of Escape From Tarkov into Stalker Anomaly. It’s super fun
As an alternative to Provak's(Which is kinda jank even 4 stalker) Id recommend you get the BaS, sound overhaul (with one of the BaS sound replacer mods that integrate S.O. weapon sounds into BaS weapons), Hollywood FX and whatever addons installed b4 you start
I also recommend the g36, saiga, mp7, and SVD model replacers the g36 ones are beautiful and add new variants like the g36c,k,and I
and some have multiple sight options that can be switched with the grenade launcher button like the BaS weapons and the model replacers work without starting a new game as long as you don't have those guns on you or in a stash anywhere and they should work with provak's.
Welcome back to the zone, Stalker. Good to have you.
Good luck Stalker
Honestly dude, these retrospectives are _such_ high quality.
Sure it's a niche field perhaps but that just makes these all the more precious to S.T.A.L.K.E.R fans.
Genuine thanks
but hes just talking over video games
@@KookoCraft That's what retrospectives are... And many people enjoy that, including me
@@KookoCraft but not just any video game
Stalker Anomaly was one of my best gaming experiences I ever had.
Not many games reach that level of immersion.
I just have to tell my Azazel mod short story since you mentioned controlling a stalker that you could have already met.
Start with me in the truck cemetery, random bandit who wakes up to getting ambushed by an army squad and obviously getting killed. Take over some random loner who's chilling by a campfire with two buddies of his not too far from the ambush. While getting my bearings we're set upon by a huge swarm of blind dogs and pseudodogs and in the panic accidently put a bullet through one of my buddies heads, the other immediately turning on me causing me to run away and blindly stumble into an anomaly proceeding to get torn apart.
From there I took over a body of one of the army guys from earlier, thinking I now had it pretty easy we set off for the exit, armed to the teeth I figured we wouldn't run into any issues. Not even 50 meters out we're set upon by a brood of bloodsuckers, already weakened from the bandit fight we made easy prey and my last sight there was of my new squad dropping and a mess of tentacles closing around my neck.
Fade from black and I'm looking at a bloodbath, lots of dead dogs and a dead person that I'm standing over. I've now just gone full circle and come back to the loner I left to fend for himself after I brained his buddy and got myself turned into a tube of toothpaste. Where chaos had taken all of my previous bodies and everyone around them, this sole undergeared and near dead loner survived and took about 10 dogs down with just a pistol and grief.
Dude was an absolute chad and I couldn't bring myself to play that save anymore because I didn't feel like he deserved a fate similar to everyone else.
fucking beautiful
Beautiful
Such is life in the zone
"an absolute Chad" ... 🤣👍👍👍
Those glowing electrical spheres are actually a type of anomaly; sort of like a rogue lighting strike, it is essentially one of psi storm discharges without the storm.
I loved them!! They would sometimes spawn inside of camps. I'd hear the noise and have to close out of the trader's inventory real quick to make sure it wasn't about to fry me.
@@AvalancheReviews Me too! One time I spent 10 minutes trying to climb this tree in the red forest, because someone threw a backpack up on one of the higher branches; just threw it up there like a pair of sneakers dangling from some power lines! Anyway, I finally got up to the branch and was just about to open the stash when one those whoring anomalies started charging up RIGHT OVER THE TREE lol. Even though I jumped off the tree, it discharged and turned me and the tree into popcorn. I quickload, climb the tree again, finally get to the stash and open it, expecting to see a goddamn Full-Empty artifact, and what'd I get? BEANS. 2 cans of beans, a half-eaten chocolate bar and some smokes! Ain't that the fuckinest thing you've ever heard? 😅
I watched your whole Stalker series and loved it! These are my favorite games too! I played Clear Sky first in 2009 and I was hooked ever since! Great work my man, I might just watch them all again!
Kinda like those "wisp" -style ball lightning jobbers from the M.E.T.R.O. series?
@@judsongaiden9878 yeah exactly!
I massively appreciate you explaining all options/modes available in the mod, on the menu itself.
So much easier to understand what each option does.
The moment I fell in love with anomaly is when there's an emission and I had a guitar I looted from a bandit. Waiting by the campfire with other stalkers and playing the guitar is an entire mood.
Whats great about Anomaly is the Immersion, Being upstairs in the merc stronghold in Deadcity while it rains and hearing a stalker play the guitar in the background, Truly amazing.
WHAT! You took out mutants? WTF, that's the most enjoyable part! Getting caught at night in some run-down shack by a horde of bloodsuckers with your ammo and nvg/flashlight batteries running out is the most exhilarating feeling I've experienced in a game in a good while.
facts
If mutants are too common they are not scary.
@@haramaschabrasir8662 Spoken like someone who's never played the game before.
Plays on Rookie with Mutants turned down, guy needs to git gud
Since I installed both the Dynamic nocturnal mutants and dynamic mutants mod and slap the difficulty on hard. Man, tough but fun af.
The best thing about having a bad memory is being able to rewatching this video every week without getting bored
Dang it man, I just got started with STALKER. And now you are throwing the mods at me! Appreciate it though. All the talk about the series finally got me to get my PC working again and purchase these games.
Hell yeah!!!
Try Last Alpha or OGSE - absolutely great mods, and they are in standalone version not requiring base game :)
@@Kommisar_Lutter Thanks for the advice. I swear I'm going to wind up buying an SSD just for STALKER and the endless library of Mods.
If you ask the Clear Sky leader about how did they survive, he will tell you that when the major attack on the CPP was launched by Scar and the original leaders, many of the Clear Sky members were wandering the Zone on errands and patrol, unable to make it back in time to participate in the attack, and so they survived and banded together to maintain the faction even if it became a shadow of itself.
As for the mutants? I understand where your oppinion is coming from. Firefights in the game is much more exciting. But its the presence of such lethal mutants that will make you need to carry exchange underwear with you. The fact that they are soo harsh and agressive will keep the players on their toes for damn sure. Most mutants have some sort of sound cue too and it will add insane immersion. Like when I was sneaking my way through the vehicle graveyard and I kept hearing odd noises that I did not recognize. The noises kept going and going until my nerves were busted and I climbed on top of an old BTR just to have the highground and relative safety. I did not recognize the mutants because a bunch of mutants in Anomaly never made it to the full games and they were restored from the files.
Anomaly carried over the insane immersion of the STALKER games. I was afraid to go out during the nights until I could afford a proper nightvision which timed my adventures from dawn till dusk. My planned explorations were often had to be called off because I ran into something that drained my supplies or forced me to detour. Without noticing it, I was roleplaying. I developped an ingame "life". I planned my trips. I rationed my supplies. I always weighted the profits of my adventures based on if I could repair my gear and still had leftover money to add to my wallet. Its magical.
"Accept your next 5-6 years will be wall to wall stalker mods"
Any stalker worth his salt will choose this option every time
Bruh, my first and current play of a Stalker game. Vanilla Anomaly, mutant hunter. Started out with the basic TOZ-34 and so far have upgraded to the MP-153. Mutants are only hard if you let them get the drop on you. Turn your music down to 50% and keep an ear out and you will know about them before they know about you.
Also I dont know if many people know this, but Garbage is a money making heaven if you want to get into mutant/artifact hunting. Sleep in Garbage, hunt artifacts, hunt mutants (Taking quests from the butcher. Not part quests tho, they take too long.), sell parts, head to science lab, sell artifacts, kill mutants near lab, sell those parts to butcher, sleep in Garbage, repeat.
Been playing this for about a year alone with no extra mods and I can say it quickly became one of my fav games of all time. I can’t get the other mods to work and I know my pc can handle it just don’t know how to. So glad you covered this and I recommended this vid to a friend I’m trying to get into it.
I love that you explained the settings and how you can tweak the game to be as punishing or as easy as youd like. Anomaly is a true chernobyl sandbox. I love turning on Debug mode and running around as Monolith with god mode wiping out the entire zone.
I've started spawning in a bunch of mutants and bandits inside of Freedom's base in the warehouses. It's insanely fun. HA!
A free mod is so infinitely better than most AAA games
Even in vanilla damn good
I have been looking for a video like this. I recently discovered stalker during the pandemic so I got to experience everything fresh with no nostalgia and I’m so glad I found stalker. It has become one of my favorite ips and seeing all the love the modding community has given these games is truly amazing.
YES, I am so incredibly happy that you're covering anomaly. With all of these stalker reviews, I have been entertained every second of the way. Great work man!
That's fucking awesome to hear man!! Thank you!!
When i found about this game i was hooked for months. The freedom of the world AND the settings customization (you can make the right difficulty for you) it's what makes this a perfect Apocalyptic Survival game. Besides the ton of customization you can do in vanilla Anomaly, you can always install mods for everything else. Never played any STALKER original games (i know i should) but have them in my steam library. I sold my PC a couple of months ago and if there is a game i miss the most is this one.
It's kinda amazing that no "real" devs had the idea to stitch together their last few games and adding some new content for something like an "epic edition"
they did it with total war warhammer
I'd say the upcoming Elden Ring does this in some ways
Not really amazing, GSC shut down for several years after the STALKER games were finished. STALKER, as an IP, was kinda in limbo for a long time, which is possibly part of why there's so many mods for the games. We weren't going to get a new one so the community basically decided to make the best out of what we had. Now GSC is back and they're making STALKER 2, so we'll see how that goes. Hopefully it's even more mod-friendly than the first 3 games were because the STALKER community has proven it can make some truly amazing stuff, I'm sure even if STALKER 2 turns out to be a flop the community can still turn it into something outstanding.
i'm sure devs don't do it because it is actual hell to pull it off xd
The new HITMAN games did this, albeit they did just throw the previous games in with the new ones
I'm glad I jumped right into Anomaly as a first-timer to the series, on hard difficulty and lots of tweaks. It's a challenge I haven't had in years but also as you perfectly put it, is very rewarding for it. After 30+ mods ontop of that this game is just blowing my mind, each day again.
Thank your for this series. Very entertaining and looking forward to your next ones!
Hey man I just want to say thank you for spreading the word. I had no idea this was a thing. This was the type of thing I've been looking for in games
Then you are exactly who I made this video for! I'm happy to spread the word. These games are too damn good for people to miss out on.
Great video, wasn't expecting you to cover Anomaly glad you did. I'd also suggest leaving a link to Mod Organizer 2, it's the best tool for adding mods to Anomaly, keeps your main gamedata folder intact.
And...One thing I feel is worth mentioning... Provak's can lead to a lot of conflicts with other mods. If the game starts crashing after adding mods on top of it, look there for the problems.
"Let's just call that a few hours of my life I will never get back" Me who just found out about fast travel through this video...same
This is one of those channels that, whenever I see the subscriber count, I do a little spit take - like how the hell does this not have a million subscribers by now?
Happens every time.
A man like me is fully dedicated to the hardcore stalker experience where one mistake would make you die. With a variety of mods such as "The Body Health System Mod" Adds head, torso, arms and legs health system. instead of just having to heal one part of your body youll need to ensure all your limbs are in check. And another mod for realism is "Anomaly magazine redux" which makes you have to actually load in bullets into your magazine. This game has so much more you can do with it i highly recommend. Its very fun and you can spend hours into it
After watching your 3 STALKER retrospectives I was hoping you would cover this. Excellent video!
It really speaks volumes about just how perfect Anomaly (and the base Stalker series ofc) is, I completed the whole main storyline without ever enabling the fast-travel system and despite it increasing the time and back-and-forth running tenfold (I also wanted the perfect gear), it never fely like a chore. I only use fast travel during my UNISG playthrough, as it feels more appropriate to play like a series of Splinter Cell-like missions than the hardcore sandbox experience of the other factions.
im super new to the series just got about halfway through soc but this game rlly has me falling in love its such a refined experence that stays pretty faithful to what i have played of the series so far and i love it i wish i had found these games much earlier in life
Its what kept Stalker alive and relevant. Also if its free its kind of hard to take down, plus Im sure GSC is impressed with it.
Just started playing my first ever stalker game (call of pripyat) and I love that it doesn't explain anything. Makes me feel like I am back in titles like gothic which just doesn't explain anything, throws you in and leaves you.
god i love this mod... if it even classifies as a mod, this seems like its own game + love-letter to the stalker series!
Provak is not really recommended due to the issues you've mentioned. If you really want a modpack, Escape From Pripyat is the the really recommended one. It runs much smoother and stable, all addon incompatibilities are addressed, and has lot less bugs, if any.
Thanks for rec. New to the game and Provak looked jank af, and I'm not really sure what benefits it has other than too many guns to possibly use. I've heard enemies can be bullet spongey though without some kind of rebalancing?
@@57precision hope you are having fun already. Yeah they can be quite bullet spongy due to armor in mid game but late game you have enough money for AP ammo
Big note, Avalanche,
There is a modpack named Escape from Pripyat for Anomaly, and the 3.0 update is coming soon. Its the best modpack I have ever tried to play in any game, you should try it...better warn you its hardcore as fuck from health based on body part to the Magazine system
I've been hearing about it a lot. Sounds like I need to check it out.
Such a good review! I have been playing Stalker since it first came out, and this is the most exciting news I’ve heard since then.
A bit sad to hear that "stalker twitter" feat assigned to some other mod rather than AMK - the grandfather of most of global mods, that invented this dynamic news feed and offline A-life that was fueling it, also proper sleeping bag implementation and many other features that are now considered norm. It was such a strong and stable foundation, that eventually vanilla + AMK was considered a new vanilla and almost any other global mod later was by default including it into its core somewhere.
love AMK, electro chimera in the Cordon, controller in the cordon -- the chaos man, the chaos
@@TIWIH777 🥲
Jared I just want to say, it's always great to see people get into stalker and the free play mods, here's to hoping this video series has given many people a brand new discovery in the world of gaming
I sure hope so. I've receive a lot of comments on other videos saying I got them to play a Stalker game for the first time, and it's the coolest feeling.
@@AvalancheReviews excellent! While I've got your attention man I know you love anomaly but consider checking out Call of the Zone, the late doctor x's magnum opus version of call of chernobyl haha.
Anomaly is a great mod, but needs more story backed play. The freeplay is nice but it gets sort of aimless at times.
If anything Lost Alpha needs a video. That mod is probably imo the best reimagining of the first game. It felt truly complete; as where Anomaly feels it will never be complete.
nah, LA suffers a lot from bad location design. better play OGSR.
@@Zeon081 LA had the best maps btw, it's only the alife grid wasn't good at all
@@joshuakimmich9536 maps were too big for their own good. For a game with lots of backtracking there is nothing worse than running back and forth on an empty map.
@@Zeon081 it's only empty because devs didn't bother with setting up the AI grid which is actually a crazy amount of work. If it did, I'd pick LA maps over the current ones anytime
I feel like anomaly is placeholder, it it updates all the systems I don't see why you can't have the original campaign.. in fact I'm kind of waiting until that happens, I'd much rather replay that in anomaly than otherwise.. especially when this is there and everything's so close together and what not.. but at the same time this is this is kind of placeholder project cuz we have the sequel coming soon, and it does a lot of the things and and I think it's it's really a good way to start introducing people, unfortunately that also means you're not interesting people to the original campaign, which I actually really liked although that would be a tough sell on this modern age, like even I have trouble going through dialogue boxes anymore.
Still, even back then when dialog boxes were definitely the exception not the rule at that point, the atmosphere for this game made up for it in spades, there was very hard to not feel like you were a part of that whole world, and given that the Ubisoft model basically has no actual context whatsoever to 99% of what it does.. maybe this is good to get people that are new into this thing, but they are used to those cinematics that you know pretend to have like some sort of vehicle for your random fucking automatically generated responding bots multiplayer map in the guise of a single player map that is now the concept of open world that we live with and are stuck with it seems, who would have thunk that every game now would be an open world game, and it would be a bad thing fucking monkeys paw right.... We were so desperate for nonlinear games back then, and then when prices came out we're like yeah this is the future and even crisis sucking was like no this is not the future we just did this to fuck with y'all at least that's what I'm assuming at this point cuz either somebody got possessed by a malicious Spirit or something like that it critic or something but they did a fucking 180 and burned the PC bridge on the way out, and I really understand like I think one of the arguments is the piracy thing it's like fuck, it's always been a thing but that could have died out a long time ago with the prevalation of steam and sales and like your this is always forcing it to come back around when everything sucks there's no demos anymore and the business model is to get people to buy the thing a year in advance because you've branded them into their cult and people are stupid nowadays on a mass scale that at least they pretended to hide back in the old days, LOL I have a sneaking suspicion they were just as dumb they just had shame back then LOL.
either way price is sold more on the PC than crisis 2 ever sold on the console so like I said in one of my other posts on here fuck you cry tech, I'm so happy that there's a stalker too that might possibly happen I hope it's I hope it's a stalker game I hope it really is, even if it's a if it's a stalker light game with a better story, if it's got the spirit of stalker and that hypertactical shooter back when tactical shooters were tactical shooters and before they had basically either become mil Sims or call of duty, and that idea that you could do that in an RPG setting like that's that was born to happen.. and for all the people that are like oh it wasn't really an RPG cuz you didn't have stats yeah fuck yourself, go away.. role-playing is role playing you play a role, it's that simple there's more role-playing in stalker than you'll ever get in fucking Skyrim, shit I think stalker even has more endings which is kind of the real marker for an RPG, that can those days though and RPG was an rpg.. and then there was the action RPG where you had stats and now that's what we call a looter shooter unfortunately we now call everything in RPG that has stats so fuck,,.
I simply cannot believe that I've never played the stalker games (particularly anomaly) until now. Starting up a new game brought back a sense of excitement and immersion that I haven't felt since I was a kid. Absolute gem recommend it to anyone who is a fan of tactical shooters and survival/horrors.
starting right now thank you so much kevin! have a beautiful day man!!
Shameless plug for Call of the Zone, the late Doctor X's (RIP) Standalone version of Call of Chernobyl with some really good quests stuff built in, I think it basically integrates several of his mods into a standalone version of CoC. Hoping people will continue to patch it work on it etc.
I agree. I also think Call of the Zone is a lot better and does more than Anomoly. Anomoly's biggest mistake is it's too much of what people thought Stalker is without understanding what Stalker actually is, (ultra depressing atmosphere, ambiguously Russian, TRU HARDCOR L33T STALKING!) It goes so far that it comes off as comedic rather than serious. When you get past the improved graphics. It's just so much more shallow compared to other Call of Chernobyl compilations. Call of the Zone is just Call of Chernobyl with everything Stalker actually needed (reactive A-Life and story quests, more free form and open ended mission structure.) Not much needed to be changed or exaggerated.
i swore to not play anomaly until ive beaten the original trilogy, or practically finished it (nearly beaten CoP), and now, i got anomaly and stalker 2 to mess around with, cant wait to try out anomaly
The fact that the first enemy you fight in the tutorial mission can so easily kill you is an important lesson in it's own right. It tells you that running and gunning it not a viable tactic, and you need to be careful and use your surroundings to your advantage as well. Try getting enemies stuck on nearby stalkers, find cover, etc. The first stalker game did this as well, having you fight a group of bandits with shotguns while you had nothing but a dinky little peashooter.
My friend had a playthrough where the tutorial boars killed the rookie village other than sido
Hey dude just wanted to say im loving the vids, you're the only creator that i know who covers and reviews lesser known games
I was hoping you would cover the mod, it's a hell of an experience. My favorite thing is the tension that grows the more you play and learn about the zone. For instance, in the beginning you've never had a Chimera or pack of lurkers sneak up behind you in red forest, once it happens... you never play quite the same.
lol holy shit 95GB? And I thought my 44GB collection was ridiculous.
I had been slowly falling out of gaming, until I saw this. Admittedly I have never played the stalker games, but I couldn't resist giving Stalker Anomaly a try.
.
.
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I'm friggin addicted.
Thank you so much.
Also~ despite this being free, I HAD to grab the whole bunch and experience this first hand. Super excited.
I'm a bit annoyed you called this the "original intention" of STALKER considering how little Anomaly actually adds. The closest thing to the "original intention" for STALKER is STALKER Oblivion Lost. A standalone mod that adds every single bit of cut content for STALKER that could be found. Including rival STALKERS, dynamic A-Life, the original plot and quests, and a whole bunch more. I'd love to see you check that out next.
I thought you were going to trash on him for covering one of the best mods in stalker for a sec lmao I'll have to check out oblivion lost
The original shadow of chernobyl has had a major impact and impression on me alone, even for its simplicity compared to what the lost alpha has meant for my game experience of the stalker universe.
It is crazy that anomaly lift this even further and I need to experience this too. Even if it kicks my ass for starters lol.
Thanks for vid 👍
I think the most significant downside of this mod is that exploration is not rewarding enough. I would expect a new location, new camp, new place to have something unique, something that makes visiting it justified. A unique gun, NPC with a short questline, valuable artifact... anything. None of that is true. All maps are free of any content that is not randomly generated. Visiting a new location feels like seeing a ghost, a shadow of what it was before. Fetch-quests are somewhat ok, but can't keep me entertained for a long, and once you figure out how to abuse them - there is no coming back.
I spent around ten hours trying to gear up and understand how to play this game. But once you have an exoskeleton and decent gun - it's just a matter of time till you start running through every single location in minutes. And yeah, the magic is now gone.
This game needs just a little more of a real content, not just a few new'n'shiny mechanics. Lost Alpha did a much better job on this, so its still top 1 in my personal rating.
i started in the northern swamp by the power plant and some how got my hands on an apocalypse monolith suit, my main goal was to fix that suit so i could 1. sneak through monlith territory and 2. have one of the best suits in the game, i got it and soem good guns fixed and then still could get killed by basicly everything out there, the armor(atleast when i played last) was more of a you can tank 4 more bullets than normal, and if you get shot too much you need to spend more time and money fixing your armor agian, very fun thou
@@UT_SWAT that's why we need story mods for anomaly. There is one for Dead Air, called Book of the Dead, which came out recently, and I heard it's pretty good.
@@UT_SWATI'm not saying you cant die. Sure you can. But with a good armor it's easy enough to not bother with most of the threats. Repair kits and items are abundant so you should have no problem repairing your gear. That's exactly what I'm talking about, once you learn how to play - the game becomes easy enough to skip a lot of the content.
i think it goes more for the post apocalyptic realism - out in the world you're not gonna find new things every encampment you come across etc. sometimes you'll find bandits or creatures or whatever, and sometimes you won't. sometimes items, sometimes not. enemy types and items found will be pretty similar in the same areas. this mod is more of a way of life, than a game with the associated direct progression (though that progression is still in there somewhere) which is best if you want to be immersed in the world - not be on schedule to reach some promised land of endgame or something. it's about the journey - not the destination and shinies.
@@whiskizyo2067 Well said, Megaman
I've played through the whole series and I had no idea this existed. Super excited to try it
As a guy who spent 1000+ hours on Anomaly, it's definitely one of the best games ever made, it's what all of us stalker fans wanted, immersive and dead environments, dynamic faction relations, fun but challenging gunplay, it's without a doubt one of the best, even with 1000+ hours I still keep finding new stuff in every playthrough, and the Modding for Anomaly, god.... it's beautiful, if there's something you hate in anomaly well, you just need to dip your toe into anomaly's Moddb page and you'll find more than you bargained for, only annoying thing is trying to figure out a good load order for the mods you have installed, finding a good and working load order is like cooking, do it badly and you'll crash your game, and your sanity, but that's a small price to pay for the amazing experience you can get from mods, Anomaly rocks harder than my nan when I un-plugged her life support, 9.4/10 Game.
I'm right there with you stalker. -It's almost unhealthy how much time I spend in the zone. I just crave the abuse.
I have absolutly no clue how you can spend 1000 hours and still find a reason to play, after 1 playthrough I feel like I saw everything it had to offer and no matter how many addons I literally shower it with, it just deels... bland, the aspect of randomness is so much lower than CoC, where I had a 6 factions fight next to the freedom base. But in Anomaly the most unpredictable thing is if that boar that rushed me will magically hit me and one shot me on my 57th ironman playthrough. And dear god I hope they change the story because it's so garbage compared to any other proper story mod, as a main thing to work towards it really is just underwhelming and doesn't keep the drive for long
@@ross_boss "Oh it's boring and not hard just stupid and I wants more RNG, magic boars is dumb and I know what is good game"
It's okay, you can play fallout, we won't judge ;P
@@unarmored9973 Wow, you sure showed him by denying the validity of his entire comment!
@@2dollarchickenwings689 to be fair neither are wrong since that guy is only expressing what he feels, his opinion is not a fact, though I will agree the story is not the best, but as he said, I'd play other mods for story
Hehe~ when you were talking about main quest that didn't want to mark as a finish I saw that underground hideout. The quest fill finish when you pick up a document that lay somewhere in the middle of Strelok room.
I picked it up. I even spawned it back into the room with the debug menu just so I could pick it up again.
I love that I got demolished by boars in the tutorial mission lol! Mutants hitting hard is kinda bad until you get the Soundscape Overhaul and it fixes the mutant sounds, therefore giving you a chance to use audio as a guide, which is dope af and essential in my oppinion when compared to the random non-existing mutant sounds from vanilla anomaly
*The perfect Stalker Game= Call Of Pripyat.*
Normally I'd agree, but since all of COP exists within this mod, I'd say there's a good argument for Anomaly.
This is one of the best games I have ever played. The modding team has really reached a pinnacle here. After playing STALKER for years, Iike to play Anomaly and pick a Mercenary with story mode off. I like to imagine I’m a new mercenary arriving in the zone and I am just trying to make a name for myself. What an unbelievable game. I mean the AI is great, you feel like you are consistently being hunted, and warfare is so cool. Additionally, the vanilla Anomaly is pretty perfect, but there are addons you can install that further the experience.
You should do a follow up video talking about the rest of the storylines at some point
METRO NEXT HYPE. Love the retrospectives of all kinds, you do a great job with even stuff I've never heard of, present it in a way that's enjoyable and concise. Great video sir!
26:08 3months buddy... if only you knew haha
Holy shit!! This was made for me and I did not even know it existed! THIS IS AMAZING!!
Having had zero prior knowledge of STALKER titles - playing through Anomaly has been a.....learning.....experience 😂
_"Oo! What's this?"_ - Dead
_"Hey! Who's that?"_ - Dead
_"Wait... wh-"_ - Dead
If it makes you feel better, I've been playing Stalker since day 1 and my first experience with Anomaly is the same as yours.
@@AvalancheReviews Tons better, cheers Avalanche 😂❤🍻
It would've been better to start off with the original games instead, just to appreciate how much it was ahead of it's time and how far we've come
@@joshuakimmich9536 I run a business - I don't have time to play an entire franchise 😂
@@unbearifiedbear1885 Playing the entire franchise takes less time than a single playthrough of anomaly. In 65h you are donzo with all 3 games
The framerate issues with the scopes is caused by the way the 3D scope functions internally. The game essentially has to render the screen frame twice. Once for everything outside the scope and once inside for the zoomed in effect inside the scope. This causes considerable frame rate dips for those reasons. Unfortunate but if you pc can handle it and it's not an issue it's a very welcomed addition in my opinion.
Also absolutely fantastic review. 10/10
I think you will love Oblivion Lost Remake too. Not to be confused with the old OL mod. This is a playable version of one of the earlier STALKER builds, before it became Shadow of Chernobyl.
Been a subscriber to this channel for a while and played both metro games.... Finally making it to Stalker now that I have a PC. I am excited for this
Ah, Anomaly... perfect Armed Hobo Simulator. I'm still mad that Misery got popular on CoCh while SGM (Sigerous Mod series) didn't.
I always wondered what happened with addons-mods for Call of Chernobyl that are more focused on the story, iirc that's something you can find in Dead Air addons. Problem - lack of English translation, or even decent one.
Dude your Profilepic is AMAZING ahaha Strelokbob Sevapants
I always thought the mutants shredding my armor were bullshit too, but then I learned how the crafting system actually worked. Going around and cannibalizing every corpses' outfit I never would've looked at twice, then investing in a couple good sewing kits for my Sunrise Suit has literally saved my life. In the Zone, if there's a will, there is a way.
Great video overall, though some things that should be mentioned i think. Most of the problems you encountered or the game sometimes feeling more hardcore than it should actually comes down to Provaks "Weapon" Overhaul. Its more than that, its a huge pack of mods compiled together, and sometimes done very poorly, therefore resulting in crashes or stuff not working as intended, take your weapon scope example, it renders differently because you have multiple weapon packs from multiple autors in there, as said sometimes very poorly merged, plus some scopes are rendered picture in picture, which results in the awful framerates sometimes.
I´d rather recommend people check out Anomaly first and then take 30 minutes to browse the addons to determine what they really want and need, without having the game overloaded with things that they might not need from a modpack. There´s plenty of packs out there that do a good job without going overboard with it or adding too much. Hell i even uploaded one myself just because of that reason, to share my experience with Anomaly in the setup i have most fun with, without overloading people with stuff, and if anyone is interested i can share it here too.
But to end this, im really glad you did that video series on the stalker games, cause it brings more attention to these awesome and highly customizable games, and hopefully lets more people enjoy them for long times to come, maybe with a little break in between for Stalker 2 :).
Glad to see you did it Jared, and also that you loved it !
See you in the zone and thanks for your hard work !
And now - there is Stalker: GAMMA. An upgrade to the Anomaly ☝🏻
My thought on the original GSC games was that SoC was the story they wanted to tell, CoP was the game they wanted to make, and CS was an explanation for why the developer couldn't do both at the same time. I think the authors and developers are really proud that there is a dedicated community that merge the games to make something truer to the vision than they themselves could achieve in the early 2000s.
I kind of wish there were some other styles of games set in the stalker universe. Wouldn't it be cool if you could make your own faction entirely, or have an x-com like game of controlling a team of agents?
It should also be stated how insanely customizable this game is. Along with the incredible amount of options they give you in vanilla Anomly, the add-ons for the game offer an insane amount of content as well. If there's any system you don't like there's a good chance there's an add-on that changes it. Highly recommend everyone give it a try.
GSC Game World allows even stand alone mods because they know that mods are the only reason people are still big fans of Stalker
Great job! Enjoyed every second of it
This has been such a great series! I've loved the Stalker games for years now and haven't had a way to really explain to my fiends why I love them so much ( Slavic Jank Included). But now I can simply point to this series and it encapsulates all the stuff good and bad that make these games one of a kind! Thanks Jared! You've done a tremendous job!
Just a funny random trivia: Anomaly is an addon-friendly pack based on Last Day pack, which is based on Call of Misery pack, which is based on CoC and Misery mods, which is based on Call of Prypyat' addon, which is based on S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl game, which is based on S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Oblivion Lost concept builds, which is based on Oblivion Lost concept builds back from 2001(!). There is a heavy part of the OG code back from the beginning still present in the Anomaly as well as some mechanics and all the engine stuff. One could say, that Stalker has come a long way since it's birth and not only alive and breathing, but even being on the edge of open-world shooters for a 2 decades now!
Also, Anomaly is amazing - S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s peak gameplay-wise (which is basically means best open-world looter-shooter on the market). Can't wait for a Dead Air 1.0 release to rival for that throne and, of course, the grand return of the series in the next year! (PC Gamer already played it and that means we will probably see full-gameplay trailer on The Game Awards)
Anyway, thanks for YET ANOTHER cool review, Avalanche, keep it up!
I was always wanting to get into the stalker series an this finally pushed me into it. I do have one request, perhaps make a short video going over each series with the mods you use the mods for each.
I'm not saying your opinion is wrong, but this is a bad way to introduce people to Stalker. You're recommending Provak's weapon pack which has pages and pages of crashlogs on the Moddb, it stole a load of gun packs and slapped them together without any quality control or balance. This isn't the "true Stalker experience" - it's a freeplay mod where you do cyclic quests for npcs. It'd be much better for people to jump in with something like OGSE, which is a highly customisable AMK variant, which mods the original SoC and improves it, rather than replacing it with a new game with a totally new direction (which the actual Stalker games don't take). There's massive item bloat in Anomaly too, and the muddy textures don't help.
As someone who used Provaks mod soup for a month or two and suffered endless crashes despite all his " fixes " , I agree. It's also much better to make your own personal modlist.
*1:54* and in true stalker fashion, we see 2 freedomers boning eachother
Literally playing Anomaly while listening to this in the background. I keep checking my PDA every time I hear the notification sound go off even though it's in the video lol.
Its a nice mod but ONLY after you went through all original vanilla games. I just find zombies in cordon a bit too much, also some modified textures ruin the atmosphere imo ( for example walls of some buildings) - they had that old soviet style look in vanilla but some places look worse now. Just because the texture has higher resolution doesn't mean that it creates a good atmosphere or that it fits the style of surrounding buildings. I also prefer the original grass, ground and color palette in general. Some items are useless and create a strange feeling that they're put into the game just for the sake of it. Not to mention the insane amount of different ak guns which simply left me confused. Some new sound choices were questionable as well, but that might be just me, as Shadow of Chernobyl had great sound design already imo. I treat Anomaly more like a sandbox game with new elements, but for original atmosphere and story - Vanilla hands down.
Dead zone mod makes textures feel just the right way
I'm so glad you got around to bring in Anomaly as well on top of the base games :D awesome video as always bud, it's like a birthday present anytime you put up something new haha!
I loved every second I spent with all of the OG S.T.A.L.K.E.R. titles. Probably put in around 300+ hours into them, only ever finished the original though. At some point, my PC that I used to play it on, bit the dust and I just never got around to reinstalling either game after that. This looks so perfect, and I can't believe it's free. My new PC should have no problems running it either! What a world!
Have you ever hear from the EFP mod (Escape from Pripyat)? It´s a collection of mods for anomaly that it completely overhauls it, Imo it´s a new take on what stalker can be since it takes a lot of ideas from other games like Tarkov (the magazine and damage location on the body), you should check it out sometime :D
Btw, sorry if my english sucks ass, not my native one lol
Exactly. Anomaly is really just a platform that allows you to create your own personalized version of open world STALKER, hence all the mod packs from different people creators.
Your English is probably better than alot of native english speakers tbh
The reason why provak's weapon overhaul feels cobbled together is because it is. It's a modpack, with a bunch of different gun mods all slapped together.
Theoretically if they're still working on it, getting the animations to work at the right frame rate shouldn't be too terribly hard, if my understanding is correct it's a matter of splining the frames... Now I'm not sure how many frames you need to have this work without hitches, it could be as simple as in-game parameters.. it's been a long since I did an x-ray dive, but initially when the engine shipped it was incredibly easy to just pull things out and modify them, they even provided little descriptions for everything.. this was how I played stalker and enjoyed it from day one, cuz day one I immediately opened up the script files took out the zoom on the iron sights.. and the tracers that was a big deal for me back then having tracers every round especially on silence weapons LOL this was before I had been broken into both just accepting the fact that all games are going to have fucking tracers cuz cuz I mean.. yeah whatever, and most games wouldn't let me adjust Minor details in the ini, OR Lua or whichever.. nowadays to do that you need to know c++ it seems, mostly on account that they don't want you doing it LOL, I have no idea why..
But yeah you could adjust pretty much every parameter you wanted on the weapons, but this is before 3D scopes or at the very least the original stalker had a hybrid of iron sights but optics were in 2D.. I remember one of my first mods was to do a two dimensional 3D scope to do hybrid scopes for the g36 and the susat l85.. and I think for that Gucci ar, tonight to my chagrin they're still up on the archived site that used to be the individual stalkerfiles.com etc hl2files.com I can't remember what it's called.. but they were in 1280x1024, the maximum resolution of the time LOL or at least the average certainly my maximum.. LOL actually CRTs used to go into the beyond 1440p range on a fairly regular basis, and to think if only digital foundry had done that retro game thing that had the CRTs from everyone's basement flying off shelves for thousands of dollars, most of them would have avoided the dump unfortunately.. all of them I assume are completely out of tune though which still cracks me up they they failed to mention that when they were talking about the power of CRTs LOL.
fortunately this exists LOL it seems like it's solved the issue by rendering them in 3D LOL resolution is no longer a problem but frame rate shouldn't be either, and I do believe 30 frames per second could at least be splines kind of like quake when you run it on a modern API or well when you translate it to a modern API LOL. Like it's not that cutting paste, but it can be done externally from what I understand.. without needing to redo the animation, now the engine could be the issue and it just could be the parameter that they set up for it, again I'm not really sure but it's a real tribute to the X-ray engine how many things are just a part of it that were honestly never really incorporated into the main game, I remember we were doing all sorts of fun render techniques by the end of my time playing stalker... now I'm not saying that this was probably an easy project to update this engine, not by any means LOL but it is a tribute to the X-ray engine that it was something that you could do that with over 10 years later into basically a modern engine, but you know it's the X-ray engine so it's better lol it has all the systems and fun stuff that it was designed around, something that we still don't see a lot of today.. if only it had a terrain-destructibility engine like crisis you know used to have before well see my other post for my thoughts on that one..
Anyhow, given the amount of fucking weapons they seem to have added to this thing I can only imagine this might just be a matter of time and as they go through them .... Giving what you just scrolled through in the video it's like what for a normal games arsenal would probably be a few hours providing I am correct in one or the other and you know what you're doing and you have the right equipment to do it, hell even if it is an engine parameter just going through that many fucking things as a fucking week project pretty much like a whole week....
I really do wish games would incorporate the optic only fov more often, you thought that was going to be a standard after they did it with unreal 2 with red orchestra, and then it was in Half-Life 2 and source engine and a pretty long-standing feature for source engine.. now you barely ever see it at all, a lot of things you don't see that much, although at the very least 3D Scopes are a standard.. everything's a monkey spa though iron sights are a standard, but regardless guns are still you know so close to the face slide should be in the eyeball when it fires.. they can do amazing complex leaning like we saw on riddick and that machine games translated over to Wolfenstein where you can have your cake and eat it too without having to slow down one bit, and yet 99% of the time you see leaning it's a cover system of sorts anymore, barely do you ever actually have manual and almost only in like milsim style games, or stealth games and most of those use a cover system.. and thus the backlash against leaning has become a thing even though it should be in every game that yeah have a body in because you might want to lean around something that's just part of being immersed in the game, being able to do basic tasks LOL. we can render face details that show like the pock marks on people, but we no longer have physics environments like we did with crisis, hell it's kind of a kind of a specialty to see like cans rolling around or the kind of expectacular havoc physics that we used to see, never mind the physics stuff because that was cool when it while it lasted, although we are starting to see some of those simulations come make a comeback with like water at the very least.. deformable train, nothing has really surpassed anything other than the visuals though especially given the design of the console seems to dictate that.. and what people complain about being bad graphics I just don't even get, like they're fine like holy fuck they're fine now now why don't you go make your fucking good game, but yeah that would be complicated cuz making a good game or making at least innovative game or just copying the innovative shit that used to be you know cool that would be mind blowing for people that haven't seen it in 10 years, I'm ranting again aren't i...
Keystrokes
16:03
WAIT YOU CAN FAST TRAVEL?!? Oh my god the hours I have spent walking back and forth through areas that I've already cleared.... Ouch.
A great video, like the other S.T.A.L.K.E.R. videos you made before. The only thing I didn't like too much is that, like many other reviews, it only shows Anomaly with addons that change many aspects of the mod and are the cause of some of the problems you criticized in the video.
The unmodified Anomaly mod is certainly not without flaws, but for example the problems around scopes and frame rate are mostly caused by the fact that you are using addons. So it's quite difficult to make the distinction between issues that are to be expected by players that choose a different set of addons and issues that are more likely to show up only with the particular set of addons you are using for this review.
Personally I prefer reviews that focus on the core of what Anomaly is and how much it can be customized and tweaked even without using addons. Of course the vast variety of available addons is a huge part of creating your own experience with the mod. So covering that as a separate part of a review would show how much the vanilla Anomaly experience can be enhanced using them.
But in the end I guess the important take away is that you seem to be having a good time playing Anomaly and that is the main goal it tries to achieve and I'm of course heavily biased about the way I'd like reviews for the mod to be set up.
Looking forward to watching more of your upcoming reviews. It seems you are planning to cover some other games that I really like in the near future.
god i loved the original stalker when i first played it 12 years ago, i just redownloaded shadow of Chernobyl and am playing through for a second time. this mod makes the game look like a sligthly older tarkov lol
Installed Escape from Pripyat after trying Provak's weapon overhaul, big difference in optimization and quality. Provak's is easier to install but not nearly as good as EFP.
Provak's is too much of a mishmash. It's better to get just a few mods, play the game and mod it to your tastes from there.
Yeah Provak’s addon is just a janky pile of shit. I waited so long for it to download and it ended up causing so many issues in my game, I just replaced it with B&S.
GSC have been really forward thinking where these mods are concerned. It's been so long since the last original Stalker game they realised that these mods have kept the Stalker name alive for the people who loved the original games, so roll on, Stalker 2 could end up one of the most sought after releases ever.
This is a pretty terrible stalker mod:
1) The A-Life barely works or isn't even there, there's not much happening in the world.
2) No fast-travel and objectives are far away, prepare for long boring runs.
3) The vegetation is common and you can't see through it, but the enemy can, you will die a lot and it will be unfair.
4) Ridiculous amounts of different unnecessary loot than you cannot sell.
5)Your companions die a lot and engage in unnecessary fights, even if you micromanage them.
6) You will take so much damage a single dog can kill you, also you bleed to death after every hit.
7) Every enemy has an almost broken weapon, which you cannot use, and cannot sell, this is just idiotic.
I've finished the trilogy about 3 times each, and this is not a good stalker game.
There is fast travel, but its pretty lazily put in as its ripped from a CoC mod.
I may be late to the party here, but if anyone stumbles onto this comment, GAMMA takes Anomaly and makes it even better somehow. Like I never played Anomaly to start with but have watched tons and tons of gameplay of it, and there are just so many things in GAMMA that aren't in Anomaly that I honestly can't imagine playing a STALKER game without. Highly highly highly recommend that modpack for anyone interested in a fresh but familiar STALKER experience
You haven’t actually experienced it if you haven’t played it though. And have you played the original games