yo protip for all of you stalkers: take some dutch coacoa heat it in some butter then add 3 parts milk, bring to a heavy boil and add 1 part heavy cream. also i remember them having this weird 'companion' mechanic in SoC which is the only original title I've played. there are the exosuit stalkers in prypiat and the mission where you help that duty guy free his bro for example
Very nice video, serves as a great reminder that simplicity isn't bad and that the originals are a lot more to the point than one might think, I share a lot of your views about clutter and stuff mainly because at some point a lot of the clutter and inv management is just a waste of time keeping me away from the actual experiences I tailored with mods, so I really appreciate your recommendations of simplifier mods and options
Considering I've been playing STALKER since the release day in 2007 I'm surprised to know people actually think these things were in OG STALKER (SoC). In the first game, you used a gun until it jammed more than a peanut butter sandwich then found another. There were repair stations visible throughout the game, but unusable by you, and NPCs couldn't repair your stuff either. It was a cut feature due to time constraints, and also one of the earliest things to be modded back in
Finally, someone’s speaking my language when it comes to playing STALKER! God, the sheer amount of *things* the standalone mods add can be overwhelming, vanilla CoP will always have a special place in my heart for how straight and to the point it’s mechanics are in comparison to whatever the _fuck_ anomaly’s weapon maintenance system is
I remember attempts at changes in repairs and crafting in "Misery+Call of Chernobyl" branches... like "Last Day", they were confusing like heck. Saving by the campfire was probably introduced by "NLC" mod series for Shadow of Chernobyl. It's really hardcore mod for, but I wouldn't call it "Misery for ShoC" tho. Maybe some day it receive full translation because it's amazing but soul-crush punishing at the same time. I remember "Golden Sphere" for ShoC had separate body parts to heal.
9:59 I recommend playing vanilla first, just to get an idea of what the original was like. It will help you understand what made the games become so popular in the first place, and it will help you better appreciate the QoL improvements of mods
Also thirst! Lot of people seem to think of thirst as having been in the games but not actually, even then, hunger was only in 2 of 3 games, (removed in clear sky)
@@cantgameright Clear Sky is real comfy food once you get some mods and know what to do. Unless you install "Reborn" mods and have masochistic tendencies, which are required for this mod....
I still remember the good old day when you have to shove at least 10 bandages when getting a minor scratch just to stop it from bleeding you to death. And in SOC you have to equip 3 of the same artifact and toss yourself into the same type of anomaly to fix your armor
Good work man, and nicely done. I love stalker, and it is a subjective thing with mods - stalker now can suit any taste if you want it. What's also nice is all the mod mods that can change a mod in a new way, altering gameplay to suit it more for you. Such a wonderful universe to dive in to.
Long term player here, mod Canon has been a thing for so long. I remember when TVtropes used things from amk and oblivion lost in the main article for SoC.
There are some stash locations in Anomaly ( and originally misery) that I look for in the original trilogy that isn't there. They have become so expected that I get thrown off. Also, squat depth.
Thank you for this video Honestly, I just couldn't keep up with Anomaly, with this mod and all the other "FU simulators" are responsible for forever dividing the Stalker community between traditionalists and progressivists (including people who played Tarkov and just go "Tarkov this" and "Tarkov that") or whatever name you wanna use After trying to get through the "ultra realistic" or "muh realism" slogfest which was painful (like items always being 0% durability, every hit or shot making you lose almost your entire health, hearing the ragged breathing from Misery that is even more annoying than the panting from the OG trilogy, literally all the artifacts being unusuable because of radiation, item clutter, etc.), I just gave up and stuck to the simplistic Stalker games and mods like Lost Alpha or Oblivion Lost Remake (if I ever return to Anomaly I hope to dear god to find mods that just simplify everything, like that repair mod you mentioned, thank you for that
Remember that soldiers practice taking apart their weapons and putting them back together again as quickly as possible. Blindfolded too. They do this countless times.
modded stalker plays like tarkov, or the chicken or the egg answer, tarkov plays like modded stalker. PS: iirc the only reason repair kit mods existed back in the day was because SoC didn't have any options for weapon repair, and for a time it went the way of the dodo in CS and CoP, but big mods for CoP started to include them again around the 2012 era as people were somewhat irked by the exaggerated degradation rate of the guns, but in all honesty its just feature for feature sake as the technicians are perfectly fine as it was and the real problem was degradation rate was a touch too punishing. As for hunting, I still remembered how much of a hilarious workaround it was to implement the feature for the Misery beta back when the source code wasn't public yet, mutants didn't have actual inventory in CoP, so the mutant basically drop the "meat" item upon death and you would pick it up by pressing a button with a text prompt, cooking was also wonky as hell and most of the time you had to bring it to a trader to cook it for you, it was also kinda useless if it wasn't for the fact that a can of kolbasa cost like a quarter of a new gun and purchasing 50 bullets could cost you as much as a mid tier pistol, god I remembered playing some mods were the economy was so bad you could soft lock your game out of sheer RNG because there was a chance that no NPCs or trader in the map possess a food item in their inventory. Still, it was kinda funny hearing jokes about implementing snork siscabobs and having the implied cannibalism flying over your head.
I have no idea why some people playing mods before finished the vanilla. It's like reading a fanfic before the original one. Yet they still complaining that the math test was far more different from what they taught in the class ._.
i inderstand your perspective on simplicity but what most pe9ple dont understand, including you is the fact that the first games were meant to be playied once or twice, finished in a few hours and you d be done with them so a lot of items ane complicated gameplay mechanics would be absolutelly redudntant, but anomaly and the mods packs are made with longevity in mind thats why it is so hard to get gear, and repair it cause that gear wil last for many hours, in soc if your gun broke youd find another one 30 seconds later
Yeah I’m like you. Simple bleed and damage system is enough. Maybe add body health like KCD or Fallout but you still use the same 2, AT MOST 3 items to heal. Same with weapon maintenance. Have one big repair kit say under 60% and one smaller lighter item for field maintenance. That’s all the complexity you need.
@@nsawatchlistbait289 Yeah I'm eventually going to cover every mod I use in future videos because that's a question that deserves being appropriately answered.
Was never a big fan of the overcomplification of systems introduced in mods. I stuck with coc for a long time since it was just cop but free roam and levels from the other games. The only thing I personally would want added into the games officially is animations for using items and consumables. Or really just some of the more interactivity with your gear the way the metro games did it.
I am autistic enough to enjoy crazy equipment management, but when I finally fixed my first exoskeleton in Gamma, i realized there's no more interesting stuff to do here, I beat the game:(
This is why I don't get people who want to gut the durability and crafting system. Once you trivialize the crafting system you Speedrun getting the best armor/weapons, the game becomes a cakewalk and the zone loses its power. Even in the original trilogy where there was a proper story once I got strong enough All the missions just felt like busy work because there was no challenge. In the gamma you get the last 10-20% of the game to be fully powered and that's after dozens of hours of toiling and struggling to get to that point. Once you gut the crafting system you get endgame loot the first time you move north of the barrier and trivialize the remaining 50-70% of the game. I really hope the stalker devs took notes from gamma and add a hardcore survival mode. I don't expect a fully blown crafting system but I hope they can find a way to block the player from progressing too early without significant effort.
@@StrengthScholar0 thing i enjoyed about Stalker the most was exploration, gearing up and going into more dangerous places to encounter more dangerous mysterious things... there's needs to be perfect ballance of exploration, story, mysteries and gearing up in stalker 2 to make it successful. I think GSC gonna deliver that.
For me, STALKER is a game that you gonna have best experience with modding. Vanilla itself isn't bad but If you can't keep up with some jank of the game then going play with minimal modding instead (I call it chocolate chips). My Call of Pripyat use Atmosphere, Absolute Nature, STCOP weapon mod and QOL mods (Artefact spawn fix), It still feel vanilla but some a bit different flavor to it.
It's strange to me how you say "play the game however you want" and then try to shame people and say they scare you "for putting spices in their hot chocolate". If you have a basic palate feel free to make your hot chocolate sickly sweet and basic. Some of us like our hot chocolate more bitter with a sprinkle of nutmeg steeped in a bit of cardamom. By the way I agree with some of the points you raised, I don't think field stripping should damage your firearm, there's a couple of repair tools that don't make sense and repairing should be an option that saves you money/speeds up your progression, not the only choice to progress. I just don't like your quasi elitist gatekeeping for people who enjoy the hardcore aspects of stalker gamma/anomaly (I don't even really consider the latter to be hardcore) Btw when you trivialize the crafting you don't only make that aspect of the game easier you make every aspect of the game substantially easier because as soon as you find a weapon you can have a mechanic patch it up and BOOM! you just hopped from a Makarov to a late game rifle trivializing the intentionally oppressive nature of the zone and robbing yourself of meaningful and fulfilling progression.
Thanks for your comment, I appreciate when a well thought out comment makes me think. I spent few years in product development for handmade cigars, premium rums, and specialty coffee, spending more sessions than I can count in tasting panels and quality control. It was always odd to see a contrast between the people I worked with in development and marketing, often insisting on the purity of the products we were making and others from more general business roles in the office who in holiday seasons would make "their own" hot chocolate recipe which was always a mix of many spices over a cheap base hot chocolate. I always wondered why it never occurred to anyone to just spend less on spices and more on the quality of the chocolate base and weigh how dark or milky it should be, how salty (if salty), and how thick. The thing is, you CAN mix up your chocolate drink with all the spices you want, but at some point it becomes chocolate eggnog and that's what I'm trying to emphasize here. There comes a point where STALKER gets modded so much that it is no longer STALKER, and that's what I'm trying to shed light on. This isn't about "gatekeeping," rather, it's about drawing a line between STALKER and STALKER derivative mods that result in a different thing. When DayZ came out of Arma a line was clearly drawn to distinguish the two, same goes for Lost World for Fallout 4. Why? because most people who played DayZ and Lost World were already familiar with the games those two came from; however, a significant amount of people who played STALKER for the first time did so through Anomaly and its modpacks, leading a pretty messy situation in which good but greatly different fan fiction was being de-facto canonized by those who have yet to play the OGs. This creates a rather dissonant community in the leadup to an upcoming canon sequel and I think it's important to draw the line between what's OG and what's Fanfic (nothing wrong with fanfic btw). The OG games have their own progression, I don't think anyone has ever thought of them as incredibly easy because they could rip everyone up with the first weapon the found and fixed. You still have to find tools and schematics for your techs to actually make them better and give you an advantage. The improvement of your weapons was spent mostly exploring and not hoarding and dismantling junk to fulfill crafting recipes in an inventory menu. The latter seems of post-apocalyptic games to me, turning random junk into tools, and Stalker isn't a post-apocalyptic game; sure its atmosphere is desolate and quasi post-apocalyptic, but I always like comparing the zone to the wild west. This is a lawless land inside of an otherwise functional world and the exploitation of this lawless land is making the functional world around it better, but at the expense of turning the lawless land even more lawless, violent, and wild with a booming arsenal. I don't know if you have or haven't played the OG games, but if you haven't, start with CoP since the order in which you play the games doesn't matter too much. You might want to mod the FoV and expand grass render distance to give it a bit of a facelift. Get to embrace the OG's progression simplicity, and the original vision of the zone that has unfortunately been forgotten in the shadow of modern mods that take the zone and run with it into another direction. Thanks for taking the time to read my thoughts, hopefully they did your concerns justice.
@@cantgameright Sorry for not responding earlier I just got a notification for your comprehensive response. I'll stick with the hot chocolate analogy. you said that the spices were used to cover up cheap chocolate. But have you ever considered that you can add high quality spices and high quality chocolate to make an amazing hot chocolate that highlights the best of both? I think a lot of people are creating a false dichotomy around staying true to the stalker franchise and implementing some of the changes that made anomaly so punishing and rewarding. This is why I've always suggested that the additions that were made in anomaly could be largely gated off by adding a survival mode. Since I don't think there's any anomaly players that would dislike having the best aspects of the original games(characters, set pieces, story beats) injected into the anomaly gameplay loop I genuinely believe there is a very easy way to make everybody happy by providing the high quality chocolate of the original stalker trilogy and optionally adding in the high quality spices that were introduced in anomaly. I think having normal difficulty modes and a separate survival mode with varying levels of difficulty would really make both fanbases happy because they got to have a high quality hot chocolate made the way they like it. Btw I played SOC a couple of years after it came out, unmodded and it was definitely a diamond in the rough but I, like many others saw something very special in it. I will make some time to Play a proper modded version of the original games that stays true to the original vision after this talk. While I may not see eye to eye with you I respect your perspective and understand the reasoning that led you to your belief. Whether you read this or not I have a lot of respect for your dedication to the community. There's only a couple of channels out there with the amount of passion you display and it's always nice to come by a new one.
@@Tony-nt5zd It's not about the crafting mechanics it's about scarcity mechanics that create a meta gameplay "story" arc from being a victim of the zone to becoming a master of the zone through persistence and resourcefulness. I think the people who haven't fully given themselves into The hardcore aspects of anomaly and specifically mod packs like gamma can't understand how powerful scrounging yourself up from the bottom any way you can to becoming a god of the zone really is. I've been gaming for 20 years and I've never interfaced with a progression system a quarter as rewarding as what stalker gamma offers you. Unfortunately progression as a meaningful as what gamma offers just isn't possible without the crafting. In short the overwhelming majority of hardcore anomaly players don't enjoy crafting, they enjoy meaningful progression that happens to be inextricably linked with crafting.
Bruh, the only mention to Gamma in this video is in reference to another video I made. If you think that any of the points brought up in the vide are exclusive to gamma, you need to play more.
yo protip for all of you stalkers: take some dutch coacoa heat it in some butter then add 3 parts milk, bring to a heavy boil and add 1 part heavy cream.
also i remember them having this weird 'companion' mechanic in SoC which is the only original title I've played. there are the exosuit stalkers in prypiat and the mission where you help that duty guy free his bro for example
Comments like this get pinned and shared in the next video ;)
Nice recipe
Я схожу каву заварюю, але замiсть вершкiв вода та спеції(кориця, сiль, куркума, цукор(мед краще), корiандр, гвоздика, цедра)
Very nice video, serves as a great reminder that simplicity isn't bad and that the originals are a lot more to the point than one might think, I share a lot of your views about clutter and stuff mainly because at some point a lot of the clutter and inv management is just a waste of time keeping me away from the actual experiences I tailored with mods, so I really appreciate your recommendations of simplifier mods and options
Considering I've been playing STALKER since the release day in 2007 I'm surprised to know people actually think these things were in OG STALKER (SoC). In the first game, you used a gun until it jammed more than a peanut butter sandwich then found another. There were repair stations visible throughout the game, but unusable by you, and NPCs couldn't repair your stuff either. It was a cut feature due to time constraints, and also one of the earliest things to be modded back in
Finally, someone’s speaking my language when it comes to playing STALKER! God, the sheer amount of *things* the standalone mods add can be overwhelming, vanilla CoP will always have a special place in my heart for how straight and to the point it’s mechanics are in comparison to whatever the _fuck_ anomaly’s weapon maintenance system is
7:27 What Anomaly really needs is better tabbing/categorization of items. Plus some are categorized in bizarre ways
7:25 I actually prefer the EFT health/damage system. Animations, different kits, tourniquets versus bandages, etc.
I remember attempts at changes in repairs and crafting in "Misery+Call of Chernobyl" branches... like "Last Day", they were confusing like heck.
Saving by the campfire was probably introduced by "NLC" mod series for Shadow of Chernobyl. It's really hardcore mod for, but I wouldn't call it "Misery for ShoC" tho. Maybe some day it receive full translation because it's amazing but soul-crush punishing at the same time. I remember "Golden Sphere" for ShoC had separate body parts to heal.
9:59 I recommend playing vanilla first, just to get an idea of what the original was like. It will help you understand what made the games become so popular in the first place, and it will help you better appreciate the QoL improvements of mods
as someone who play anomaly once, and played the og games many times, vary nias
yias nias indeed! m'name CGR
I said come in,don’t stand there
Also thirst! Lot of people seem to think of thirst as having been in the games but not actually, even then, hunger was only in 2 of 3 games, (removed in clear sky)
Clear Sky is my happy place.... and with Arsenal Overhaul? Oof!
@@cantgameright agreed! Though for me it’s clear sky + srp + absolute nature mod + cgim or atmosfear + OWR3
@@cantgameright Clear Sky is real comfy food once you get some mods and know what to do.
Unless you install "Reborn" mods and have masochistic tendencies, which are required for this mod....
I still remember the good old day when you have to shove at least 10 bandages when getting a minor scratch just to stop it from bleeding you to death. And in SOC you have to equip 3 of the same artifact and toss yourself into the same type of anomaly to fix your armor
Good work man, and nicely done. I love stalker, and it is a subjective thing with mods - stalker now can suit any taste if you want it. What's also nice is all the mod mods that can change a mod in a new way, altering gameplay to suit it more for you. Such a wonderful universe to dive in to.
Long term player here, mod Canon has been a thing for so long. I remember when TVtropes used things from amk and oblivion lost in the main article for SoC.
There are some stash locations in Anomaly ( and originally misery) that I look for in the original trilogy that isn't there. They have become so expected that I get thrown off. Also, squat depth.
ngl, I appreciate the "balls to the dirt" squat
2:57 I never did the parts scrounging and "maintenance." I just earned (or looted) the money needed to pair the professionals to maintain/fix my shit.
I was in the discord and saw your comment, nice vid
Thank you for this video
Honestly, I just couldn't keep up with Anomaly, with this mod and all the other "FU simulators" are responsible for forever dividing the Stalker community between traditionalists and progressivists (including people who played Tarkov and just go "Tarkov this" and "Tarkov that") or whatever name you wanna use
After trying to get through the "ultra realistic" or "muh realism" slogfest which was painful (like items always being 0% durability, every hit or shot making you lose almost your entire health, hearing the ragged breathing from Misery that is even more annoying than the panting from the OG trilogy, literally all the artifacts being unusuable because of radiation, item clutter, etc.), I just gave up and stuck to the simplistic Stalker games and mods like Lost Alpha or Oblivion Lost Remake (if I ever return to Anomaly I hope to dear god to find mods that just simplify everything, like that repair mod you mentioned, thank you for that
Mira buen video que haces maestro ojalá que la gente de latinoamerica y todo el mundo le diera más reconocimiento a este juegaso,saludos de arg
Remember that soldiers practice taking apart their weapons and putting them back together again as quickly as possible. Blindfolded too.
They do this countless times.
modded stalker plays like tarkov, or the chicken or the egg answer, tarkov plays like modded stalker. PS: iirc the only reason repair kit mods existed back in the day was because SoC didn't have any options for weapon repair, and for a time it went the way of the dodo in CS and CoP, but big mods for CoP started to include them again around the 2012 era as people were somewhat irked by the exaggerated degradation rate of the guns, but in all honesty its just feature for feature sake as the technicians are perfectly fine as it was and the real problem was degradation rate was a touch too punishing. As for hunting, I still remembered how much of a hilarious workaround it was to implement the feature for the Misery beta back when the source code wasn't public yet, mutants didn't have actual inventory in CoP, so the mutant basically drop the "meat" item upon death and you would pick it up by pressing a button with a text prompt, cooking was also wonky as hell and most of the time you had to bring it to a trader to cook it for you, it was also kinda useless if it wasn't for the fact that a can of kolbasa cost like a quarter of a new gun and purchasing 50 bullets could cost you as much as a mid tier pistol, god I remembered playing some mods were the economy was so bad you could soft lock your game out of sheer RNG because there was a chance that no NPCs or trader in the map possess a food item in their inventory. Still, it was kinda funny hearing jokes about implementing snork siscabobs and having the implied cannibalism flying over your head.
I have no idea why some people playing mods before finished the vanilla. It's like reading a fanfic before the original one. Yet they still complaining that the math test was far more different from what they taught in the class ._.
i inderstand your perspective on simplicity but what most pe9ple dont understand, including you is the fact that the first games were meant to be playied once or twice, finished in a few hours and you d be done with them so a lot of items ane complicated gameplay mechanics would be absolutelly redudntant, but anomaly and the mods packs are made with longevity in mind thats why it is so hard to get gear, and repair it cause that gear wil last for many hours, in soc if your gun broke youd find another one 30 seconds later
great video!!!! your channel is the best🔥
4:55 and it's a shame S2 won't have co-op.
Yeah I’m like you. Simple bleed and damage system is enough. Maybe add body health like KCD or Fallout but you still use the same 2, AT MOST 3 items to heal.
Same with weapon maintenance. Have one big repair kit say under 60% and one smaller lighter item for field maintenance. That’s all the complexity you need.
Great video as always. Can you please make more videos about H3VR.
Hmmm H3VR can certainly play an important role in a video I'm currently planning.
What mod are you playing in this vid?
It's mixed gameplay footage from a bit of everything really. From SoC, CS, and CoP to CoC and Anomaly.
@@cantgameright oh nice
@@nsawatchlistbait289 Yeah I'm eventually going to cover every mod I use in future videos because that's a question that deserves being appropriately answered.
Was never a big fan of the overcomplification of systems introduced in mods. I stuck with coc for a long time since it was just cop but free roam and levels from the other games.
The only thing I personally would want added into the games officially is animations for using items and consumables. Or really just some of the more interactivity with your gear the way the metro games did it.
I'd love to have your mod pack is that an English translation mod? I've been having trouble modding without crashing lol
What is that gun in the second section with the grenade launcher?
that's a remodel for the TRs-301 from the OG games.
@@cantgameright based
I am autistic enough to enjoy crazy equipment management, but when I finally fixed my first exoskeleton in Gamma, i realized there's no more interesting stuff to do here, I beat the game:(
This is why I don't get people who want to gut the durability and crafting system. Once you trivialize the crafting system you Speedrun getting the best armor/weapons, the game becomes a cakewalk and the zone loses its power. Even in the original trilogy where there was a proper story once I got strong enough All the missions just felt like busy work because there was no challenge.
In the gamma you get the last 10-20% of the game to be fully powered and that's after dozens of hours of toiling and struggling to get to that point. Once you gut the crafting system you get endgame loot the first time you move north of the barrier and trivialize the remaining 50-70% of the game.
I really hope the stalker devs took notes from gamma and add a hardcore survival mode. I don't expect a fully blown crafting system but I hope they can find a way to block the player from progressing too early without significant effort.
@@StrengthScholar0 thing i enjoyed about Stalker the most was exploration, gearing up and going into more dangerous places to encounter more dangerous mysterious things... there's needs to be perfect ballance of exploration, story, mysteries and gearing up in stalker 2 to make it successful. I think GSC gonna deliver that.
For me, STALKER is a game that you gonna have best experience with modding. Vanilla itself isn't bad but If you can't keep up with some jank of the game then going play with minimal modding instead (I call it chocolate chips). My Call of Pripyat use Atmosphere, Absolute Nature, STCOP weapon mod and QOL mods (Artefact spawn fix), It still feel vanilla but some a bit different flavor to it.
Відео має українські субтитри. Круто.
Ви вважаєте переклад прийнятним?
@@cantgameright Є декілька граматичних помилок, але це не критично. 9/10
Simplified repair mod was the first mod i installed... Anomaly's system is unnecessary and cringe
It's strange to me how you say "play the game however you want" and then try to shame people and say they scare you "for putting spices in their hot chocolate".
If you have a basic palate feel free to make your hot chocolate sickly sweet and basic. Some of us like our hot chocolate more bitter with a sprinkle of nutmeg steeped in a bit of cardamom.
By the way I agree with some of the points you raised, I don't think field stripping should damage your firearm, there's a couple of repair tools that don't make sense and repairing should be an option that saves you money/speeds up your progression, not the only choice to progress. I just don't like your quasi elitist gatekeeping for people who enjoy the hardcore aspects of stalker gamma/anomaly (I don't even really consider the latter to be hardcore)
Btw when you trivialize the crafting you don't only make that aspect of the game easier you make every aspect of the game substantially easier because as soon as you find a weapon you can have a mechanic patch it up and BOOM! you just hopped from a Makarov to a late game rifle trivializing the intentionally oppressive nature of the zone and robbing yourself of meaningful and fulfilling progression.
Thanks for your comment, I appreciate when a well thought out comment makes me think.
I spent few years in product development for handmade cigars, premium rums, and specialty coffee, spending more sessions than I can count in tasting panels and quality control. It was always odd to see a contrast between the people I worked with in development and marketing, often insisting on the purity of the products we were making and others from more general business roles in the office who in holiday seasons would make "their own" hot chocolate recipe which was always a mix of many spices over a cheap base hot chocolate. I always wondered why it never occurred to anyone to just spend less on spices and more on the quality of the chocolate base and weigh how dark or milky it should be, how salty (if salty), and how thick. The thing is, you CAN mix up your chocolate drink with all the spices you want, but at some point it becomes chocolate eggnog and that's what I'm trying to emphasize here.
There comes a point where STALKER gets modded so much that it is no longer STALKER, and that's what I'm trying to shed light on. This isn't about "gatekeeping," rather, it's about drawing a line between STALKER and STALKER derivative mods that result in a different thing. When DayZ came out of Arma a line was clearly drawn to distinguish the two, same goes for Lost World for Fallout 4. Why? because most people who played DayZ and Lost World were already familiar with the games those two came from; however, a significant amount of people who played STALKER for the first time did so through Anomaly and its modpacks, leading a pretty messy situation in which good but greatly different fan fiction was being de-facto canonized by those who have yet to play the OGs. This creates a rather dissonant community in the leadup to an upcoming canon sequel and I think it's important to draw the line between what's OG and what's Fanfic (nothing wrong with fanfic btw).
The OG games have their own progression, I don't think anyone has ever thought of them as incredibly easy because they could rip everyone up with the first weapon the found and fixed. You still have to find tools and schematics for your techs to actually make them better and give you an advantage. The improvement of your weapons was spent mostly exploring and not hoarding and dismantling junk to fulfill crafting recipes in an inventory menu. The latter seems of post-apocalyptic games to me, turning random junk into tools, and Stalker isn't a post-apocalyptic game; sure its atmosphere is desolate and quasi post-apocalyptic, but I always like comparing the zone to the wild west. This is a lawless land inside of an otherwise functional world and the exploitation of this lawless land is making the functional world around it better, but at the expense of turning the lawless land even more lawless, violent, and wild with a booming arsenal.
I don't know if you have or haven't played the OG games, but if you haven't, start with CoP since the order in which you play the games doesn't matter too much. You might want to mod the FoV and expand grass render distance to give it a bit of a facelift. Get to embrace the OG's progression simplicity, and the original vision of the zone that has unfortunately been forgotten in the shadow of modern mods that take the zone and run with it into another direction.
Thanks for taking the time to read my thoughts, hopefully they did your concerns justice.
Fortunately I have always been consistent in my opinion that crafting mechanics fans are cringe.
@@cantgameright
Sorry for not responding earlier I just got a notification for your comprehensive response.
I'll stick with the hot chocolate analogy. you said that the spices were used to cover up cheap chocolate. But have you ever considered that you can add high quality spices and high quality chocolate to make an amazing hot chocolate that highlights the best of both? I think a lot of people are creating a false dichotomy around staying true to the stalker franchise and implementing some of the changes that made anomaly so punishing and rewarding.
This is why I've always suggested that the additions that were made in anomaly could be largely gated off by adding a survival mode. Since I don't think there's any anomaly players that would dislike having the best aspects of the original games(characters, set pieces, story beats) injected into the anomaly gameplay loop I genuinely believe there is a very easy way to make everybody happy by providing the high quality chocolate of the original stalker trilogy and optionally adding in the high quality spices that were introduced in anomaly.
I think having normal difficulty modes and a separate survival mode with varying levels of difficulty would really make both fanbases happy because they got to have a high quality hot chocolate made the way they like it.
Btw I played SOC a couple of years after it came out, unmodded and it was definitely a diamond in the rough but I, like many others saw something very special in it.
I will make some time to Play a proper modded version of the original games that stays true to the original vision after this talk.
While I may not see eye to eye with you I respect your perspective and understand the reasoning that led you to your belief.
Whether you read this or not I have a lot of respect for your dedication to the community. There's only a couple of channels out there with the amount of passion you display and it's always nice to come by a new one.
@@Tony-nt5zd
It's not about the crafting mechanics it's about scarcity mechanics that create a meta gameplay "story" arc from being a victim of the zone to becoming a master of the zone through persistence and resourcefulness.
I think the people who haven't fully given themselves into The hardcore aspects of anomaly and specifically mod packs like gamma can't understand how powerful scrounging yourself up from the bottom any way you can to becoming a god of the zone really is. I've been gaming for 20 years and I've never interfaced with a progression system a quarter as rewarding as what stalker gamma offers you. Unfortunately progression as a meaningful as what gamma offers just isn't possible without the crafting.
In short the overwhelming majority of hardcore anomaly players don't enjoy crafting, they enjoy meaningful progression that happens to be inextricably linked with crafting.
For someone who doesn't like gamma you talk a lot about gamma
Bruh, the only mention to Gamma in this video is in reference to another video I made. If you think that any of the points brought up in the vide are exclusive to gamma, you need to play more.