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[Ulfarr]

Nice! I guess I'll wait for a few more addons to pop up and I'll give it a try.

truckload of useless junk items found in Anomaly.

Yeah it's a shame that they added so much clutter in it. I wish there was a "lite" version, because a lot of the concepts behind it are really nice.

[Ulfarr]

I gave CoTZ a try and i'm still too early in my playthrough ( only gone to cordon and the swamps so far) but I have to say that overall I'm very pleased with the mod.

First of all the Zone itself is gorgeous with vibrant colours and dark shadows to contrast them. Staring as a Loner I found myself inside one of the underground bunkers and when I climbed up to the surface I just couldn't help myself but marvel at the sight of sun rays passing through the lush vegetation. It was beautiful! Compared to Anomaly where everything was depressingly bleak and hostile, CoTZ' zone has a wild beauty, it's still hostile yet fascinating enough to make you want to explore it.

The nights especially can potentially be terrifying. Nights are pitch black! So you really need to get your flashlight out (or get some night vision device but I don't know how effective it is) or you won't be seeing anything. Now this might get tiresome after a while but it can make something as mundane as looking for a stash in the bushes into a spectacular event. Years ago I was playing the Lost Alpha which had similarly dark nights, slogging through the cordon barely able to walk from all the loot I was carrying, a storm raging and everything was so dark I had no idea were I was. And then a thunder lit up the sky and I found myself walking right into a pack of Blind Dogs. One of my best stalker moments.

Gunplay is quite nice too. The guns are punchy enough that I could take on a few soldier with just a pistol ( I hadn't had a rifle yet) and live to tell the story (died a few times but yeah..), after anomaly that's quite refreshing actually. And yet so far they don't feel overpowered, a pseudogiant took about 20 shotgun shots (buck and slug) and then some 5.45 to the face before it went down.

Performance wise it's also quite nice. My computer isn't that strong but it loads the maps quite fast and the controls feel responsive enough. Honestly my only complain so far is that personally I'd like that loot from stashes and boxes was a bit more restricted, I've barely played a few hours and I already have a veles detector (I'm still running in just my leather jacket because I can't afford a proper suit yet but you get the point).

[Robsoie]

I find Call of the Zone excellent in every ways.
It does not have any features i don't like (unlike some other mods) and look and play really well.

Additionally it load faster than nearly every other mods (i guess not using truckload of super high res textures everywhere helps) making quickisave/load completely painless

Also seems rock solid, only crashed once (in fact it was on my first play) but since then not a single time (Call of the Zone has been updated to 1.1 by the way).
I'm on my 9th day of hunting artifacts around the map and making tons of money from selling them to either Sakharov or the Jupiter scientist in their lab, even got the achievement that is increasing the respawn rate of those artifacts.

This has been helped by the fact Sakharov on my first day gave me a random task to find an artifact (that after checking the file can only spawn in Generators, that is the most far away map/area) and "to help" he also gave me ... a svarog ... for free !

Looks like those dynamic tasks may need some progression rebalance a bit as the svarog is the ultra highest end of the artifact detector series (it also display all the anomalies, making it very easy to navigate inside clutters of them to fetch artifacts in the middle) and should really not being that easily available to the player (as it fully bypass the need to find the normal detector then the bear and then the veles).

But at least it helped me swim in money from all those artifacts i sold

Had some nicely great large firefights too, some Duty random missions lead me into battles with Duty squads and their enemies (mostly Monolith as with the random faction relations we got Freedom neutral)

For all the stalker standalone mods based on freeplay, Call of the Zone is the very best for me, there are addons starting to get added on the moddb page.

[Ulfarr]

For all the stalker standalone mods based on freeplay, Call of the Zone is the very best for me, there are addons starting to get added on the moddb page.

Honestly I'm feeling like it doesn't realy needs addons. I do use lokStre's weapons mod I might change opinion once I have more hours under my belt but right now I don't think I'm going to add anything else, it feels... complete.

[Tilla]

Trying to remember which standalone it was that had a very tiny install but all the maps, and a shit load of options to customize the experience. I swear I had this installed at some point and just forgot it. It doesn't seem to be any of the things mentioned here? from a first glance.

I may be misremembering it's just one of those things that is bugging me in my messed up brain

[Ulfarr]

Call of Chernobyl maybe?

I think it was the first of the standalone mods that did the "all maps" thing and at some point it came with an installer (and an auto updater) but it was later dropped in favor of the usual "unzip" method. CoC was barebones on it's own though and any more stuff had to be installed on top of it through addons.

[Robsoie]

There's someone that seems to be trying to remake Stalker in the unreal engine, you can see several ported maps there :
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG8asYgVjHtfTmDdEPHKRPA/videos

[Ulfarr]

New task added: Find the Wish Granter.
New task added: Wish that this dude pulls through with UE4 Stalker.

I 've only watched the videos about garbage and army warehouses and both maps look good. A bit rough on some places but quite good otherwise.

[Ulfarr]

Slight necro to say that the dude working on UE4 Stalker announced that he is planning (and working) to add multiplayer too!

[Robsoie]

Interesting, though i wonder if it's adversarial type of multiplayer on single maps like it existed in the commercial stalker games or if it's going to allow coop.
Coop has been a long time dream of the players in the stalker world, there's the Ray of Hope project that apparently is still ongoing :
https://www.moddb.com/mods/ray-of-hope-co-op-online

In the single player standalone mods, i spotted development of a new one that seems very promising and according to screenshot looks rather different from other mods in the lighting department :
https://www.moddb.com/mods/true-stalker

Still playing from time to time with Call of the Zone ( https://www.moddb.com/mods/doctorx-call-of-the-zone ) , it became my favorite standalone mod.

[Robsoie]

I have been recently playing Oblivion Lost Remake : Vector of Alienation
https://www.moddb.com/mods/olr-vector-of-alienation

To play there is no need to install anything, just extract the game, and launch it with  ...\bin\XR_3DA.exe

It's a standalone game (as in it does not need any other Stalker game already installed) that from what i had read is an improved version of Oblivion Lost Remake, fully in english.
Similarly to Oblivion Lost Remake, it is a retelling of the original Stalker : Shadow of Chernobyl, but using development documents to reimplement the story, missions, characters and creatures that were cut during development before the Soch release.
It does not use fancy graphics like more modern Stalker standalone mods (so it should just fly on anyone computer), but it has a much better story and dialogues than all of them that i played.

There are a few addons that you can enable/disable with the included JSGME.exe (note, if you want to disable the annoying "headbob", enable the "camera head bob" addon, then go into ...\gamedata\config\misc\ and open "effectors.ltx" with your favorite text editor, you can then "run_amplitude", "walk_amplitude" and "limp_amplitude" change to 0 or a slightly higher number if you want to keep a level of head bobbing )

So far it is very good, and it's different enough from old Shadow of Chernobyl to be worth a play even if you already completed old soch.

[JimboM12]

lol i looked into vector of alienation and i ended up dl'ing it. that brings me up to 7 different installs of stalker, some of which may be redundant but such is life in the zone.

my list:

call of pripyat (unmodded)
lost alpha
a.r.e.a.
dead air
vector of alienation
call of the zone
anomaly

and an honorary companion: chernobylite

maybe i spend too much time in the zone. i am playing other games but ill find myself playing around in one of these stalkers for a few hours before snapping back to reality and its midnight.

[Robsoie]

That's a big list , i did some clean up recently and "only" have 2 stalkers installs left on my system : Call of the Zone that seems to fit all my "freeplay stalker" needs and this really amazing Vector of Alienation that provide the best story and best maps so far of all the stalkers i played.

[King Zultan]

What are the main differences between Vector of Alienation and Lost Alpha?

[Robsoie]

Both games re-imagine the Shadow of Chernobyl story, and both goes their own way to retell it (so even if you completed Shadow of Chernobyl, both Lost Alpha and Vector of Alienation games will still have different missions to tell the tale).

Another big difference is the map design, both Lost Alpha and Vector of Alienation have different maps design, there's different locations and maps that are named the same look very different , etc..., so you can play both games and it still does not feel the same game (and both have also a different map design than Shadow of Chernobyl).

From what i played, personnally i didn't liked Lost Alpha, first there's more stuttering in it than in any Stalker game i ever played (something odd considering most Lost Alpha are lacking a lot of all the a-life than any other Stalker games), and the backtracking in mission makes things even more annoying.
But Lost Alpha maps are probably the prettiest and biggest of them all even if they're not really "functionnal" (too few AI in them i mean), but so far Vector of Alienation is my favorite of the SoC derivated, dialogues and story are really great.