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[Darkmere]

So, I did a play-through with COMPLETE and then tried Misery. After about 20 minutes, Misery is getting uninstalled and deleted. The core of it sounds like a decent concept, but everything about the implementation is shit AND it's buggy as hell... and they made the whole thing hideous, apparently on purpose (that's the real reason all those promo pics were photoshops with some text. The entire Zone is now a brown blob and maddeningly boring).

Spoiler: List of poor implementations (click to show/hide)

-The Field of View now defaults to fisheye. Don't like it? Uninstall, reinstall, hope the new option works better. Don't like that one, either? Repeat.
-You have to launch the game 3 times in a row if you don't want to play an assault class. Once to even let you change classes, once to pick a new class, and once again to actually play. You also MUST run the game as administrator.
-Everything's in Russian, with no subtitles. You can read English in dialogues only, for "immersion" (because nothing is as immersive as never knowing what's going on, ever). The dialogues also have typos aplenty and sound like a fanfic wank.
-Radios have tons of localized songs! But each song only plays for about 30 seconds before static squelches and the song changes randomly.
-Taking hits in combat is now more realistic. But only for you. Shoot a bandit in the chest? No effect. Get shot in the leg? Duck behind a wall, holster your weapon, use a bandage, use an emergency stim, use a coagulant, draw your weapon, try and figure out where everyone went in the 30 seconds it took to do all that. If they find you while you're bandaging, you die. I got shot once and bled out from half health to dead before I finished applying a bandage.
-If you don't have the creator-accepted gear to survive an anomaly field, you get script-killed several meters away from the border of the anomaly... There is technically a warning, but it's an area of about 3 footsteps. It's fairly easy to just die from going too close to an area that logically shouldn't affect you (the burnt-out farmstead is auto-kill several meters ahead of where you even get the temp warning in vanilla).
-The price on all goods and services is increased up to 500%. The reward for all quests is cut by 75%. Enjoy grinding bandits for weapons to sell, coz the game is now a treadmill. This also means there's no way you can afford to maintain more than two weapons. Hope you didn't like flexibility; you can't afford it anymore.
-There's now a windup flashlight instead of a headlamp, to fix the battery problem they created... but see the list of bugs below.

and

Spoiler: A list of painfully obvious bugs (click to show/hide)

-The flashlight model is attached improperly, so it points right at your face. Using it breaks the headlamp functionality... sort of. Pressing L makes the headlamp flash once, so it kinda looks like something's happening. If you want light, you press... O ... instead.
-Interacting with a wounded stalker (to give a medkit) automatically crashes the game.
-AtmosFEAR is in, but broken. Stalkers outside during an emission can safely ignore it. Except for you.
-AtmosFEAR also caused graphical glitches for me with this version that didn't exist in Complete, so it must be the custom setup that shipped with Misery, as I don't run anything else.

Sorry about the rant. Just had to get that out there. Don't waste your time on Misery, there has to be any number of better mods.

[Zyxl]

Yeah the MISERY dev team kind of lost it. MISERY 1.1 or 1.2 or whatever the pre-2.0 release was is actually very good. MISERY 2.0 didn't deliver on many promised features and cranked the artificial difficulty to 11 as well as the grinding.

The lead gameplay designer for MISERY 2.0 stated on the forums he intended for things you'd normally do in STALKER to be effectively impossible without the right piece of equipment, with which it becomes pointlessly easy. An equipment-based RPG, if you will, where you'll spend 5 hours grinding to buy the equipment to unlock a new thing to grind.

He cited EVE online as inspiration. No seriously, I've seen a screencap of his explanation where he actually states EVE online is his inspiration for STALKER.

Hope you like quick-save too, and not because you actually died. Generally speaking, even with the right equipment, MISERY 2.0 is designed that the repair costs will always be more than the loot no matter what you do. Even if you buy the most anomaly-resistance suit in the game, the repairs ALWAYS cost more than the artifacts are worth. That's even with the cheaper DIY repair methods implemented.

Then there's the straight up artificial difficulty. Excepting the best couple guns in the game shooting the most expensive ammo... nothing dies in less than 2-3 headshots. Excepting you of course. Unless you've grinded up for the exo-suit+addons, everything will kill you in one hit.

Then there's the bugs. Even with the latest official+unofficial patching, around Jupiter and beyond the game crashes constantly. Even before that too, I couldn't get out of Zaton with all the crashing.

[Catastrophic lolcats]

God that sounds awful. The main draw to STALKER for me is the fact that although the game can be a right dick and really punishing it's usually pretty fair. While you yourself die pretty quick so do enemies. If you want to take on a Monolith army with a pistol, a bottle of vodka and a raincoat you could as long as you had the balls and skill to do it.

Setting up brick walls that can only be overcome by grinding and pre-set requirements is just bad archaic game design. Reward players for their skill and deduction, not for just looking up the wikia page.

Stalkersoup/Naradnaya Solyanka remains my preferred STALKER experience not only due to it being such a massive expansion but also the fact that a lot of the mechanics are usually pretty fair. Sure there's a lack of transparency in some mechanics but that can sometimes be engaging in a game such as STALKER. When you've learnt that the bag doesn't split open just by pure chance and is instead based around overloading you do get a small sense of satisfaction for learning the mechanic and feel less cheated since you can influence it. 

[Darkmere]

God that sounds awful.

It is.

If I could cut out the stupid half of Misery and leave the interesting parts intact, I'd probably be fine with it.

Honestly, what I really want is the equivalent of Fallout Overhaul Kit for STALKER. STOOK? STOOKER? Yeah. Something that just adds moar of everything but still stays roughly plot- and gameplay-neutral.

[Krevsin]

I heard good things about the STALKERSOUP mod, the englosh version of the Narodnaya Solyanka mod. It is supposed to be extremely difficult, as it starts you off with a makarov, one clip's worth of ammo and on the military side of the Cordon. It contains all the locations in the 3 games, anomalies are more dangerous and picking up an artifact hurts you.

I have not played this mod (because i doubt my PC can handle it) but I've heard a lot of praise for it.

[snelg]

I've played Misery since the 2.01 patch came out and even if I haven't played CoP before it works out kind of alright. The main problem I have is that there's so many cool things that I would like to use and try but it's so expensive I'd rather not. I also am not particularly impressed by the various headgear covering your screen so you can't see anything. It kind of still works but I'd probably enjoy it a lot more without. I'm not particularly fond of the class system either, since I'd rather experience most of the things and try various weapons throughout the game instead of being shoehorned into using certain weapons and equipment.

[Mech#4]

Related to the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series; the S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Lost Alpha mod came out yesterday on Moddb.

Apparently being in development since 2008, S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Lost Alpha aims to include many features that didn't make it into the final release of S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl. The biggest of which in my mind is adding a whole bunch of new areas like the Dead City, Generators, Swamps and others that were included in some alpha builds but cut from final release.

The mod is actually a fully stand alone game, not requiring the base game S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl, as I think the developers of the mod worked with GSC members to release the mod. They were going to release it sometime in the future but due to someone leaking a beta version they moved the release date up to April 26th.

Downloading it from Moddb might be a bit difficult as there are a lot of people trying to at the moment. There is a link to a torrent on the Moddb page that I used which should be easier. The mod is around 20gb in size and comes in four parts.


As an addition, I did try the Misery mod and while it has nice elements of survival and such in it, I didn't like that I had great difficulty trying to shoot an NPC from 150 metres away with a sniper rifle while they could do the same with an assault rifle, even if I hadn't shot at all. They have a really high detect radius, to the point that they could see me prone, hiding in grass and the aforementioned 150m away.

[marples]

I've put a few hours into Lost Alpha and its pretty impressive. A lot of work has gone into rebuilding the levels, for instance Cordon now has a huge underground section and Garbage is unrecognisable. The Alife seems to have been toned down a lot though, there never seems to be too much non scripted activity.

[Mech#4]

Yah yah, I've been playing "Lost Alpha" recently as well.

From looks, it's incredible what the engine is able to do. Lighting in S.T.A.L.K.E.R always was it's strong point, but standing in a field and watching cloud shadows move over the swaying grass, darkening as the sun goes behind clouds is really something else.

As I mentioned before, the mod adds a number of areas that were never included in the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R, however the developers have also added new areas to the existing places, and in some cases changed the environments quite a bit.

Cordon for example; the novice camp is more or less the same, but there's the addition of a few other underground bunkers for shelter. The bridge under the road now has a swamp on the bandit hideout side not to mention where the bandits are is now a big factory.

All this though is a bit marred by rather a lot of bugs. Since they released it earlier than they had originally planned, the community is reporting bugs for them to patch. A patch came out on May 2nd which fixes some of the more immediate issues (Such as crashes caused by a missing foot bone or somesuch) but there's apparently still quite a few problems with quests and the A.I.

I'll add that there's an interesting mechanic in the game where you can call up NPCs on your PDA and ask them if they have any jobs for you to do. This is usually small things like bringing them a medpack or food I believe but I don't think that was something in any of the original games.

[Akura]

I'll add that there's an interesting mechanic in the game where you can call up NPCs on your PDA and ask them if they have any jobs for you to do. This is usually small things like bringing them a medpack or food I believe but I don't think that was something in any of the original games.

Clear Sky had something similar, you could ask squad leaders if they had jobs, and it was usually bring them some ammo or medkit in return for something from their faction's shop owner or barman.

[Mictlantecuhtli]

Lost Alpha is very, very rough but I'm loving it. Not like STALKER 1 and the others were that good on first release, anyways ;p All I need is the FPS to stay stable. Sometimes I get really bad choppiness during lightning storms, for a reason I can't seem to figure out.

[motorbitch]

you may run out of memory on your gfx card. the lightning require a lot for the shadows.
reducing the shadow resolution may work.

[marples]

There's a new patch out for Lost Alpha. I've had to download the whole game again, so no info on what's changed as download speeds seem a little slow http://www.moddb.com/mods/lost-alpha

The patch is supposed to address many bugs and instabilities but here's to hoping they filled in a few smart terrains as well.

You don't need to own Stalker to play this, it's completely stand alone and free.

*Edit whilst typing* moddb is back to its 'speedy as fuck' self so downloads are pretty rapid.

[BuriBuriZaemon]

Does anyone have any mod recommendations for Stalker Call of Pripyat? Misery seems to be popular. Other mods seem to have been released in 2011-2012.

I am using the GoG version if that matters.

[Darkmere]

I liked the Complete mods just for vanilla-ness and continuity. Misery's only worth it if you absolutely love having everything but you being invincible titans with autoaim and running around in washed-out muddy gray auto-kill areas.

I should note though, and I have no idea what caused it, but my modded game died right before the final mission, and I have no idea what specifically triggered that to make the game unwinnable.