I'm just gonna leave this here... So at the end of this video I asked: Was it worth it to spend all this time modding Anomaly just to get it to be playable for me and less over the top and hardcore? The answer is no. No it is not. The more I played the more frustrating I found the various gameplay features. The games story ending (which I just got to replaying the past few days) entails an absurd amount of walking simulator gameplay which is just lazy. Honestly seems like the developers ran out of steam in the last third of it or so gameplay wise. The writing of the whole thing sucks and is ultimately inconsequential with nothing ever being revealed, changed, or anything in the end. I thought I had never finished this games main quest but it turns out I did years ago. It just ends awkwardly without any real conclusion or climax. I remember thinking back when I did the last quest that my game must be bugged since I didn't get any quests after it but nope. That's just it. That's the game. Honestly the negatives with this game FAR outweigh the positives and I wonder if all the people who praise this game the way they do ever beat it or got further than the first few levels because it seems like from what I've seen online the reception is sort of lukewarm among many of the people who got to the end. At the end of the day Anomaly does nothing but waste your time with pointless grindy elements. The amount of times I had to stop mid firefight to repair gear and armor was just...it completely broke the flow of the gameplay but I had to do it unless I wanted the game to break my wallet. There is no more love/hate relationship with Anomaly for me. I HATE this game. This mod. It is terrible and I wont be coming back to it. Ever. Again. Even the worst Stalker mods I've played have more vision and creativity than this. Anomaly feels like it was written by a 15 year old larper. I still wanna make Stalker videos but when it comes to Anomaly I'm out. I wanted to like this mod, I tried so hard. It wasn't worth it. If you're on the fence or in the same predicament I've been in for the last several years of 'should I mod this mod more to make it playable? Maybe it will be worth it" I say DON'T. Play something else. Try True Stalker, Goldsphere, Lost Alpha, RTTN, hell try OP 2. Try anything but this mess of Tarkov wanna be fake milsim bullshit. Thanks for reading my rant. I'm gonna go get some water and fresh air.
I have invested many hours modding stalker, and in my experience, it has really been worth it, with all the knowledge I acquired, I would make my own stalker game.
Funny thing about everything being expensive in the zone, 10,000 rubles is like $115. Everything in the zone is actually ridiculously cheap lol. So next time you do a quest for a thousand or so rubles, you're actually risking your life for about 10 bucks.
The rouble in Stalker is most likely a currency that only exists and has value inside the Zone. So you're not really risking your life for 10 bucks, you're risking your life for whatever 1000 "roubles" is worth in the Zone, which is quite a lot more than 10 bucks. Edit: my comments are getting deleted from here instantly for some reason except for this one, so I'll just put a response here: @animalmother9143 Why would Russian or Belarusian currency be in use in Ukraine? That would be a logistical nightmare for anyone in the Zone. Prices would need to track the exchange rates of foreign currencies, like the Russian ruble or Belarusian ruble. But if the ruble crashes, how would people in the Zone even know to adjust their prices? It's not like news on the Russian economy is easy to come by when you're in Ukraine, let alone in the Zone. Plus, it would make everything ridiculously cheap for no reason whatsoever. You could also then essentially do an infinite money glitch by bringing hundreds of thousands of Russian rubles into the Zone, buying everything people are willing to sell you and return to Russia and make insane profit over and over again. The rubles used in Stalker are explicitly Soviet rubles, which aren't used anywhere on the planet except in the Zone, making the economy extremely stable because it isn't affected by foreign markets.
@@ikopotamus7774 rubles are not some made up currency. It's Russian and Belarusian currency and yes you can directly ratio it to any other currency. Actually.
@@animalmother9143 And that makes... what kind of sense exactly? Why would Russian or Belarusian currency be in use in Ukraine? That would be a logistical nightmare for anyone in the Zone. Prices would need to track the exchange rates of foreign currencies, the Russian ruble or Belarusian ruble. But if the ruble crashes, how would people in the Zone even know to adjust their prices? It's not like news on the Russian economy is easy to come by when you're in Ukraine, let alone in the Zone. Plus, it would make everything ridiculously cheap for no reason whatsoever. You could also essentially do an infinite money glitch then by bringing in hundreds of thousands of Russian rubles, buying everything anyone is willing to sell you and then going back to Russia and selling them for insane profit over and over again. The rubles used in Stalker are also explicitly Soviet rubles, which aren't used anywhere on the planet except in the Zone. This would also make the economy very stable, as it isn't affected by what is going on in other countries or even in the same country you're in. So to me it seems this is the only logical explanation?
@@animalmother9143 Why would Russian or Belarusian currency be in use in Ukraine? That would be a logistical nightmare for anyone in the Zone. Prices would need to track the exchange rates of foreign currencies, like the Russian ruble or Belarusian ruble. But if the ruble crashes, how would people in the Zone even know to adjust their prices? It's not like news on the Russian economy is easy to come by when you're in Ukraine, let alone in the Zone. Plus, it would make everything ridiculously cheap for no reason whatsoever. You could also then essentially do an infinite money glitch by bringing hundreds of thousands of Russian rubles into the Zone, buying everything people are willing to sell you and return to Russia and make insane profit over and over again. The rubles used in Stalker are explicitly Soviet rubles, which aren't used anywhere on the planet except in the Zone, making the economy extremely stable because it isn't affected by foreign markets.
Love the fact that when you said that it was a fan mod and not a cheap husk of a game by a giant company, you roasted the in-game store in Halo Infinite.
@@xXRealXx Anomaly gives you 5 bullets per kill, Misery gives you 1 if you are lucky. It was a mod made specifically to appeal to people that enjoy every single thing in the game being against them. Along with plenty other questionable design choices. It was never really good, it was popular because... reasons unknown to me. It never had the flexibility of Anomaly to reduce artificial difficulty.
@@Infernal969 ah, so the name really means something. Truly miserable lol. Although if both the player and NPCs die easily, it's not such a problem. Was it popular because there weren't any other mods like it at the time?
@@xXRealXx I guess it was a mix of few factors. Little competition at the time, people really getting into "hardcore difficulty" games/mods (DayZ mod for Arma was the thing everyone was losing their minds over for example) and the fact that people still playing Stalker back then were so used to the games' mechanics that they needed some artificial difficulty just to feel anything. It also had a fair share of novel stuff, like character classes with perks for example, if somewhat janky in implementation. Yes, everyone was squishy, so it was fair in that way I suppose, but then so is Anomaly. What really saves Anomaly from being just CoC + Misery is how many options it has to customize the difficulty and overall experience, and the absolute mountain of addons for it to customize it even further. A lot of Anomaly development these days is more aimed to pick up the CoC torch of being a modding platform, rather than a complete game, so you really have to tweak it yourself to your liking in order to really enjoy it.
i mean it aint that grindy, by like 4 hours in i already had an ak and some duty armor. the crafting system is kinda useless unless you're playing gamma, also you can customize how hard progression is when making your world
it took me like 20 mins to get an ak and a merc suit in shadow of chernobyl sooo... but i agree that anomaly is fun when you tweak the progression to your liking.
Same. Played as an Ecologyst. A few hours in a game, 60k rubles, and I've got myself a Nomad suit. But I've ran a lot tho😅 I miss CoP fast-travel sooo much.
@@gorg4281I think this is a little bit different, cuz Anomaly is more difficult and also doesn't have good stashes. I mean, you can find a merc suit in the Newbie Village and an AK by killing soliders under the bridge.
@@gaellorenzo3006 it took a couple months to fully understand the game, but this to me is miles better gameplay than stalker original.. but the original had better story indeed
Thing is, Anomaly (and a few other mods that was its predecessors like Call of Misery or Dead Air) is for people who have played the og trilogy countless ties and look for something more open-ended and challenging. Anomaly's crafting, economy and progression make no sense and that's *intended.* The problem isn't that, it's how most newcomers don't realize that it's not aimed at them. Its popularity is simply caused by the rising popularity of difficult games in the recent years. Some people came into the franchise for a "survival shooter" and GAMMA/EFP gives them exactly that. (There's a reason other modpacks like Expedition or NOMAD aren't quite as popular despite being competent.) Also, GAMMA/EFP atleast brings a method to Anomaly's chaos. The mechanics still arbitrarily challenging yes, but atleast there's a certain way to work through them. Some people dig it and that simply won't change no matter how much we yell. Also you're somewhat wrong about difficulty mods not being a thing before Anomaly. Mods like AMK (turned into Zone of Alienation later) for SHoC or Misery for CoP were popular back in the day. Some of Anomaly's features can be traced back to those. Artifact cooking, unscripted blowouts and dropping your gun when you're hit came from AMK. Skinning mutants and cooking them, lead artifact containers came from Misery etc. But in the end, I agree that Anomaly and its popular modpacks gave the newcomers a wrong idea about what the games are meant to be. I don't enjoy them for mostly the same reasons as you and try my best to have people check out the originals and other well made mods. Also I've taken a look at your channel and decided to subscribe.
Well thanks for that but I never said difficulty mods were never a thing before just that they weren't the mainstream. Take Lost Alpha for example. At one time it was by far the most anticipated mod for Stalker and the most popular when it first came out. It wasn't a hardcore mod at all. Even OP while challenging and sometimes a difficulty to wrap your head around isn't made with all the hardcore survival elements in mind it's more like spam mutants everywhere but at the same time for every overpowered mutant horde you come across you'll also come into scenarios where you yourself are also overpowered so its a mixed bag. I just don't like how hardcore has become the mainstream now, it always existed just wasn't 'the way' people played Staler. Maybe I should have been clearer on that front. I tried Nomad, it was cool I liked the spirit of it just had a hard time getting it to run on my PC well, in reality what I have put together is similar to that but with less graphical enhancements.
I was really critical at first watching this video. I think you summed it up quite well here. I played the stalker games all when they came out or a few years thereafter. I started modding it myself and spent hours downloading things I wanted to have in "my" zone, running into bugs and incompatibilities, yet kept going because the zone just called me back. And I was a huge fan of the Misery mod project. To that, Anomaly and nowadays mostly GAMMA TOTALLY makes sense to me. I also think, that some mechanics in their default setting might be a bit too much or maybe too hardcore but noone and nothing is keeping me from tweaking it to my liking to craft exactly the experience I want. I get it, that this is not how eveyone wants to play. But then, maybe the zone is not made for you. ;)
@@Deathoutofhell 'maybe the zone isn't made for me' would be a valid argument if Anomaly and its offshoots were anything like the base games where you know the zone was made. But they aren't.
I think some of these are valid criticisms, but Anomaly isn't that reliant on the crafting system by default. You're thinking of Gamma. In regular Anomaly, technicians can repair and upgrade gear for money, with no other items required. Also, everything negative you mentioned here can be directly configured in-game, no mods required.
Yeah but the cost of it is insane. And as I said as soon as you take away the grind (by lowering the vanilla settings) theres no substance in stock Anomaly.
@@BrokenCircle1 so your mad about it taking a job or two to get the money to fix items because it cost a "insane amount" yet when you try to make jobs pay better in settings, you get angry that it removes the grind your complaining about? Yeah I don't get it personally, but to each their own.
if i wanted to play free to play games that torture you until you give them money to skip the grind, i would do that. I hate how this grind is normialized these days.
They should make Stalker MMORPG mod at this point since they love boring grind so much. Grind dogs for 20h to lvl up your guy and a gunner class. So fun (not).
They have it's called Stalcraft. I tried it once for like an hour. Didn't like it. Really not sure what the deal is with all these online only/hardcore grinding sim games. I swear its like people have no lives other than gaming sometimes. When I play a game I just wanna hop in and have fun because regular life is stressful and grindy enough.@@Dregomz02
Misery is x100 more grindy. It is literally Artificial Difficulty: The Mod. It does absolutely everything to make the player's experience as unfair and grindy as computationally possible. The whole mod runs like a slideshow regardless of PC hardware because it bloated the game world with SO MANY useless items, aimbot AI, mutant spam and game mechanics that the engine can't handle it. Whether you have a cheap PC from 2013 or a $5000 PC from 2024, Misery runs nearly the same. Long loading screens, stutters, random framedrops and of course Out of Memory crash errors.
@@TheJohn_Highway Oh yeah thanks for reminder of that awful performance, grass shadows lowered my framerate to sub 15 while not looking any worse than "optimized" config. It's not just gameplay that got worse but also performance they screwed everything up from A to Z.
I played Anomaly with the EFP mod, there's a slightly different crafting system there, I found it super addictive (though yes, somewhat nonsensical). Don't know if it's the same in vanilla Anomaly. I also liked that you can adjust the difficulty as much as you like - I actually made the economy much more forgiving, and absolutely enjoyed the whole experience.
You should check out Call of the Zone if you haven’t already. I love it for all the reason I dislike anomaly. A highlight to me is it’s questing system, as it might be one of the most unique I’ve seen in any game. Every single random quest feels like it could be a main quest on its own. The creator sadly passed away a couple years ago, RIP DoctorX, but I know people were trying to port more of his systems/mechanics into Anomaly.
I have tried it quite alot. Vanilla, repacks, my own custom build. I always have a problem with loads of crashes, stutters, and just general performance hitches sadly. Edit: but it is cool and yes RIP Doctor X. I really wonder what Stalker modding would look like today in an alternate world where he never died and CoTZ was finished.
I 100% agree. I have no problem with the game making mechanics harder but if you’re going to do it, it has to be followed through on. For example, why is every gun on every NPC completely broken but they can hip fire strafe you while you’re behind cover and take out half of your health in one shot from 100m away? Those guns should be jamming every shot, be completely inaccurate, and generally not very useful. Why not just have the weapons be higher durability or have them miss more often? And all of the people saying tWeAk YoUr GaMe I shouldn’t have to spend hours fixing all of the key binds and mod parameters to get a halfway decent experience. The complaints along these lines are endless
Yeah the thing about Anomaly is like there is already a bunch of hardcore mods for STALKER that do things in a way more concise and well executed way than Anomaly or GAMMA do. I unironically blame MISERY for starting this "Making the game hard but not following through with your mechanics." sort of thing. And furthermore you can play em without having to sit around tweaking shit for hours.
That is bar far my biggest complaint with GAMMA/Anomaly; the asymmetry that presents itself between Stalker AI and the player on certain occasions. Like you said, it makes no sense for an enemy Military soldier to be shooting 100 rounds at me while I'm hiding behind cover and once I kill and loot him, his AK is at 16% durability, he has only 5 rounds in his mag, and another 3 bullets in his pocket; all the while his gun didn't jam a single time while he was fighting me. Another problem I have with those mod-packs is that If I get lit up by enemy Stalkers, I have to retreat and heal; and healing requires sitting through an animation. Enemy Stalkers in these mod-packs don't use healing items. If they get lit up they won't retreat behind cover and take a few seconds to sit through a healing animation; they just non-stop flank or camp or fight to the death.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion. I personally love it. I have not played the base Anomaly for a long time though. As you said, it's a platform for customization. I would build my own mod list from Moddb and some of my own personal mods. After Gamma and EFP came out I just started using those with a few cherry picked mods. For me it's all about grinding through the hobo stage.
That's funny. I was playing the first game, Shadow of Chernobyl, early this morning. I'm not going to watch the video unfortunately, because I don't want spoilers. But keep making videos :)
What i hate the most is the items bloat. We can get around the artificial difficulty, lessen it, remove it whatever, but what do i do about all the items ? If removed then trader inventory needs to be changed and drops & stashes & laying items around too.
Yeah that's one of the things I wasn't able to fix in my build. The mods that remove the bloat are all outdated sadly. It's really annoying having to constantly stop to repair things so they don't go below the threshold.
@@BrokenCircle1 ehh these can help but idk. Modules : -smoother progression, -toolkit remap, -repair kits revision, -missing parts vanilla, -helmet parts. These are easily editable and even remove contents from them due to DLTX. I want to mention the Loot Rebalance module which enables you to edit even outfit/weapon/recipes drops condition with ease. Addons : 1.Grok craft and repair overhaul 2.crafting parts with returns 3.High level tooklits include low level toolkits 4.No toolkit requirement for vices. (haven't tested this one yet) Depending how you take these you might brick the balance. I purposely avoided the use of WPO and OPO. There may be stuff ive missed, my modpack is too big... EDIT : Trader Overhaul mod. So basically, the author made toolkits (basic,advanced,expert) purchasable from some of the traders around the map. I think there's an error tho because mechanics somehow sell them even if they tell you they don't have any...
i disagree , i playied the og games and even old world and going back to finding only bread and bandages on dead enemies is annoying as hell and not rewarding at all
I find Anomaly fun... but only with the story disabled and with the Old World addon installed (to simplify the game and remove a lot of unnecessary crap). Ultimately, I enjoy exploring the Zone more than following the story. Especially because that first playthrough ended with me constantly dying for no reason at a door inside of the Monolith War Lab that I was presumably meant to wait on a timer for it to unlock. Safe to say, I deleted the character and restarted with the story disabled after that.
Thank you for this video. Sadly I have to fully agree. I've tried a couple times to get into the mod and appreciate it for what it is, but I just can't. Doesn't make it easier if you get killed instantly by the first boar with a 50% chance (well, the other 50% Fanatic will die instead), and I am not looking for a simulator where I have to craft my own shoelaces or toilet paper (a little exaggeration). I wish there would be another mod that uses the fantastic OpenXRay port of the engine, but keeps closer to the spirit of the original Stalker. Because Anomaly DOES look and run great, much better than the original. But now we can only set our hopes in Stalker 2 for a new journey into the Zone.
@S13iPNiR pretty much what I was trying to convey with this video but people just got mad because they can't seem to understand the concept that people want mods to follow the vision of the game not change it into something else that half looks like the original. Oh well. Thanks for watching and the support.
I enjoyed Anamoly... I had a very different experience to you. Game was solid, no crashes. It was not that hard, and it felt pretty rewarding. I could go on and on about my experience, but to summarize: I had no issue with the economy, difficulty and I did not find the inventory management to be annoying. The start is hard, but rewarding. The game is fun, but my only complaint is that I would love some more story based/scripted quests that focus on secrets and atmosphere.
Im pretty sure this guy just didnt understand good ways to make money in anomaly because its easy to make like 100k in a single day of playing and you can buy all the upgrades that he complained about not having
Hey! I agree with all u said. I mean, I do not believe that there is a stalker player, who never cursed during the game or said " I will never do it again". But all of us especially those who played three vanilla originals, will come back to it. I call myself a professional COC player and after all those hours the game (still) manages to kick my butt and go back there to get un-alive. Let's c what stalker 2 will do.
I feel like most hardcore STALKER mods take after the Misery CoP mod, which is much less forgiving and 100 times more BS than Anomaly. You need a lighter to cook meats for profit(only obtainable after the Skadovsk Bandits' side quest chain). Far away human enemies will throw grenades that home to your feet. You picked the Assaulter class with affinity to heavy armors? Great, somehow he loses stamina faster using light armors. I stopped playing after arriving at Jupiter, which I heard had massive packs of snorks and burers.
Hey, long time STALKER player here. I've liked pretty much all of the modpacks I've played, both the more curated, narrative driven ones and Anomaly and GAMMA, To establish my bona fides, the first time I heard of STALKER was reading a section in the weekend edition of a fucking NEWSPAPER in my country (yeah, as in a printed newspaper) that focused on technology stuff, with one of the back pages devoted to games. It sounded absolutely amazing to me, and I bought it the day it came out in my country, and played the whole trilogy (except for Clear Sky which I didn't particularly like). STALKER modpacks becoming popular on UA-cam really brought me back into it in recent years- I suppose the only part that I missed was this midpoint from like 2012-2015 of ultra brutal punishing hardcore mods like Misery (and well, perhaps that's for the best, haha) Your video clearly got a lot of traction here- I can see people still commenting on it as of last week! I have noticed that Anomaly and GAMMA do represent this really interesting flashpoint in the community that, no lie, lives pretty much rent free in my head. I just find the community as a whole really fascinating, that there can be differing and sometimes competing visions of what one game is or was, and people are willing to put hours of their free time into bringing it into alignment with a particular vision of what the came could be. You've gotten some pretty heated responses from fans of Anomaly and GAMMA, and while I share their passion for these mods, I can totally accept that not everyone wants, as a previous commenter very astutely observed, a "dick flattening" simulator. A lot of people noted that you can adjust the difficulty and economy to your liking. This was a criticism leveled against you, but I think it's also important when you're reviewing a game to base your criticisms on the default experience, i.e the one that the creator/modder intended you to have. Nonetheless, I really like challenging games that allow me to gradually work up to this experience (I'm not very good at games generally lol)- I tend to like games with more complex systems under the hood like CRPGs and survival games, and the feeling of mastering such a system can be rewarding if you have the specific set of character flaws that I seem to have :) A lot of people have accurately noted that some of us have played the original trilogy and kind of want to just be in the world that GSC created. The walking simulator criticism obtains here, but honestly that adds to the tension for me. I could go through a deserted city district and have nothing happen, or suddenly be confronted with a horde of zombies and mutliple controllers, only barely making it out alive. I feel like it really showcases what an incredible job the original creators of the game did- that it is such a haunting and well realised world that kind of just passing through it seems to create its own emergent narrative, and GAMMA and Anomaly lean into that aspect so well in my opinion. (You 100% correct about the campaign aspect of Anomaly though, it is very lacking and the writing is terrible, but I suppose it is fan made so I don't want to be too harsh). I don't quite understand the "tacticool" criticisms leveled against these mods though- in Shadow of Chernobyl you got quite a few unicorn guns like the FN F2000 for example (which at time of creation definitely seemed tacticool!), as well as a completely fictional energy weapon! I will confess that in my current playthrough of GAMMA I am limiting myself to only looted attachments, as decimating a squad of Monolith with iron sights seems the more STALKER experience to me :). I had a good laugh in one of the STALKER 2 trailers when someone put an underbarrel shotgun on a sniper rifle- I sincerely hope it wasn't Anomaly fans exerting their evil influence on the poor GSC GameWorld devs! This is one issue that I have, that certain modpacks deviate excessively from what the "true" experience should be. I've really never seen a community dig in their heels about this as much as this community does- from my standpoint every mod chooses to emphasise a certain aspect of what already was in the original trilogy. Survival gamelplay elements? Food and gear repairing were in every game (although obviously not as in much depth). Weapon customisation - expanded upon from the original games, which was just scopes, silencers and grenade launchers. A lot of narrative focused mods are building (highly successfully in my opinion) on the really terrifying world of the Zone that was stymied by the graphics and engine limitations of the 00s. Indeed, I don't really understand people telling younger people to "go and play the original trilogy"- I feel like they wouldn't really enjoyed the level of, well, jank, that we were able to tolerate back in the days of yore. I feel like the plurality of these modpacks and the differing experiences they offer are one of the things that makes this game a very special one, and something that will keep me invested in it for many more hours to come. Oh yeah, and obviously I am hyped for STALKER 2 Sorry for the mini essay but your video helped me to clarify thoughts that have been in my head for a while :)
I dont use the crafting system and only get my items from the money i earn in jobs. Its fun and not as bad as you are saying it is. Every single thing regarding sell/buy prices, weapon degradation, damage done by you and enemies, amount of money earned from jobs, the fucking length of the blades of grass, etc are tweakable in settings. You can make it so the game is not as brutal if you cant handle it. This game wasnt really made for halo fans
I was about to leave this same comment. This dork didn't realize almost every in-game variable is adjustable from the get go? And then thought it was a good idea to go on this rant after all his "research"? What a joke of a channel. I'd say this is cheap rage bait but you can tell he's being authentic which is so much worse lmao
I've been enjoying gamma after trying anomaly and beating all the vanilla games, and like, yeah i pretty much agree. I like hard games, i enjoy some masochism, but a lot of it feels like artificial realism, which breaks immersion. One of the main things about gamma is that you can't buy or sell guns or armor, which just seems dumb to me. I still scavenge, that's mainly how i like to find gear, but it totally breaks immersion for me that the shop keepers wouldn't have the main thing you need in the zone.
@@fuglaa4766 yeah there's a loading screen message that says "something something gun control" but like, bullshit lol. There's also just like, the fact that apparently, you're the only one in the Zone who repairs their weapons. i'm in the Cordon still and i've looted some guns, fixed them up to like 100%, most of their components are good condition, but nobody else does this. Nobody in the military, nobody in the various raiders and other stalkers, despite stores only friggin selling gun repair supplies, nobody else uses them.
@@fuglaa4766 idk where else to put this, nobody i know plays this game lol but here, pro tip: in the cordon you can get one or two missions from Wolf to go kill mutants, easy enough, but if you're low on ammo, just sleep, the storm will kill the mutants, completing the quest, and you get like 5-10k out of it
Completely 100% agree. Also another point that I think people overlook, another LARGE negative, is how a vast amount of the new fans in the community that came in strictly because of Anomaly/Gamma/EFP now expect Stalker 2 to be Anomaly 2, and I can already see the rage and the blasting of the game when it releases and it's *nothing* like that. I've constantly seen comments on so many youtube videos trashing the original trilogy and constantly telling people to ignore them as "outdated bad games" and to "just play Anomaly it's better". It infuriates me. Anomaly is a fine game *for what it is*, as are Gamma and EFP, but it's not *Stalker*. It's wearing a Stalker cosplay and covering itself with the appearance, setting, and location with a fanfiction level story that now all these new people think is what Stalker actually is. Constantly seeing lore questions on the subreddit talking like Anomaly is canon, asking dumb questions about things in the lore that are answered in the original games but they have no clue because "just play Anomaly its better". When you see a question like "Who's this Strelok guy why am I even going after him" asked for the millionth time by these types of fans and then see the whole SoC plot completely ruined and spoiled because of the dumb question and the fact that they refuse to play the originals, it really just lets the wind out of your sails. Yeah, I get it, everyone has different tastes in what they enjoy. It's great that they all enjoy the grindy bloated survival aspects of Anomaly/Gamma/EFP, cool more power to them, but don't come into the franchise and act like the entire facet of Stalker needs to change to be more like Anomaly/Gamma/EFP just because of that, when that wasn't what the originals were like at all.
I agree entirely. Sadly we live in an age where it seems like people want to insert themselves into any franchise, not learn the backstory, not respect it's legacy, and demand it change for them for some reason. This is half the reason why every game that comes out these days all feel generic and the same.
honestly just seems like you doing what the youtubers are doing except your shitting on things people have made only because its not the original trilogy, I haven't played the original trilogy because I cant afford to buy games but I don't shit on em and you cant expect every single person to play games for story (although I kind of think its dumb not doing so) and that's just knit picking the example's of people who cant appreciate story. there are plenty of people who have caught up on stalker lore but just don't play the originals, all to their own ig.
I mean I get it, different strokes for different folks. I dont mind the working towards a goal for gear and crafting. Considering I ignore the main questline for the most part it's nice to have side objectives. Things to look for, that and with gamma involved I enjoy the hide out building. That and I adore the struggle. The fact I can struggle in the zone is a bonus. Again that's just me, ultimately all of these are taste based and it's perfectly valid to not like broken gun/ dick flattening simulators.
I noticed a lot of the STALKER mods have unreasonable artificial difficulty added to it, which is a shame because they are so good, but for example goldensphere you cant even see the anomalies so you're forced to constantly throw screws everywhere you walk.
@Yojimbo61 Yeah. Some good mods that don't have the artificial difficulty are IWP, Lost Alpha, and Team Lite. Highly recommend each and i videos for all them.
Anomaly is cool for the first few hours that you play it, since you feel so free for a while. However, after a while, I just found it to feel empty and boring despite all the content available. I took a break from STALKER for about a year and then recently reinstalled Call of Pripyat, and I still think the base games hold up so well that there is no need for Anomaly and other mods.
@@pipopoikapelaa5468 as if sandbox games ever had "meaningful content", the whole point of a sandbox is to create own "meanings" out of contents that are completely senseless unless organised and arranged by the player under his chosen premises. just look at minecraft.
you do know you aren't obligated to play the game right?. saying theres no need for completely free mods and games is the dumbest thing ive heard in a while. just because you don't like something doesn't mean it shouldn't exist. i mean what did you even expect when you downloaded a free open-world survival sandbox mod? an award wining storyline?
I loved the Call of Chernobyl mod because it was basically using the mechanics of Call of Pripyat (albeit still needed a few addons to iron out some kinks). But, it's out of date and more or less abandoned, so I thought I'd try Anomaly. Yeah, it honestly sucks. To make it even playable you have to spend soooo much time figuring out add-ons, and the crafting stuff sucks like why on earth would you have to go through all of this trouble for gun maintenance? GAMMA was even WORSE on that end. Forget all of that nonsense, just let me play open-ended Stalker, that's all I really want. At this point, I'm simply waiting for Stalker 2. The story looks interesting, and hopefully with the open world, you're not necessarily completely tied to it (allowing you to just exist in the world).
@johncunningham1889 there is old world addon and old world redux for anomaly which attempts to make it more like the original stalker games, other than that there are plenty of mods like legends return or even the original call of chernobyl
as someone who has played HUNDREDS of hours of anomaly and its modpacks, i can i agree with many things. i still love these games and would play them for hundreds of hours more, but only because i have a deeper passion to the IP, having played the trilogy growing up. but god damn, thats what always kills it for me. it's just way too much. game has what must be 90 weapons in its arsenal and ive only ever used around 20% of that because getting weapons is an odyssey.
Yeah it really is too much, for me it always felt too redundant and repetitive. I guess that's all games to an extent but being someone who played vanilla, other mods, and alot of CoC before Anomaly came out I guess I have more time in it so it's like for me I'm more worn out than most. Thanks for watching.
From my experience its also an age thing. At a certain point, you are not interested in grindy walking simulators where you spend half the time in the inventory, anymore.
I remember downloading primitive SoC mods on the Stalker filefront site over a decade ago. Played a modpack off of there that had an easter egg pink Hello Kitty AK47 hidden in the bandit HQ. Good times. Stalker is different now. The new mods coming out now don't scratch the itch like they used to. Maybe I just got old, lol.
Because people like to be no lifers lol. GAMMA does suck. Probably the worst of all the Anomaly mod packs. It has a few good features sure but honestly I'd rather just install them individually. Also its not nearly as modular as advertised. Turning off half the stuff breaks the whole game and it runs like ass.
@BrokenCircle1 I absolutely cannot stand that Fallout ripoff health system. Also screw base Anomaly for that ridiculous Artifact condition meter. I have so many problems with Gamma and I just cannot. I'm so over the bs difficulty and the ridiculously expensive economy in it
Thank you for taking the words out of my mouth pal. You have just got another new subcriber. Anomaly crafting system is the reason why I keep playing COC. I spend my time enjoying the Zone atmostphere and gunplay with smart AI rather than managing my inventory. I'm very looking forward to the improved Weapon Pack [CoC] mod on an updated COC engine
Thanks for watching and subbing! Are they planning to update the CoC engine at all? I really with CoTZ had continued as it actually had a good variety of dynamic quests. Problem with it was the performance was awful and the crashes regular.
I play anomaly with two game changing small mods: Increased loot drops and increased ammo drops. It makes the whole difference when you regularly find full health weapons and armor, as well as realistic full mags of ammo on enemies
@@BrokenCircle1I don't understand why you think repairing is a slogfest? I never used the gun/armor disassembly mechanic in anomaly. I always just did quests to earn money to pay technicians for repairs. You're talking about base anomaly right?
@@IW3X I mean delete the stuff that makes Anomaly Tedious and shit, i Remember playing Call of Chernobyl with mods and was better experience... The thing its Anomaly its using Improved XRay engine so it hass juicy shaders mods
@@RogueBeatsARGI play Tarkov and Anomaly and I can safely say that most of this hardcore bs isnt Tarkov-related. Its just some misery bullshit that has been scaled to 100 for no logical reason. Still doesnt have that soul the trilogy had though.
This video sums up pretty much why I despise Anomaly. Can't wait for people to bitch when Stalker 2 drops and it's not a hardcore survival sim like they expected to be.
Yup. I'm already seeing loads of people talking about how S2 is gonna suck because 'Anomaly better'. It should not be practically worshipped the way it is. The more Stalker mods I play the more I realize how ass Anomaly is.
I will say as someone who played CoC I can understand why the hardcore stuff exists, because CoC was essentially "grind easy quests for an hour in the south and then just buy OP shit, go to the north for 10 minutes, realize you are bored because you have 0 character progression and nothing to do" the hardcoreness of anomaly/gamma help make you feel like you are progressing your character with every small purchase and every decision, even if a lot of it is tedious. It extends the gameplay and I think hobo mode stalker where every fight is scary deadly and you have to come up with solutions other than running down a pack of 10 bandits with a makarov, exciting (although fuck the mutants those bullet spongy assholes are too rough in all anomaly variations). I dont know if there is any other way to extend the gameplay of a freeplay mod otherwise, because if there is how come we havent seen it yet in the 10 years since CoC launched? Even IWP is just "CoC but with guns and some other minor things" which still doesn't make up for the complete lack of progression, scripted quests, or story. Also it feels a bit disingenuous to say the community mods werent tailored to be hard before when one of the most popular was Misery and all of its offshoots and shit like ABC inferno and soup mods like OP
I played it a moderate amount, in a few modding configurations. It always felt like i have to deal with a tone of BS mechanics, whilst the enemies... didn't.
whats your fav vanilla stalker im trying to understand stalker and you say in videos many people dont get what made vanilla stalker great and are just milsim addicts what are the best and worst parts of vanilla stalker
Personally what the trilogy so great on it's own is that the journey was linear yet fulfilling, the goal was clear, and they are fairly balanced for average players. SoC was great for first step into the series as it balances the introduction of everything the zone has to offer, such as hostile stalkers, mutants, places crawling with mutants, build-up to the heart of the zone, etc. CS was attempted to polish some of it's mechanics, but best regarded as action FPS game since you'll be shooting stalkers 95% most of the time and not so much opportunity experiencing the horrors of the zone. CoP was pretty open and has a lot good handcrafted sidequest to help you get through the main story and keep you immersed. It was the most polished stalker experience, in gameplay as he said, from other two. But lacks opportunity to revisit locations from previous games, not even the Chernobyl NPP. Which comes to.... Anomaly, what made it so popular is that due to that modpack, of course, and also it's a free game that can anyone can get and play without having any of the trilogy. It also has more content and mechanics for those who want more, which most are just straight up bloat and inconveniencing for some. Additional mods to alleviate those issues, sure, but we are talking the fundamental issues of the mod on it's own, not nickpicking about whether we can, should, or not to customize them based on our preference. It was the base game that was already laid on. Of course no one would give a shit as it's already obvious since everyone had the choice and opinions don't matter because it is what it is. Sorry for the rant in the end, I might have overthinking this a bit too much. Can't say much about the worst part of the trilogy, they was alright as for me.
SOC is my favorite as it's the most curated experience of the bunch (good mix of open ended play areas with more linear horror/action oriented levels). CoP is probably the most polished and overall solid game in the series however. I like Clear Sky but you can definitely tell alot of it's mechanics are experimental to say the least
Gets shot twice* no specific glue to fix armor. Armor breaks and becomes useless at 75 percent durability. Shot once from aimbot through thick foilage* no bandage bleeds to death. Stalker anomaly in a nutshell. The game could be perfect without all the misery mod esc bullshit and bloat
I disagree. I play heavily modded Anomaly, so sorry if you mean something like GAMMA, b Armor can still be repaired after it gets below 75, and most armors can take quite a few shots
I disagree. I play heavily modded Anomaly on max difficulties, so sorry, if you mean something like GAMMA, you could be right. Armor can still be repaired after it gets below 75, either using armor kits + parts or just armor kits. If it gets past 50, it's probably not worth it to fix it, but if your armor is below 50 durability, you have other problems. Most armors can also take quite a few shots/mutant bites before even going below 90. I do agree that NPCs spotting you across the map and shooting perfectly through foliage is a bit BS, but there are workarounds, such as going out at night with NVGs or installing separate mods which fix this. In my experience, the longer you play the less of a problem this becomes. Also, bandages are cheap and NPCs carry them often, lately I found myself not even having to buy any myself. I understand that this isn't a game for everybody but I don't believe the specific criticism you provided to be valid. It is clear to me you haven't played this game for very long. And believe me, when it comes to Misery elements, Anomaly is by FAR not the worst violator.
Thanks for sharing this. These are legitimate issues that I also personally dislike in games. Hard for the sake of being hard, too much micromanagement, more carry limits, this sounds very unfun to me. I often mod games to add quality of life improvements to lessen those micromanagement elements.
Thanks for watching and the kind words. Yeah I agree. The people who don't mind these things...not really sure where they're at. I like a challenge in fact I'm playing a new mod I recently found (video coming soon) that is just that. A challenge for sure but not tedious and time consumingly difficult. I always say I play games to relax and have fun. At the end of the day I've got work to go to, a car or two to work on, a wife to be with, and a house to take care of. I really think some of the people who like the 'hard for the sake of hard' games don't have their priorities straight.
@@BrokenCircle1 I do like relaxing games, but I also like a challenge as well from time to time. I play games in either hard or normal. That's because a lot of the games I play are designed well, and the difficulty is balanced. One of the games I dislike is Dark Souls 2 and it's because of that exact reason, hard for the sake of being hard, there's even a death counter in the main town. It's clear the team that designed it didn't understand what made the first game, Dark Souls 1, great. The first game while yes it is challenging, it's never tedious or unfair, and every hit you take feels like it was your fault. Not the game's fault. There's no ganks or sudden attacks at every corner for no reason, there's no unfair hitboxes, etc.
@@BrokenCircle1 I think one of the reasons you keep getting hate is because of the "people who like the 'hard for the sake of hard' games don't have their priorities straight." sentiment you keep expressing. Things like Masochism or trying to grapple with a really frustrating or "unfair" task is appealing to a lot of people regardless of employment or marital status or whatever. The issue is a lot of Anomaly and Gamma people seem to be in denial that, that is what it is and pretend its like perfectly balanced and shit. I would argue even from the perspective of "The difficulty is the point." design Anomaly is surprisingly all of over the place and unfocused in trying to do that and there are better mods that came after Anomaly that do what Anomaly does but way better and more concise. Less confused design.
"One that puts the difficulty upto 11 for absolutely no reason." It does it for fun. This is where I'll stop, because fun is incredibly subjective and these aren't really anything other than subjective critques. I understand why you dislike it; it's subjectively not fun for you and that's fine. In comparison to the stalker player base, it's definitely a minority opinion but people who have been with this game for awhile have developed a taste for a very hardcore realistic survival shooter- that said it is a game, and part of it has to be less "realistic" and more artificial in order to be difficult, and that's what it's essentially aiming to be. That doesn't appeal to you because you enjoy things more on the casual side, and that's fine too- in contrast to the wider world, you actually hold the majority opinion.
Nice video, I freaking love Anomaly and only agree with your gripes on the fee on the workbench, that's just ridiculous and someone should go to prison for that.
Anomaly has many things that are brought from Misery almost untouched, hence the problems of so many illogical things, they are former fans who wanted something much more hardcore, but they went too far and it became somewhat insufferable, there are certain points that I disagree with, and some that I do agree with. btw, good video essay.
I love Misery, but Anomaly has nothing of the Misery feeling other than all of the thoughtlessly ported items. On Misery you could just buy a gun, fully upgrade it and it would pay for itself in one day of game time. In Anomaly, you need a dozen repair kits and those hard fo find upgrade kits or spend the entire GDP of Uganda to upgrade your gun, then you need to spend the GDP of Greece just to buy a reasonable ammo reserve for it as NPCs will just drop one or two most of the time (And you'll also have to wait a week of game time because trader restock is scripted and can't be accelerated). Once you have your gun, you now spend half of your time just walking around because most maps are deserted of things you can use it against, unless you go to Limansk/Red Forest.
I 100% agree, when i originally played STALKER, i started with Anomaly. Then i played the vanilla games and realized the vanilla games are infinitely better. And all of your critiques are entirely justified.
@@BrokenCircle1 XD i can see that, i wonder how upset people are going to be when they realize stalker 2 is another story driven stalker experience haha, i think anomaly has completely spoiled peoples expectations
@@stronensycharte64 not necessarily "expectations", I'd say those "Tarkov at home" mods have spoiled the taste of a truly good game design for players. I get that extraction shooters have gained a decently big fanbase these days, but also - what are these people fanboying over exactly? When did scavenging for every single separate gun part 'n stuff become "superior gameplay"? And why exactly STALKER, an immersive exploration-focused story-driven Sci-Fi FPS, should become a mil-sim grind? I can draw a singular proper conclusion from all these web talks: Anomaly, EFP & GAMMA enjoyers are essentially Tarkov fans trying to create their "ultimate dream EFT+DayZ game that never came to be" on basis & at the expense of STALKER franchise.
@@F1stzz I don't and have never played Tarkov but I very much enjoy stalker gamma.. I love survival games and stalker anomaly/gamma gives me that and more, Who the hell cares if it's not the ideal way to play stalker? If I wanted to that I would go play the original games or stalker 2 when it comes out... Chill out bro, just let people enjoy and fanboy over what they love, like you did with the original games.
Please dont, there is dozens of better mods to start your modding journey, popular mod doesnt equal good mod (its the opposite usually) Many mods are much more polished with better stories, sidequests, mechanics that arent confusing and locked behind RNG walls etc. Anomaly just isnt a good start
don't. like the other commenter said popular doesnt equal good and this goes especially for stalker lost alpha? only good part about it for the entire 10 years of it being out and getting updates has been the maps true stalker? overrated and overhyped slop that really doesnt feel much like the trilogy anomaly? a bad port of a bad mod based on a bad mod based on two meh mods ported to a bad engine
With all respects, I believe that most of the points and criticisms you provide in the video are misguided, biased and I'm hesitant to call them a product of ignorancy or not since you claim to have more than a hundred hours into the game although I don't know how many of those were spent playing the default anomaly and how many of those had mods that affected the gameplay involved. So, this comentary is both for you in case you didn't know these things and for anyone watching the video who might be interested in anomaly so they get the full picture and not this overly negative partial picture: 3:28 scavenging parts for better equipment is one way to get better gear, one that can potentially save you money in the long run if you bother learning the whole system. It is irrelevant since you can still just straight up buy perfect condition guns and armor at traders if you don't wanna bother with the crafting/repair system. 3:44 yeah you grind, its a big grinding game of doing quest in areas --> getting items and money --> using such items and money to get better gear --> do harder quest in harder areas --> repeat You have 3 long main quest but the core gameplay loop goes as said and I don't know what to tell you, if this is a poor and awful system I guess entire genres of games that revolve around grinding are bad as well, aren't they? If you wanna complain about how the grind is done, do so, if you don't like grinding consider that maybe this just isn't the game for you. Still, even then you can go straight for the main quests faster if you wanted to do that for some reason through help setting to make the progression faster or just cut it out entirely through the debug menu to get yourself all the gear you need to go on. The option is there for a reason, this isn't a game with a multiplayer high score competition, this is a Stalker mesh of things to play as you want in a sandbox so use the tools you have in the setting and the launcher. 3:56 you can still pay technicians to repair your items exactly like in the original game without giving a damn for the whole manual repair system and its items. I did so in my first ever playthrough and it didn't hinder me. As I played more I started trying out the repair system slightly and found it to be just a helpful tool to make progression a bit faster by saving you money. But it is completly skippeable and you can just ignore or sell all the repair related items if you desire so to get some extra money for the technicians. If you spend too much time in menus managing gear consider ignoring the systems and clicking on a technician to get your gear repaired/modified. And if you need more money for that there you have a reason to go on more quest and play more of the game instead of sitting in a menu when nobody is forcing you to. 4:34 if you're overcumbered, have you consider managing your inventory better? Its up to you to force yourself to deal with the stamina penalties because you are holding more than you can carry. The base carry capacity (which can be improved through backpacks and gear upgrades) gives you more than enough space to carry two guns, ammo for them, armor, tools and devices, medical supplies, food and water, repair kits for some of your things and other miscelaneous supplies like batteries or artifact containers. If you have problems with the weight you can always try to reduce the weight of your gear or choose what to grab and leave, you can also plan your routes better so you can make stops at traders or meet with other stalkers to trade as you move through the zone. The game gives you lots of options, I don't know why you decided to endure the penalty and complain like its a punishment sent by god himself. 4:48 you can tweak the economy in the settings 4:56 yes, the game is harder on default than most, that why once more you got settings to make it more accessible or change aspects of the difficulty. As for reasons, some people like it this way? As someone new to the game I can understand the frustration and wanting a more forgiving set of settings but when you know most levels, quests and mechanics well the game isn't that hard and I'd argue that its a bit cheap how you can abuse some quests and systems.
5:06 this is simply false, unless there is a hidden mutant I'm not aware of all I've seen cannot correct their trayectories in the slightest and they are fairly easy to dodge if you decide to. You only have to run sideways in relation to what direction they're approaching, just like in the original games. 5:15 again, it can be tweaked in the difficulty settings. Even then, I think you fail to see why the game might be designed this way. At the start any mutant is a threat the same way any bullet is. You need to pay a lot of attention and pick quests and routes carefully. As you get better gear everything becomes easier and you only find the challenge in the harder areas, but even then, eventually the end game gear is strong enough to make you very hard to kill unless you're making the settings and the game harder. So again, the difficulty is there for a reason and you have tons of tools to deal with it such as being more careful, avoiding fights, getting companions, picking safer routes to travel, picking easier quests, improving your gear, etc. Still if you dislike it, the settings are there for you to use. 5:32 the hardcore economy gives you incentives to use the crafting and repair system. It doesn't force you to do it. 5:33 Toolkits and upgrades aren't laying around in random abandoned buildings. They're found in stashes, the ones stalkers use to hide their loot and gear, as it is mentioned and reinforced through the games lots of times (including this one), stashes are set by stalkers to hide or keep useful things so they can be stored and safe. I hope you can understand why saying that they are just laying around in random buildings is a misleading argument. 6:10 if an AK would operate with the same degree of durability as in the real world then I think we could scrap the whole durability mechanic from the game. In fact, you could say the same about all the guns. Yes, they degrade fast but otherwise what would be the point of mainteance? And besides that, you have to put hundreds of rounds through an in-game firearm to get to the point where you might have to change a barrel. Doing that would imply getting a barrel in better condition and using a workbench and a tool kit to replace a scratched barrel when you could potentially just clean it. So yeah, it is stupid, its stupid to do in-game too. You have several flavous of gun oils and mainteance kits that are use to keep your gun components healthy. The only case where you would need to replace a component is when you find a trashed gun and have lots of parts to repair it. But afterwards, just using all those repair items that are two-click appliances is easier, cheaper and what the game is going for. 6:36 if you are gonna complain about smoking reducing radiation why don't you complain about how you heal radiation by drinking vodka in the original games and that is enforced? 6:56 Like you said, this is a feature from the original Stalker games. I don't think its fair to criticize it here, you are talking about why you don't like anomaly so shouldn't you stick to anomaly and what's unique about it rather than what it shares with the original games? 8:44 I really hate to say it but, I really think that you're either not great at the game or actively hindering yourself with the settings. The game has tons of guns and if you like the gameplay and doing quests you'll get supplies and money to use whatever you like. The game is restrictive at first and saving for your first guns is hard, but once you have better gear is a snowball from there, because quests that were easy are still available and they still pay well, you will earn money faster by taking on more jobs with more gear and carry capacity and you can absolutly afford everything in the game without grinding for too many hours. Because an expensive rifle might cost you 30K, that around what you will earn by doing the basic "clear the mutants" quests that pay for almost 10K and sometimes involve shooting a pair of dogs. Sure, you'll have to pay for other expenses in the meantime so maybe you won't get your rifle after the third quest, but you can take more quests on top of those that are near the route and increase the income, the better you plan the faster you'll get what you want. 9:26 Or you could just buy them, again, this game doesn't force you to craft. You can buy any item at a trader. 9:34 you're out of luck? You search for them and keep playing. 9:36 And on top of that, you don't have to pay for a bench once you've given the technician three kits. Once again, to use a bench that you don't need to use to progress because the game doesn't force you to craft or use it to repair guns that you can buy for a bit more of cash that would be the equivalent of taking one-to-three more quests at most. And you're gonna find toolkits in stashes eventually, so you only have to pay to use the workbench until that point, if you wanted to. These are the main missinformation snips that I find with the video and I hope it serves people who don't know about anomaly to get a more clear picture because you didn't mention a lot of details about the things you dislike. Many of the elements you criticize are things that either have ways around them, can be tweaked in the base settings or straight up are systems working as intended that you simply seem to dislike. That's my whole problem with your video honestly, you just seem to dislike Anomaly and that is perfectly fine. But there is a difference between a game being badly made or designed and you not liking what the game is. I don't like gardening games because I find them repetitive, boring and uneventful, but that is because I do not like the genre, not because the games are badly made. I don't know if your original intention with this video was to simply state that you do not like Anomaly because of the type of game it is, but as a viewer, it seems to have gone in the direction of you trying to convince us all that this is a poorly made game while providing incomplete or misguised reasons alongside other statements to which me or anyone could reply "well, that sounds good to me" I don't know if you're angry over this mod because of the people who arrived into Stalker without playing the original games thinking this is what the series is about, if so I can understand you but this isn't the solution to that problem. Anomaly is a great mod and a super flexible game to modify for many us of who love the original games and its world. I loved the story of the base games but always hated that I couldn't just live in the zone like a smaller stalker, like one of those side characters with their own adventures behind them. Anomaly made it possible and without it I don't know where this saga would be in popular culture at the moment but I honestly don't wanna know. The original games and its focus will always be there and more people are getting into it thanks to Anomaly, even if others prefer a modified and uncompleted version of what Stalker is. At the end of the day, I feel great for this game's existence allowing me to further get into the zone, I'm glad it helped many players discover the series and I'm also happy for those who just like to use it as a radioactive milsim, because I fail to comprehend how that is hurting me or anyone and I'm not against people having fun with things in the way that they want, specially if its not my saga. Good evening and have a nice day.
Anomaly is everything that I disliked about misery, packed into everything I liked about call of chernobyl. I've not had a super positive experience with anomaly over the years, but I've given gamma a try and it's okay. I don't hate it as much as I used to, but I enjoy call of chernobyl, or rather call of the zone much more, despite some of the cool mods that have been made for anomaly.
As someone new to the Stalker games I instantly got hooked into the parts grind side of this game. From what you're describing the OG trilogy was a fun little thriller romp through the zone without much difficulty or sense of progression where as here in annomaly each tier of a new weapon or toolset expands your gameplay so much. Perhaps It's the type of games I enjoy, sanbox and survival that makes it perfect for me. I don't think the Gamma modpack would have caught on this hard unless people wanted a game that took time and was rewarding in the way it is. Alot of people including me are not playing the trilogy even modded but instead this version of the games
one mod id like is a mod tthat lets u have a goal, like maybe you need tto find a rare artifact to cure your cancer so you have a time limit or maybe you raise money to send to family so now u gotta save money and play cheap, its what i like about stalker stories, your not forced to survive but u choose to break in the zone for a reason, everyone has a goal, id be down for a mod like that and iron man runs would be so much more fun
I'm curious why you played Anomaly so much. If you were going to have to tweak it so much for your experience, I feel that it would have been better to play a different mod. The way the video comes off makes me think that you just wanted the story and simpler mechanics, similar to the original games. But you choose to play a much harder and grindier version of these games. I understand that the elements of the repair system and stamina are just overcomplicated for no reason, but it seems like it was intended that way or at least meant to be harder than the OG series. Anomaly was intended to be open-ended, and you essentially live a life in the zone. I would think that the story ending and gameplay based around the story are not too important as well and that it was intended to be that way. The way I hear it, the mod was just not made for your audience. Thoughts?
Crafting is not necessarily at all and I will say it is rudimental mechanic, you will waste more time to find all necessary components and recipes, instead, it's more easy to grind up enough money and reputation for any fraction to get whatever you need or want.
True you can grind but that's where it leads me to believe it is poorly designed. Awful crafting system and grinding being the only choices of gameplay seems pretty crap to me.
I really dislike gamma and EFP. For the most part I dont have an issue with vanilla anomaly though still feels stalker "enough" that I can have lots of fun playing it. COC still goated
I like ropleplaying. I love imagining im stuck somewhere cleaning shit and piss from the toilets while being addicted to benzos and cheap brandy while also suffering skin cancer. Anomaly, and then gamma - made my roleplaying wishes come true. So yeah long story short this is a modpack more suited for that mindset. For example - item bloat. When i first talked to Sidorović, and when i noticed that - what the fuck holy shit fucking CIGARS this is mental OMG theres like 10x more stuff now - i was only happy and really loved learning about the new items. When you wait for a blowout to finish, then its a perfect time to do stuff like reading descriptions or the in game encyclopedias. So no, there is no item bloat. I and many others never said - Item Bloat - because to us its not a problem. Same for - complicated crafting recipes, i never used crafting. Again, i used to play minceraft with these mods like - autism x1000 run your own nuclear plant for no reason. Ok i admit that the crafting bench mod makes most sense - because you just stuff everything inside and you automactically see what you can craft or not. So its a QoL kind of thing. But even without that i enjoyed crafting, because im roleplaying and i love imagining how was my dumb character drawn to even try and make a fucking phone with random electronics and bolts and a piece of string. Also - i have been playing the - INVICTUS - challenge for 3-4 years now and i still did not beat it. This just makes all the challenges 10 times more difficult and every problem you mention is now magnified 10 fold. But again, if you really want to prove to yourself you can do it, and you never felt about these issues as - issues - at all, then its the opposite effect - dareisayit.. the intended effect from the devs.
Мужик, спасибо за видео)) Знаешь вот на западном ютубе , который я не смотрю - вы обсуждаете что у Anomaly вообще-то есть проблемы, что мод в целом не про СТАЛКЕР. Когда на Рускоязычном ютубе таких видео просто не существует, люди хавают эту модификацию, записывают одну жизнь, как проходяь за разные фракции, советы по выживанию и прочее. Вместо того чтобы признать что Anomaly - это крайне посредственный мод, который не стоит вашего вниманию , т.к. в нём полностью поломанно то что делало СТАЛКЕР - СТАЛКЕРОМ ) Я вот сам не играл в ANOMALY , но я очень много видел контента по этой модификации, мой друг играл в этот мод ... и для себя я понял, что я не хочу играть в Fallout 4 на движке Сталкера в виде мода Аномалии... ну зачем мне все эти горы мусора ? Крафт, открытый бездушный мир который по сути не ставит перед игроком никаких задач ? Вот серьёзно, я иду на очередную локацию, что бы что ? Что я получу когда прийду на точку, чем я буду заниматься ? И по сути игрок должен сам себя развлечь в этой ситуации , сам себе придумывать цель, сам её выполнять и прочее... Но игра подразумевает то - что она и без игрока вполне себе справляется сама с собой. Хардкорность и крафт - это вообще то что сталкеру не нужно максимально. Если не умеешь в баланс - просто делай крафт как основную механику, а игроки с радостью будут собирать всё то дерьмо что для них заботливо подкинет RANDOM ммм... классно полагаться на случайности в огромной игре. Ребят , играйте в хорошие моды или оригинальный сталкер, А не дешевые поделки на Побег из Таркова.
@@MegaMALLFOYi completely agree with you on that, im kinda sad to see that despite anomaly have like the bigger modding community in stalker, the only thing they create is another 69420's ak47 reanimation and other reposition stuff and all (most of it, western goods 3.0 update is lit :d). If people really just want to play this game for singleplayer tarkov look alike then they better off just buy/crack it instead of trying alternatives, because seriously anomaly isn't even balanced or that fun without QoL addons and the generic daily quest are easy to exploit. Beside the mod itself aren't still polished to me and they kinda left it on 1.5.2, and also the mod heavily depends on addons to make it good with there legit almost no one play pure vanilla anomaly explain a lot. Tho i still find anomaly to be fun at some time if im bored, i see it as the better freeplay mods available other than cotz and area (if u are a maso) Honestly wished they make more quest addons for anomaly in the future, there already a lot of too much gun reanimation :d
@@TheGuyFromWortnite Мне кажется Аномалия - это сама по себе тупиковая ветка развития для Сталкера, т.к. она далеко отходит от концепций игры. Даже если у игры будет больше квестовых аддонов , ей возможно это не поможет, т.к. игра сломана в самом ядре геймплея - вместо шутера с приключениями где главное было тайны зоны, эксперименты и простая сталкерская жизнь, мы получили прям тебе хардкорный симулятор выживания в зоне с элементами тактического шутера... чёт мы не туда свернули))) Могу посоветовать неплохие моды на Сталкер в которых Сталкер всё еще остался ) True Stalker - там точно знаю есть хотя бы английский текст. 7-8/10 по атмосфере )) Lost Alpha Enchanced Edition - тоже прекрасная работа с отличной графикой и атмосферой игры. И кстати та же LA - является отличной платформой на которой некоторые выпускают свои моды.
As a fan of the mainline STALKER series I just tried Anomaly... And it was awful. I think your video perfectly summed my thoughts while I was uninstalling it. Definitely going to try out some other mods though.
so a game either has to be 100% accurate realism or not realistic at all to be considered "good"? no in between.. that just seems counter productive. Ah well whatever shakes your peach tree.
Simplicity. This mod lacks the simplicity Call of Chernobly has offered. Misery style mods are only fun If It's your first or 2nd run. After that, It gets extremely dull and boring. And imagine having to pass through Garbage for the 2139812nd time. I no longer find myself wishing to play Anomaly. Not only It lacks quests and an actual story, it's also worse now thanks to the hardcore mods. When I play Anomaly, I want a simple experience. Get a quest, go to a place and kill a lot of people. Take their gear, enjoy the profit. Old World Addon was just a fresh breath, I am glad It exists. Aside from that, I don't even want to talk about how these mods introduce weapons and armor that do not even fit into Stalker. What's worse is that GAMMA has introduced so many casuals into the franchise and now Stalker games are no longer Stalker games. The community is filled with all kinds of weird people, and they have ruined the identity of Stalker. What's gonna happen next is that when Stalker 2 comes out (doubt It'll ever come out) its gonna have an identity crisis thanks to the new fanbase. I swear I have seen someone believing their game was glitched when they had entered the factory in Yantar. The guy was complaining about how his screen was messed up with yellow tint and weird graphical artifacts and asking how to fix it on GAMMA discord. When someone replied him with "Turn off the Miracle Machine" solution, he asked "how do I do it, through Mod Organizer or Mod Menu in the main menu?" That alone sums up the entire situation. We need mods like True Stalker.
I played Misery for years and loved just wandering the Zone with no real objective other than I felt like doing that day, kill pseudogiants with only a knife?, go buy one from Owl and head out, clear all of Pripyat out of Monolithians?, just made sure to had enough rounds for the whole thing. Freeplay is FUN, but not when you need to be the Zone's delivery boy to make any real money and bullets are so ridiculously hard to get. In my experience the mod feels like a reverse Misery, where combat is actually easy but the economy makes Argentina look like Switzerland, and pretty much every derivative mod I've looked at just turns the whole thing into Tarkov at home.
@@BrokenCircle1 Misery doesn't change a single mission of the original COP story, you're given the option of entering freeplay after you evacuated the military, just like the original. And in my opinion, that's where the real fun of the mod began. If you have made it to the point where you can clear vanilla COP in Master with nothing but your starting equipment (With the exception of the SEVA for the underground pass) I highly recommend that you try it out, it is indeed a lot harder but barring the psi mutant hiccup it isn't really unbalanced in terms of combat.
Stalker Bugamma was one of the biggest pieces of electronic garbage I've ever seen. I don't know why the stupid Grok feels so proud of having created this shoddy Tarkov project. Why this obsession with Tarkov? It's IMPOSSIBLE to finish the game on Bugamma. It freezes and crashes a lot. Not to mention the walking simulator, which is boring. Stalker Bugamma is garbage. One bug per square meter.
Actually I am replaying the first one right now. I've wanted to make a video on them for years. It's nowhere near done as I am in the replay and get footage phase but it will come eventually.
Ive kept my first and only save from 2021 with all of the main quests completed and basically set for life in-game with tons of guns, resources, everything unlocked and a literal million in cash, and after recently revisiting it i cannot believe i put myself trough all of that grind. Not that i didnt have fun, but getting back into the game is so exhausting, if it wasnt for my stashes i would have to relearn all the stupid repair mechanics.
Pretty much my thoughts. I've played it since 2018. After this video I finally quit for good. So much BS that just isn't worth it. I'm convinced the people that worship this mod are no life's.
I'm kinda new to stalker, any mod recommendations? I've played the original trilogy and i tried anomaly but it got boring quick. I've heard call of the zone is good, and I've tried true stalker but i found the story to be kinda generic and the alife seemed to be dumbed down. are there any other in depth story mods that keep the exploration/open world aspect of the og games?
I think Anomaly is alright even if a bit broken. I always get mods to improve my experience and I can't stand garbage like GAMMA and their Tarkov kids who never played vanilla SoC
To each their own. For me in the end I've finally given up on it. It's too barebones for my liking with all the depth being in the crafting system that I hate. Been trying more OP 2. It's interesting to say the least.
@@BrokenCircle1 I understand, I do agree with the crafting system and the feeling of spending way too much time on getting mods to run properly that you also mentioned in the video. It is also why I don't have the energy to play Anomaly today
Yeah believe me I do get that. I've honestly given up on anomaly (see pinned comment if you really wanna read a rant lol) Thanks for watching! @@monolith4653
nah dude space rangers did living universe long time before stalker except stalker was made to be not exactly open world with dynamic world while space rangers has
Honestly? I absolutely love Anomaly, and I agree with basically everything you said, just to different degrees. I remember exploring the plant for the first time years ago and thinking how cool it would be to actually have scripted stories in there... thinking back to trying to get all the way up on the chimney to try and scout for possible npcs...
I agree its EXTREMELY hard to get going and insanely punishing, also you are right it is relatively bar bones and I often find myself having nothing to do besides search npcs to loot while not feeling adventure and progression of my own gear and area difficulty
I have a very love/hate relationship with Anomaly (I only play GAMMA). Sometimes I play, but these days I generally get bored and abandon my playthrough after about 10-15 hours of playtime. I enjoy the atmosphere, presentation and good gunplay, but i pretty much hate everything related to crafting, item bloat and artificial difficulty. Everything is a slog. Tons of abitrary limitations (to the player only ofc) that breaks immersion and logic all the time. As a result, when I play Anomaly I never feel like I can roleplay a stalker in the Zone. Too many weird design choices that only exist to hinder the player progression, and not in a good or organic way. Inventory clicking simulator pretty much. I understand the "reward player progression by limiting loot and making everything slow, so that each step is a reward" side of things, but it should be balanced vs actually being somewhat believable, or at least reasonable. GAMMA at its core denies this balancing act completely, which to me, is still a mystery given how good the other moving parts of this modpack are put together. Instead, it doubles down on slowing player progression, to the point where it's not even fun or realistic anymore. Maintaining guns, healing a wound or dealing with radiation sickness should not require 25 different items. In fact, cleaning guns and patching up armors could be done with maybe 3-4 items max in real life. And the experience could be the same if not a lot better for your mental health. I guess it's because of the gameplay design choices. Well, I don't like it and I think this is absolutely not what STALKER is about nor should it be. A much better design basis imo would be to do away with all the item bloat, weapon parts, and broken weapons on the enemies, and to just make ammo scarce in general (less ammo from merchants too). That would force the player to switch weapons regularly, try new strategies, and adapt to their immediate resources. Just like they should. Instead of, you know, being a hoarder collecting every piece of crap from Cordon to CNPP just to get a working rifle or two in the end... While every other stalker in the Zone can shoot perfectly maintained weapons forever with unlimited ammo. I can recommend Radiophobia 3, since it has all the good stuff like modern gunplay and graphics, but retains the original story and intent of SoC. Much closer to the original games than Anomaly and its offsprings will ever be.
Yeah you pretty much said it all. Anomaly and its offshoots take the good things stalker has then messes them up with fake difficulty, bloat, and grind. I hate Anomaly now and since this video haven't gone back to it. Been playing other gsmes and have been much happier as a result. Thanks for watching.
"(I only play GAMMA)" Well, there's your problem. You can completely ignore crafting side of things in Anomaly and adjust the economy/difficulty to be more forgiving and the game doesn't suddenly disintegrate. Anomaly with few basic quality of life addons is infinitely better than that flustercuck of a modpack. The biggest issue that you can't overcome is the item bloat, a flaw that everything from this branch of modding shares sadly.
you said you made a mod pack to make it less grindy but the links are to 4 separate mods. and it says there was to many to list. so is there a mod pack that includes all the ones needed to make it less grindy? i don't like the idea of the weapon maintenance being that bad, or the lack of recourses, and having to pay to craft or repair.
@fordman7479 I had put something together but found out after this video it has quite a few crashes. I made a simple mod myself that allowed for faster movement and less damage from fire anomalies. It's on moddb. Overall however I reccomend Old World. It makes Anomlaly play alot like the OG game.
Overall point of anomaly being mid I agree with, but many of your issues with it were completely separate from mine. I’ll have to do a video on it at some point looking at anomaly on the whole
i just play Old World Addon with other addons to make it even more vanilla, like original textures, original UI/Footstep sounds, original mutant sounds etc.
Thank you for having common sense. First off I reccomend you play vanilla. Shadow of Chernobyl id your best bet there. Clunky but the truest Stalker experience you'll find. Clear Sky is skippable but good if you want all the backstory. Call of Pripyat I highly reccomend. Beyond that the True Stalker mod is fantastic though you might feel a bit lost if you know nothing about the original games. Nonetheless it is very polished and well put together. I did a video on that very recently check it out. Also there is Lost Alpha which is very mixed. Alot of cool things there but alot of not so good things as well (too much walking simulator stuff) but I still reccomend it. Also did a video on that about a year ago.
play the entire trilogy vanilla (yes including clear sky its honestly second best in the trilogy next to SoC) after that i suggest going through some story mods like incubator, oblivion lost remake, and FOTOGRAF and maybe try to get into soup mods like narodnaya solyanka 2016, stalkersoup, and op2.2
the Gunslinger mod for CoP is really good if you want better looking gun models and animations and more "realistic" (its nowhere near as hardcore as Anomaly/GAMMA) while still playing a stalker game with a decent story.
First, what level is that 14:08? Second, I spent a LONG time crafting a carefully curated mod-pack for Anomaly to be exactly how I like it. A lot of mods that remove excess tedium, or replace the tedium with something tangible and increase immersion and the vibes. Some of my favorites For me, are the food and drink animations, the interactive PDA and PDA radio mods, and the climbing mod. That is the beauty of Anomaly for me, is that its huge canvas with a strong starting point to build a personalize experience. Of course, that is not going to be everyone's cup of tea, but when you have been replaying STALKER since it came out, adding my own personal touches feels really good. Thanks to MO2 which is a godsend, I am running 94 active plugins and the game is surprisingly stable. All of these mods finely tune smaller aspects of the game to make it less ball-busting and more of an immersive adventure.
@@DavienMcCarty it's from the more levels addon. I would recommend it. One of the only things up miss about anomaly. If you want a freeplay mod with more quest variety and less tedious elements try IWP. Fantastic mod.
Hey, I just finished your video, and I think you make some pretty valid points. I do wonder, though, how you feel about gamma? Do you feel as though it fixes some problems that anomaly has, or do you feel like it is a worse version of anomaly?
I think it's worse. The amount of memory it takes up+performance requirements isn't worth it for how little it actually changes. I guess that's another issue I have with CoC based mods these days. You mod them so much sometimes spending hours downloading, reading up on, and solving file conflicts only for ultimately minor changes. Other games with mods usually change alot more. Skyrim mods for instance can add entire massive new areas regularly with dozens of hours of both radiant and scripted quests. I get that Stalker and the X Ray engine are totally different beasts that are much harder to work with but to me the effort required for Anomaly modding in the end just ain't worth it. 80 GB or whatever for GAMMA to stutter like crazy, take forever to load and just have what is ultimatley only a few new things doesn't do it for me. In terms of what GAMMA does change I am not a fan really. Anomaly will likely never be good for me at least not with the current state of things. I like radiant quests but I also need scripted story, cool characters to find, and worldbuilding. Since I played vanilla many times all that was already done there so Anomaly and it's derivatives feel like an empty shell to me. Hope that answers it sorry for errors. On my phone and running on a few hours sleep.
@BrokenCircle1 I actually agree because I recently installed GAMMA and I noticed that the load times are super long and my PC is pretty powerful also I feel as though it doubles down on what anomaly does but barely fixes what it does. I downloaded gamma and anomaly because I just finished the original trilogy and wanted more stalker content but felt underwhelmed with what it offered. I hope stalker 2 isn't like what anomaly and gamma are. Plus, you're all good King, get some rest 👑
Yeah Stalker tends to suffer from that. The vanilla games always left me wanting more. I would recommend True Stalker mod. Better visuals, animations, and a whole new story. It's shortish but it is very very good and actually builds on Stalker rather than changing everything in favor of hardcore difficulty. Really enjoyed playing that mod. Lost Alpha while not perfect also ain't a bad mod. It adds in loads of content that was cut from the original and redoes most of the game world (for the better imo)@@slacker4486
@@BrokenCircle1 GAMMA is vastly different to anomaly though? it's way more difficult, and tries to be a bit more grounded. the economy, combat, healing, and crafting systems are all totally different.
After 20 hours total playtime or so, Still fixing my weapons and fixing up a good enough Environmental Suit, to get to the X-labs and hopefully not get shot to death by factions who don’t want you in the zone unless you can blend in with the correct faction patches on
i felt like this the first time i played anomaly but i prefer sandbox type games so gamma is up there for me. i started by looking for games similar to DayZ. i guess this is for masochist more than casual players. BUT i can say gamma got me into the world and lore. i went back and researched the book and movie and played CS so far(not liking it too much but i dont dislike it at all, trying call of prip next) im looking forward to stalker 2. the lore and story is pulling me in and i see they included some elements from anomaly. best of both worlds!
@@BrokenCircle1 thanks for the advice. ill buy that one now. i dont agree with a lot of your takes but thats why i like your content. a different perspective. im definetly subbing
@@belzebubukas How do I know you're talking about the Aug without even checking the video? Yeah I mean to each their own. Fair enough. Thanks for watching.
The thing that kills the immersion for me is that when I kill any stalker (rookie or monolith pros), their guns are ALWAYS below 30% durability. this makes ZERO sense. It's straight up stupid.
@_454_ Yeah I agree. The original games it makes much more sense to have a variety of conditions. I know in anomaly very late game you can find guns in good condition but by that point it doesn't matter.
Yes brother i abso-frikin-lutely agree with you, i was playing Call of Pripyat Recently and i am a loot hog so i wanted to download a mod that lets me carry as much as i want to and guess what, there are only 2 tutorials, 1 doesnt work 2 requires some kind of Hex Editor wich makes no sense, and guess what was google recommending me instead of those tutorials? EVERY ANOMALY AND GAMMA REDDIT POST EVER KNOWN and i was so mad So after i finished the game on the best ending possibe, i tried to play Call of Chernobyl cause i was bored, and i liked it but i shortly quit cause of the Crashes happening every 2 minutes. AND I COULDN'T FIND ANY OTHER MODS TO PLAY CAUSE EVERYTHING I SEE THAT INCLUDES STALKER MODS IS JUST ANOMALY AND GAMMA And so i have no choice I download Anomaly Set up the settings AND SEE THAT YOU CANT EVEN INCREASE THE STARTER POINTS FOR THE STARTER PACK, EVEN WITH MODS And there is only ONE additional carry weight mod And The fans Only produce some insane graphics mods that your pc cant handle, AND MORE HARDCORE GRIND MODS And now because im a S.T.A.L.K.E.R fan and watch Bori4ello i get my recommendations SPAMMED with ANOMALY VIDEOS And i also hate how much anomaly and gamma overshadows other awesome mods
At this Point Stalker Anomaly&Gamma are just Escape from tarkov With some elements of stalker Oh yeah and by the way, GAMES ARE MENT TO LET YOU HAVE FUN, NOT MAKE YOU RELOAD YOUR SAVE CAUSE YOU GOT HALF OF YOUR HP EATEN BY A " PM " BULLET
Thanks for watching. Yeah I agree it really sucks that Anomaly has gotten all the attention and effort but not in the right places IMO. The graphics/hardcore mods are dumb as hell. It mystifies me that there are so many addons for it but the VAST majority of them don't actually add much.
i respect your oppinion an you are right about all the false things anomaly does but HAPPILY all those problems like gun maintenance and Drugs making no sence can easily be bypassed with some simple mods like better economy better traders better repair system and more
Personally, as someone who played the OG trilogy for thousands of hours and has completed several playthroughs for Anomaly and GA.M.M.A, I cannot help but agree with the points you've made. What really pissed me off about Anomaly was how janky the experience was to begin with and the artificial difficulty it brought; I do understand completely that most of the issues can be resolved with mods or by tweaking the settings in the Gameplay section, but my point is that if that is how the game plays right as I create my character and press the play button, then the very first experience the creators were trying to convey is lacking. True, most of the things do not make sense, however I would like to point out that the reason why every weapon is in a terrible condition was due to balancing. I can understand as it would break economy, however they could've taken notes from the original games and made that only Stalkers with higher rank would spawn with some really nice gear, mostly around the northern part of the Zone which is notorious for being dangerous, it would make sense to go there prepared and face even deadlier situations. If there was a small chance that a high ranking Stalker were to spawn in a beginner area, make it so that the ammo type for that gun he was carrying is either rare or expensive in the early game zones ( Which I did configure in the menu, and believe me it made a great difference.). This has been a thing since the Misery mod, and the devs had an equally terrible in world explanation which was: "You won’t get everything you think you deserve, the Zone is not about fairness after all, so cut it out with all that nonsense right know and grow some testicles. And yeah, if the guy you just shot drops like rock onto something or rolls down a cliff, his stuff will get mushed, broken, destroyed. So you won’t have a chance at dipping in that butter jar at all." In short, they said "Fuck you, that's why." There is absolutely no reason for the mutants to have homing attacks, It really pisses me off that I cannot dodge a boar charging at me in Anomaly while it posed no issue in the OG games. And don't get me started on the freaking cats that cannot be heard AT ALL while they're running at you,. You could be wearing an EXO suit, they are still going to take you down in two hits. That could've been fixed by giving us a chance to dodge mutant attacks and actually slowing down the cat enemy and making their footsteps louder. Guns should be made more durable, as this whole degradation system is made with the goal of forcing you to use the repair system more often and to again, grind for materials so that you may keep them in good condition. I don't have an issue with oiling my gun every once in a while, it adds a touch of immersion and bonding with your weapon. But I do have an issue if my equipment is breaking after three enemy encounters and I have to oil it once every two days. I personally don't have the issue with the grind, as long as it makes logical sense and is actually rewarding (Which again, I solved by tweaking the gameplay settings in the menu.). As for Anomaly not having any good side quests, I agree. It heavily relies on the radiant quests and grind to keep you occupied. There should be more interesting side quests like in the OG games which have a story to them and would actually give you more meaningful rewards and incentivize you to explore the new locations that were added in the mod. However, I do understand that this is not much of a game, but a storytelling engine. Anomaly is most fun when you create your own character, give him personality and figure out what is his purpose in the Zone? Is he a mercenary who wants to earn as much cash as possible and leave once his contract with Dushman expires? Is he a scientist who wants to collect all the artifacts, experiment with them and document them for further research in SIRCAA? Is he a criminal who was running with his crew in Dark Valley and got tired from drinking booze, smoking and risking his ass for scraps, which prompted him to slowly build his wealth and become a merc? That's where Anomaly shines, when you use your imagination and create your own story. When you turn it into a post apocalyptic version of DND and decide to give him flaws in order to create challenging gameplay. One of my characters was a merc who had a close call with a chimera and started smoking due to stress. I will repeat, all of these things that I am complaining about are already fixed by GA.M.M.A , EFP and by tweaking the gameplay settings in the Mod Organizer and main menu, however it should've been like that right out of the box. And for the love of God, I urge all who started with Anomaly to close the game right now and start with the OG trilogy, otherwise they're in a world of disappointment when S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2 drops.
Well thanks for watching. Sorry it took me so long to respond to your comment I've been really busy at work and all and wanted to give the proper time to sit and read it. I get what you mean about the making your own story stuff. For me I used to do that alot on CoC back in the day. I liked it but much like Anomaly I found it lacked any real depth but at least it felt freer if that makes sense. Also the misery devs response to why things are so broken is beyond stupid lol. I've seen glocks put in ovens, dropped from buildings, and run over by trucks and they still work better than the crap in Anomaly so that's invalid lol. I get it it's a game but man I don't know. I just really with CoC had been continued and had an upgraded engine. It was so much more true to the original games gameplay wise. Anomaly is just icky to me. Even after I tweaked the settings and spent countless hours trying to mod it. I never liked GAMMA not one bit, granted part of that was due to the massive stutters I'd get on my rig that even after following the stutter fix guides persisted. Even looking past that I found it made alot of the base Anomaly issues worse. I don't know. In a weird way after all this time I still almost want to go back and try it again for some dumb reason even though I've been trying since 2018 and never liked it. Maybe one of these days I'll mess around with CoC again. It crashed alot but it was still good. Thanks for watching.
I think anomaly was just a platform for the stalker community and few use it as it's meant. Like if you've ever played operation flashpoint dragon rising, the mod community was crazy and there was a lot of scripted quest mods that were fun af. I feel like if people utilized the engine for anomaly and the ability to mod there could be some amazing fan story-driven projects, or even adaptations of the original games scripted and ported into the anomaly platform. Instead people are looking for hardcore survival or tarkov clones. I personally like efp because of some of the features that it adds and I like preparation with magazines.. But I add a whole bunch of mods and turn off some of theirs to make it closer to the original games, but then add things for quality of life. I'm about to try out the mysteries of the zone mod, to see how the scripted questing is implemented in anomaly... But ya i feel it's more of a platform that people used in the unintended way, successfully. It's definitely not for newcomers. I mainly played call of pripyat, and couldn't get into the other two cuz I could never get them to run(the irony), but I mainly like anomaly for the gunplay, and the"stalker simulator" aspect where it's like a random dude in the zone..and I think that's the main reasons people go to anomaly and it's mods for. And the AI is way better then most AAA GAMES... With extra mods of course😂
Can u check out what stalker unreal engine 5 is? It seemes like a huge thing but theres not really even anyone talking about it outside of its predominantly russian speaking discord.
It didn't fix everything. Repairing was still a pain and there was alot of walking simulator gameplay. Also for some reason when I looked at the ground the games framerate would get cut in half. Occasionaly crashed too.
@@BrokenCircle1 I'm sorry but I really dont get the criticism :( if it is so bad - maybe just play another game. And first and foremost, accept that there are people out there who enjoy this kind of gameplay. Not everything needs to be a dumbed down version of call of duty were you have one item for healing, one for repair and one ammo type to collect to mow through hordes of enemies while doing fetch quests to bridge the time between cutscenes.
You talk about it again as if vanilla Stalker was dumbed down like CoD. It isn't. People can enjoy what they want but drastically changing the base game then acting as if it's the best/definitive way to play Stalker just isn't right. @@Deathoutofhell
@@BrokenCircle1 let me give another comparison ... lets say we are not talking about a videogame but about your grandmothers famous applepie. In that case, her recipe is the best! Everyone who ever tasted it, applauded its taste, the sweetness and the fluffy crust. But after a local news reporter once wrote about your grandma and her cake and published the recipe, everyone in the town started baking it. And other people made adjustments to their taste and their liking. And nowadays there is a version that has pears in it as well and there is an adaptation from a pie to a tart. People enjoy it so much and put the apples of the region to such good use. Now you come along and say ''I hate the apple tart'' and people discuss that statement and you end up defending your opinion with the reasoning ''that it is not your grandmas original apple pie.'' Its 100% okay if you prefer the tart over the pie. But dont go arount talking shit about people because they like tarts or pears or otherwise disagree with you . And for all its worth, ask your grandmother how she thinks about this.
I just beat Anatoly's Story mode as a Loner. "Living Legends" was ok, even though it's just a rerun of Shadow over Chernobyl with nothing new to justify it's existence. The SIn storyline just felt lazy with you having to go back and fourth in Limansk three times! The boss fight was just an op Sin guy within the Chernobyl Plant. UNISIG gave no real direction other then the radio comms you get, and even then it was just killing UNISIG around Jupiter, just to have a anticlimactic showdown at Pripyat with like..5 guys? I also did UNISIG's story mode which has you basically doing everything in Living Legends which is to raid every lab, take random documents (assuming they didn't spawn or bugged out, which it did MANY times in this playthrough with 0 addons!) just to end up back in Pripyat to kill Strelok..Then you finish. Aside from only crashing once in this mod, it's way too annoying with all it's maintenance mechanics and even the binoculars and enemy target finder on sniper rifles were disabled for "immersion". Very sub par for one of the supposed "best polished stalker mods" out there.
1000% agree and that was kind of my point with this video. There are so many better mods out there. For freeplay I recommend Team Lite or IWP, for story I say True Stalker. Only reason Anomaly is popular is because a few big youtubers picked it up.
I honestly don't get how this video is supposed to be "ragebait" as the folks say in the comments, the points you made clearly emphasizes the issues that me and my friends who have been long-time STALKER fans have with Anomaly: We don't have problems with Anomaly existing, we play it now and then, but we absolutely despise how it warped STALKER's unique identity into discount Tarkov: Roadside Picnic Wannabe Edition. Last time I introduced my cousin who's a diehard GAMMA fanboy into trying out the trilogy he is out-right appalled that the originals are nothing like his favorite mod. That sentiment is so commonly shared and parroted that newcomers just assume STALKER to be this realistic tacticool Slavic extraction/survival experience and completely disregard it's roots. I also hate how that also puts a lot of weight on the development of STALKER 2 because I bet your ass they're going to be so sad that the game won't feature a decked out M4A1 with all the lasers and flashlight gizmos and artificial difficulty bumped up to 9000 so they can LARP as their USEC PMC in Chernobyl. Again, I have no issues with Anomaly being a thing, but boy do I disagree when people put Anomaly and it's modpacks on a pedestal and call it the definite STALKER experience, because that's plain bullshit.
I'm just gonna leave this here...
So at the end of this video I asked: Was it worth it to spend all this time modding Anomaly just to get it to be playable for me and less over the top and hardcore?
The answer is no. No it is not. The more I played the more frustrating I found the various gameplay features.
The games story ending (which I just got to replaying the past few days) entails an absurd amount of walking simulator gameplay which is just lazy. Honestly seems like the developers ran out of steam in the last third of it or so gameplay wise. The writing of the whole thing sucks and is ultimately inconsequential with nothing ever being revealed, changed, or anything in the end.
I thought I had never finished this games main quest but it turns out I did years ago. It just ends awkwardly without any real conclusion or climax. I remember thinking back when I did the last quest that my game must be bugged since I didn't get any quests after it but nope. That's just it. That's the game.
Honestly the negatives with this game FAR outweigh the positives and I wonder if all the people who praise this game the way they do ever beat it or got further than the first few levels because it seems like from what I've seen online the reception is sort of lukewarm among many of the people who got to the end.
At the end of the day Anomaly does nothing but waste your time with pointless grindy elements. The amount of times I had to stop mid firefight to repair gear and armor was just...it completely broke the flow of the gameplay but I had to do it unless I wanted the game to break my wallet.
There is no more love/hate relationship with Anomaly for me. I HATE this game. This mod. It is terrible and I wont be coming back to it. Ever. Again.
Even the worst Stalker mods I've played have more vision and creativity than this. Anomaly feels like it was written by a 15 year old larper.
I still wanna make Stalker videos but when it comes to Anomaly I'm out. I wanted to like this mod, I tried so hard. It wasn't worth it. If you're on the fence or in the same predicament I've been in for the last several years of 'should I mod this mod more to make it playable? Maybe it will be worth it" I say DON'T. Play something else. Try True Stalker, Goldsphere, Lost Alpha, RTTN, hell try OP 2. Try anything but this mess of Tarkov wanna be fake milsim bullshit.
Thanks for reading my rant. I'm gonna go get some water and fresh air.
I have invested many hours modding stalker, and in my experience, it has really been worth it, with all the knowledge I acquired, I would make my own stalker game.
I’ve played numerous run throughs on Anomaly, specifically UNISG, Loner, and Merc Ironman. Finished all of them. Love it every step of the way.
Fair enough to each their own.
Fair enough everybody has different tastes Anomaly just isn't mine.
@@BrokenCircle1 I really don't like anomaly base, I removed almost all the mechanics that you and I don't like
Funny thing about everything being expensive in the zone, 10,000 rubles is like $115. Everything in the zone is actually ridiculously cheap lol. So next time you do a quest for a thousand or so rubles, you're actually risking your life for about 10 bucks.
The rouble in Stalker is most likely a currency that only exists and has value inside the Zone. So you're not really risking your life for 10 bucks, you're risking your life for whatever 1000 "roubles" is worth in the Zone, which is quite a lot more than 10 bucks.
Edit: my comments are getting deleted from here instantly for some reason except for this one, so I'll just put a response here:
@animalmother9143 Why would Russian or Belarusian currency be in use in Ukraine? That would be a logistical nightmare for anyone in the Zone. Prices would need to track the exchange rates of foreign currencies, like the Russian ruble or Belarusian ruble. But if the ruble crashes, how would people in the Zone even know to adjust their prices? It's not like news on the Russian economy is easy to come by when you're in Ukraine, let alone in the Zone. Plus, it would make everything ridiculously cheap for no reason whatsoever. You could also then essentially do an infinite money glitch by bringing hundreds of thousands of Russian rubles into the Zone, buying everything people are willing to sell you and return to Russia and make insane profit over and over again.
The rubles used in Stalker are explicitly Soviet rubles, which aren't used anywhere on the planet except in the Zone, making the economy extremely stable because it isn't affected by foreign markets.
@@ikopotamus7774 🤓actually
@@ikopotamus7774 rubles are not some made up currency. It's Russian and Belarusian currency and yes you can directly ratio it to any other currency. Actually.
@@animalmother9143 And that makes... what kind of sense exactly? Why would Russian or Belarusian currency be in use in Ukraine? That would be a logistical nightmare for anyone in the Zone. Prices would need to track the exchange rates of foreign currencies, the Russian ruble or Belarusian ruble. But if the ruble crashes, how would people in the Zone even know to adjust their prices? It's not like news on the Russian economy is easy to come by when you're in Ukraine, let alone in the Zone. Plus, it would make everything ridiculously cheap for no reason whatsoever. You could also essentially do an infinite money glitch then by bringing in hundreds of thousands of Russian rubles, buying everything anyone is willing to sell you and then going back to Russia and selling them for insane profit over and over again.
The rubles used in Stalker are also explicitly Soviet rubles, which aren't used anywhere on the planet except in the Zone. This would also make the economy very stable, as it isn't affected by what is going on in other countries or even in the same country you're in. So to me it seems this is the only logical explanation?
@@animalmother9143 Why would Russian or Belarusian currency be in use in Ukraine? That would be a logistical nightmare for anyone in the Zone. Prices would need to track the exchange rates of foreign currencies, like the Russian ruble or Belarusian ruble. But if the ruble crashes, how would people in the Zone even know to adjust their prices? It's not like news on the Russian economy is easy to come by when you're in Ukraine, let alone in the Zone. Plus, it would make everything ridiculously cheap for no reason whatsoever. You could also then essentially do an infinite money glitch by bringing hundreds of thousands of Russian rubles into the Zone, buying everything people are willing to sell you and return to Russia and make insane profit over and over again.
The rubles used in Stalker are explicitly Soviet rubles, which aren't used anywhere on the planet except in the Zone, making the economy extremely stable because it isn't affected by foreign markets.
Love the fact that when you said that it was a fan mod and not a cheap husk of a game by a giant company, you roasted the in-game store in Halo Infinite.
It was born from the idea of combining Call of Chernobyl and MISERY. Many people don't even know what MISERY is.
How hardcore is misery compared to anomaly? Is it even more bs artificial difficulty?
@@xXRealXx Anomaly gives you 5 bullets per kill, Misery gives you 1 if you are lucky. It was a mod made specifically to appeal to people that enjoy every single thing in the game being against them. Along with plenty other questionable design choices. It was never really good, it was popular because... reasons unknown to me. It never had the flexibility of Anomaly to reduce artificial difficulty.
@@Infernal969 ah, so the name really means something. Truly miserable lol. Although if both the player and NPCs die easily, it's not such a problem. Was it popular because there weren't any other mods like it at the time?
@@xXRealXx I guess it was a mix of few factors. Little competition at the time, people really getting into "hardcore difficulty" games/mods (DayZ mod for Arma was the thing everyone was losing their minds over for example) and the fact that people still playing Stalker back then were so used to the games' mechanics that they needed some artificial difficulty just to feel anything. It also had a fair share of novel stuff, like character classes with perks for example, if somewhat janky in implementation. Yes, everyone was squishy, so it was fair in that way I suppose, but then so is Anomaly.
What really saves Anomaly from being just CoC + Misery is how many options it has to customize the difficulty and overall experience, and the absolute mountain of addons for it to customize it even further. A lot of Anomaly development these days is more aimed to pick up the CoC torch of being a modding platform, rather than a complete game, so you really have to tweak it yourself to your liking in order to really enjoy it.
@@Infernal969 Misery was specifically made to be Call of Pripyat on hardcore difficulty.
i mean it aint that grindy, by like 4 hours in i already had an ak and some duty armor.
the crafting system is kinda useless unless you're playing gamma, also you can customize how hard progression is when making your world
it took me like 20 mins to get an ak and a merc suit in shadow of chernobyl sooo... but i agree that anomaly is fun when you tweak the progression to your liking.
Same. Played as an Ecologyst. A few hours in a game, 60k rubles, and I've got myself a Nomad suit. But I've ran a lot tho😅 I miss CoP fast-travel sooo much.
@@gorg4281I think this is a little bit different, cuz Anomaly is more difficult and also doesn't have good stashes.
I mean, you can find a merc suit in the Newbie Village and an AK by killing soliders under the bridge.
@@gaellorenzo3006 it took a couple months to fully understand the game, but this to me is miles better gameplay than stalker original.. but the original had better story indeed
@@challenger5474 there is fast-travel in stalker anomaly, i saw in the settings
Thing is, Anomaly (and a few other mods that was its predecessors like Call of Misery or Dead Air) is for people who have played the og trilogy countless ties and look for something more open-ended and challenging. Anomaly's crafting, economy and progression make no sense and that's *intended.* The problem isn't that, it's how most newcomers don't realize that it's not aimed at them. Its popularity is simply caused by the rising popularity of difficult games in the recent years. Some people came into the franchise for a "survival shooter" and GAMMA/EFP gives them exactly that. (There's a reason other modpacks like Expedition or NOMAD aren't quite as popular despite being competent.) Also, GAMMA/EFP atleast brings a method to Anomaly's chaos. The mechanics still arbitrarily challenging yes, but atleast there's a certain way to work through them. Some people dig it and that simply won't change no matter how much we yell.
Also you're somewhat wrong about difficulty mods not being a thing before Anomaly. Mods like AMK (turned into Zone of Alienation later) for SHoC or Misery for CoP were popular back in the day. Some of Anomaly's features can be traced back to those. Artifact cooking, unscripted blowouts and dropping your gun when you're hit came from AMK. Skinning mutants and cooking them, lead artifact containers came from Misery etc.
But in the end, I agree that Anomaly and its popular modpacks gave the newcomers a wrong idea about what the games are meant to be. I don't enjoy them for mostly the same reasons as you and try my best to have people check out the originals and other well made mods.
Also I've taken a look at your channel and decided to subscribe.
Well thanks for that but I never said difficulty mods were never a thing before just that they weren't the mainstream. Take Lost Alpha for example. At one time it was by far the most anticipated mod for Stalker and the most popular when it first came out. It wasn't a hardcore mod at all.
Even OP while challenging and sometimes a difficulty to wrap your head around isn't made with all the hardcore survival elements in mind it's more like spam mutants everywhere but at the same time for every overpowered mutant horde you come across you'll also come into scenarios where you yourself are also overpowered so its a mixed bag.
I just don't like how hardcore has become the mainstream now, it always existed just wasn't 'the way' people played Staler. Maybe I should have been clearer on that front.
I tried Nomad, it was cool I liked the spirit of it just had a hard time getting it to run on my PC well, in reality what I have put together is similar to that but with less graphical enhancements.
Dead Air sounds like a Left 4 Dead mod for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
Dead Air isnt Anomalys predecessor, its sister mod to Last Day which itself is Anomalys predecessor.
I was really critical at first watching this video. I think you summed it up quite well here. I played the stalker games all when they came out or a few years thereafter. I started modding it myself and spent hours downloading things I wanted to have in "my" zone, running into bugs and incompatibilities, yet kept going because the zone just called me back. And I was a huge fan of the Misery mod project. To that, Anomaly and nowadays mostly GAMMA TOTALLY makes sense to me. I also think, that some mechanics in their default setting might be a bit too much or maybe too hardcore but noone and nothing is keeping me from tweaking it to my liking to craft exactly the experience I want. I get it, that this is not how eveyone wants to play. But then, maybe the zone is not made for you. ;)
@@Deathoutofhell 'maybe the zone isn't made for me' would be a valid argument if Anomaly and its offshoots were anything like the base games where you know the zone was made.
But they aren't.
I think some of these are valid criticisms, but Anomaly isn't that reliant on the crafting system by default. You're thinking of Gamma. In regular Anomaly, technicians can repair and upgrade gear for money, with no other items required. Also, everything negative you mentioned here can be directly configured in-game, no mods required.
Yeah but the cost of it is insane. And as I said as soon as you take away the grind (by lowering the vanilla settings) theres no substance in stock Anomaly.
@@BrokenCircle1 so your mad about it taking a job or two to get the money to fix items because it cost a "insane amount" yet when you try to make jobs pay better in settings, you get angry that it removes the grind your complaining about? Yeah I don't get it personally, but to each their own.
@@sergeantdornan1043 Since Stalker 2 is coming out I'm glad the devs didn't look to mil-sim mods like these. Like play Tarkov lol
@@trblemayker5157lol congratulations on a dumb comment
@@trblemayker5157 Mil-sim?
B-b-but im a grind addicted, fetch-questin, stinky loot goblin
Lol all good to each their own.
if i wanted to play free to play games that torture you until you give them money to skip the grind, i would do that. I hate how this grind is normialized these days.
@@arkgaharandan5881
These days? My boy has not played any JRPGs released after Chrono Trigger or MMOs.
A lot of Anomaly mechanics are taken from Misery mod for cop. But even misery wasn't that grindy.
So I've heard.
They should make Stalker MMORPG mod at this point since they love boring grind so much. Grind dogs for 20h to lvl up your guy and a gunner class. So fun (not).
They have it's called Stalcraft. I tried it once for like an hour. Didn't like it. Really not sure what the deal is with all these online only/hardcore grinding sim games.
I swear its like people have no lives other than gaming sometimes.
When I play a game I just wanna hop in and have fun because regular life is stressful and grindy enough.@@Dregomz02
Misery is x100 more grindy. It is literally Artificial Difficulty: The Mod. It does absolutely everything to make the player's experience as unfair and grindy as computationally possible. The whole mod runs like a slideshow regardless of PC hardware because it bloated the game world with SO MANY useless items, aimbot AI, mutant spam and game mechanics that the engine can't handle it. Whether you have a cheap PC from 2013 or a $5000 PC from 2024, Misery runs nearly the same. Long loading screens, stutters, random framedrops and of course Out of Memory crash errors.
@@TheJohn_Highway Oh yeah thanks for reminder of that awful performance, grass shadows lowered my framerate to sub 15 while not looking any worse than "optimized" config. It's not just gameplay that got worse but also performance they screwed everything up from A to Z.
I played Anomaly with the EFP mod, there's a slightly different crafting system there, I found it super addictive (though yes, somewhat nonsensical). Don't know if it's the same in vanilla Anomaly. I also liked that you can adjust the difficulty as much as you like - I actually made the economy much more forgiving, and absolutely enjoyed the whole experience.
You should check out Call of the Zone if you haven’t already. I love it for all the reason I dislike anomaly. A highlight to me is it’s questing system, as it might be one of the most unique I’ve seen in any game. Every single random quest feels like it could be a main quest on its own. The creator sadly passed away a couple years ago, RIP DoctorX, but I know people were trying to port more of his systems/mechanics into Anomaly.
I have tried it quite alot. Vanilla, repacks, my own custom build. I always have a problem with loads of crashes, stutters, and just general performance hitches sadly.
Edit: but it is cool and yes RIP Doctor X. I really wonder what Stalker modding would look like today in an alternate world where he never died and CoTZ was finished.
I 100% agree. I have no problem with the game making mechanics harder but if you’re going to do it, it has to be followed through on. For example, why is every gun on every NPC completely broken but they can hip fire strafe you while you’re behind cover and take out half of your health in one shot from 100m away? Those guns should be jamming every shot, be completely inaccurate, and generally not very useful. Why not just have the weapons be higher durability or have them miss more often? And all of the people saying tWeAk YoUr GaMe I shouldn’t have to spend hours fixing all of the key binds and mod parameters to get a halfway decent experience. The complaints along these lines are endless
Yeah the thing about Anomaly is like there is already a bunch of hardcore mods for STALKER that do things in a way more concise and well executed way than Anomaly or GAMMA do. I unironically blame MISERY for starting this "Making the game hard but not following through with your mechanics." sort of thing. And furthermore you can play em without having to sit around tweaking shit for hours.
That is bar far my biggest complaint with GAMMA/Anomaly; the asymmetry that presents itself between Stalker AI and the player on certain occasions. Like you said, it makes no sense for an enemy Military soldier to be shooting 100 rounds at me while I'm hiding behind cover and once I kill and loot him, his AK is at 16% durability, he has only 5 rounds in his mag, and another 3 bullets in his pocket; all the while his gun didn't jam a single time while he was fighting me. Another problem I have with those mod-packs is that If I get lit up by enemy Stalkers, I have to retreat and heal; and healing requires sitting through an animation. Enemy Stalkers in these mod-packs don't use healing items. If they get lit up they won't retreat behind cover and take a few seconds to sit through a healing animation; they just non-stop flank or camp or fight to the death.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion. I personally love it. I have not played the base Anomaly for a long time though. As you said, it's a platform for customization. I would build my own mod list from Moddb and some of my own personal mods. After Gamma and EFP came out I just started using those with a few cherry picked mods. For me it's all about grinding through the hobo stage.
Fair enough. Everybody has different tastes.
Hobo stage is great fun!
That's funny. I was playing the first game, Shadow of Chernobyl, early this morning. I'm not going to watch the video unfortunately, because I don't want spoilers. But keep making videos :)
There aren't any spoilers. I don't talk about story just gameplay.
there are some semi "spoilers" in terms of visuals but other than that ur good
What i hate the most is the items bloat. We can get around the artificial difficulty, lessen it, remove it whatever, but what do i do about all the items ? If removed then trader inventory needs to be changed and drops & stashes & laying items around too.
Yeah that's one of the things I wasn't able to fix in my build. The mods that remove the bloat are all outdated sadly. It's really annoying having to constantly stop to repair things so they don't go below the threshold.
@@BrokenCircle1 DLTX minimodpack can ease up the repair as well.
I have that installed...which module fixes repair though? @@florin9243
@@BrokenCircle1 ehh these can help but idk.
Modules : -smoother progression, -toolkit remap, -repair kits revision, -missing parts vanilla, -helmet parts. These are easily editable and even remove contents from them due to DLTX.
I want to mention the Loot Rebalance module which enables you to edit even outfit/weapon/recipes drops condition with ease.
Addons :
1.Grok craft and repair overhaul
2.crafting parts with returns
3.High level tooklits include low level toolkits
4.No toolkit requirement for vices. (haven't tested this one yet)
Depending how you take these you might brick the balance.
I purposely avoided the use of WPO and OPO. There may be stuff ive missed, my modpack is too big...
EDIT : Trader Overhaul mod.
So basically, the author made toolkits (basic,advanced,expert) purchasable from some of the traders around the map. I think there's an error tho because mechanics somehow sell them even if they tell you they don't have any...
i disagree , i playied the og games and even old world and going back to finding only bread and bandages on dead enemies is annoying as hell and not rewarding at all
I find Anomaly fun... but only with the story disabled and with the Old World addon installed (to simplify the game and remove a lot of unnecessary crap). Ultimately, I enjoy exploring the Zone more than following the story. Especially because that first playthrough ended with me constantly dying for no reason at a door inside of the Monolith War Lab that I was presumably meant to wait on a timer for it to unlock. Safe to say, I deleted the character and restarted with the story disabled after that.
Thank you for this video. Sadly I have to fully agree. I've tried a couple times to get into the mod and appreciate it for what it is, but I just can't. Doesn't make it easier if you get killed instantly by the first boar with a 50% chance (well, the other 50% Fanatic will die instead), and I am not looking for a simulator where I have to craft my own shoelaces or toilet paper (a little exaggeration).
I wish there would be another mod that uses the fantastic OpenXRay port of the engine, but keeps closer to the spirit of the original Stalker. Because Anomaly DOES look and run great, much better than the original. But now we can only set our hopes in Stalker 2 for a new journey into the Zone.
@S13iPNiR pretty much what I was trying to convey with this video but people just got mad because they can't seem to understand the concept that people want mods to follow the vision of the game not change it into something else that half looks like the original.
Oh well. Thanks for watching and the support.
I enjoyed Anamoly... I had a very different experience to you. Game was solid, no crashes. It was not that hard, and it felt pretty rewarding. I could go on and on about my experience, but to summarize:
I had no issue with the economy, difficulty and I did not find the inventory management to be annoying.
The start is hard, but rewarding.
The game is fun, but my only complaint is that I would love some more story based/scripted quests that focus on secrets and atmosphere.
same COMPLETE different experience than the dude in the vid. each to their own ig.
Im pretty sure this guy just didnt understand good ways to make money in anomaly because its easy to make like 100k in a single day of playing and you can buy all the upgrades that he complained about not having
Hey! I agree with all u said. I mean, I do not believe that there is a stalker player, who never cursed during the game or said " I will never do it again". But all of us especially those who played three vanilla originals, will come back to it. I call myself a professional COC player and after all those hours the game (still) manages to kick my butt and go back there to get un-alive. Let's c what stalker 2 will do.
Thanks for watching. What version of CoC do you play?
I feel like most hardcore STALKER mods take after the Misery CoP mod, which is much less forgiving and 100 times more BS than Anomaly.
You need a lighter to cook meats for profit(only obtainable after the Skadovsk Bandits' side quest chain). Far away human enemies will throw grenades that home to your feet. You picked the Assaulter class with affinity to heavy armors? Great, somehow he loses stamina faster using light armors. I stopped playing after arriving at Jupiter, which I heard had massive packs of snorks and burers.
Hey, long time STALKER player here. I've liked pretty much all of the modpacks I've played, both the more curated, narrative driven ones and Anomaly and GAMMA,
To establish my bona fides, the first time I heard of STALKER was reading a section in the weekend edition of a fucking NEWSPAPER in my country (yeah, as in a printed newspaper) that focused on technology stuff, with one of the back pages devoted to games. It sounded absolutely amazing to me, and I bought it the day it came out in my country, and played the whole trilogy (except for Clear Sky which I didn't particularly like). STALKER modpacks becoming popular on UA-cam really brought me back into it in recent years- I suppose the only part that I missed was this midpoint from like 2012-2015 of ultra brutal punishing hardcore mods like Misery (and well, perhaps that's for the best, haha)
Your video clearly got a lot of traction here- I can see people still commenting on it as of last week! I have noticed that Anomaly and GAMMA do represent this really interesting flashpoint in the community that, no lie, lives pretty much rent free in my head. I just find the community as a whole really fascinating, that there can be differing and sometimes competing visions of what one game is or was, and people are willing to put hours of their free time into bringing it into alignment with a particular vision of what the came could be. You've gotten some pretty heated responses from fans of Anomaly and GAMMA, and while I share their passion for these mods, I can totally accept that not everyone wants, as a previous commenter very astutely observed, a "dick flattening" simulator.
A lot of people noted that you can adjust the difficulty and economy to your liking. This was a criticism leveled against you, but I think it's also important when you're reviewing a game to base your criticisms on the default experience, i.e the one that the creator/modder intended you to have. Nonetheless, I really like challenging games that allow me to gradually work up to this experience (I'm not very good at games generally lol)- I tend to like games with more complex systems under the hood like CRPGs and survival games, and the feeling of mastering such a system can be rewarding if you have the specific set of character flaws that I seem to have :)
A lot of people have accurately noted that some of us have played the original trilogy and kind of want to just be in the world that GSC created. The walking simulator criticism obtains here, but honestly that adds to the tension for me. I could go through a deserted city district and have nothing happen, or suddenly be confronted with a horde of zombies and mutliple controllers, only barely making it out alive. I feel like it really showcases what an incredible job the original creators of the game did- that it is such a haunting and well realised world that kind of just passing through it seems to create its own emergent narrative, and GAMMA and Anomaly lean into that aspect so well in my opinion. (You 100% correct about the campaign aspect of Anomaly though, it is very lacking and the writing is terrible, but I suppose it is fan made so I don't want to be too harsh).
I don't quite understand the "tacticool" criticisms leveled against these mods though- in Shadow of Chernobyl you got quite a few unicorn guns like the FN F2000 for example (which at time of creation definitely seemed tacticool!), as well as a completely fictional energy weapon! I will confess that in my current playthrough of GAMMA I am limiting myself to only looted attachments, as decimating a squad of Monolith with iron sights seems the more STALKER experience to me :). I had a good laugh in one of the STALKER 2 trailers when someone put an underbarrel shotgun on a sniper rifle- I sincerely hope it wasn't Anomaly fans exerting their evil influence on the poor GSC GameWorld devs!
This is one issue that I have, that certain modpacks deviate excessively from what the "true" experience should be. I've really never seen a community dig in their heels about this as much as this community does- from my standpoint every mod chooses to emphasise a certain aspect of what already was in the original trilogy. Survival gamelplay elements? Food and gear repairing were in every game (although obviously not as in much depth). Weapon customisation - expanded upon from the original games, which was just scopes, silencers and grenade launchers. A lot of narrative focused mods are building (highly successfully in my opinion) on the really terrifying world of the Zone that was stymied by the graphics and engine limitations of the 00s. Indeed, I don't really understand people telling younger people to "go and play the original trilogy"- I feel like they wouldn't really enjoyed the level of, well, jank, that we were able to tolerate back in the days of yore.
I feel like the plurality of these modpacks and the differing experiences they offer are one of the things that makes this game a very special one, and something that will keep me invested in it for many more hours to come. Oh yeah, and obviously I am hyped for STALKER 2
Sorry for the mini essay but your video helped me to clarify thoughts that have been in my head for a while :)
Been playing a lot recently.... Everything you said is completely valid. It's a lot. 😂
I dont use the crafting system and only get my items from the money i earn in jobs. Its fun and not as bad as you are saying it is. Every single thing regarding sell/buy prices, weapon degradation, damage done by you and enemies, amount of money earned from jobs, the fucking length of the blades of grass, etc are tweakable in settings. You can make it so the game is not as brutal if you cant handle it. This game wasnt really made for halo fans
I was about to leave this same comment. This dork didn't realize almost every in-game variable is adjustable from the get go? And then thought it was a good idea to go on this rant after all his "research"? What a joke of a channel. I'd say this is cheap rage bait but you can tell he's being authentic which is so much worse lmao
I've been enjoying gamma after trying anomaly and beating all the vanilla games, and like, yeah i pretty much agree. I like hard games, i enjoy some masochism, but a lot of it feels like artificial realism, which breaks immersion. One of the main things about gamma is that you can't buy or sell guns or armor, which just seems dumb to me. I still scavenge, that's mainly how i like to find gear, but it totally breaks immersion for me that the shop keepers wouldn't have the main thing you need in the zone.
Fair enough. Thanks for watching
there is a lore reason in the game, i don’t like it from a gameplay perspective but it is explained
@@fuglaa4766 yeah there's a loading screen message that says "something something gun control" but like, bullshit lol. There's also just like, the fact that apparently, you're the only one in the Zone who repairs their weapons. i'm in the Cordon still and i've looted some guns, fixed them up to like 100%, most of their components are good condition, but nobody else does this. Nobody in the military, nobody in the various raiders and other stalkers, despite stores only friggin selling gun repair supplies, nobody else uses them.
@@fuglaa4766 idk where else to put this, nobody i know plays this game lol but here, pro tip: in the cordon you can get one or two missions from Wolf to go kill mutants, easy enough, but if you're low on ammo, just sleep, the storm will kill the mutants, completing the quest, and you get like 5-10k out of it
@@Westonator5000 disable the mod for the black market thing, and use Configurable Loot Condition for the terrible condition and ammo
Completely 100% agree. Also another point that I think people overlook, another LARGE negative, is how a vast amount of the new fans in the community that came in strictly because of Anomaly/Gamma/EFP now expect Stalker 2 to be Anomaly 2, and I can already see the rage and the blasting of the game when it releases and it's *nothing* like that. I've constantly seen comments on so many youtube videos trashing the original trilogy and constantly telling people to ignore them as "outdated bad games" and to "just play Anomaly it's better". It infuriates me.
Anomaly is a fine game *for what it is*, as are Gamma and EFP, but it's not *Stalker*. It's wearing a Stalker cosplay and covering itself with the appearance, setting, and location with a fanfiction level story that now all these new people think is what Stalker actually is. Constantly seeing lore questions on the subreddit talking like Anomaly is canon, asking dumb questions about things in the lore that are answered in the original games but they have no clue because "just play Anomaly its better".
When you see a question like "Who's this Strelok guy why am I even going after him" asked for the millionth time by these types of fans and then see the whole SoC plot completely ruined and spoiled because of the dumb question and the fact that they refuse to play the originals, it really just lets the wind out of your sails. Yeah, I get it, everyone has different tastes in what they enjoy. It's great that they all enjoy the grindy bloated survival aspects of Anomaly/Gamma/EFP, cool more power to them, but don't come into the franchise and act like the entire facet of Stalker needs to change to be more like Anomaly/Gamma/EFP just because of that, when that wasn't what the originals were like at all.
I agree entirely. Sadly we live in an age where it seems like people want to insert themselves into any franchise, not learn the backstory, not respect it's legacy, and demand it change for them for some reason.
This is half the reason why every game that comes out these days all feel generic and the same.
honestly just seems like you doing what the youtubers are doing except your shitting on things people have made only because its not the original trilogy, I haven't played the original trilogy because I cant afford to buy games but I don't shit on em and you cant expect every single person to play games for story (although I kind of think its dumb not doing so) and that's just knit picking the example's of people who cant appreciate story. there are plenty of people who have caught up on stalker lore but just don't play the originals, all to their own ig.
I mean I get it, different strokes for different folks. I dont mind the working towards a goal for gear and crafting. Considering I ignore the main questline for the most part it's nice to have side objectives. Things to look for, that and with gamma involved I enjoy the hide out building. That and I adore the struggle. The fact I can struggle in the zone is a bonus. Again that's just me, ultimately all of these are taste based and it's perfectly valid to not like broken gun/ dick flattening simulators.
Fair enough. Thanks for watching.
I noticed a lot of the STALKER mods have unreasonable artificial difficulty added to it, which is a shame because they are so good, but for example goldensphere you cant even see the anomalies so you're forced to constantly throw screws everywhere you walk.
@Yojimbo61 Yeah. Some good mods that don't have the artificial difficulty are IWP, Lost Alpha, and Team Lite.
Highly recommend each and i videos for all them.
Anomaly is cool for the first few hours that you play it, since you feel so free for a while. However, after a while, I just found it to feel empty and boring despite all the content available. I took a break from STALKER for about a year and then recently reinstalled Call of Pripyat, and I still think the base games hold up so well that there is no need for Anomaly and other mods.
Yeah lately I've been feeling the same
Anomaly has a lot of content but a lot of that content is basically as meaningful as an empty room.
Exactly. I think the standards for games are really low these days and people often mistake content for quality.@@pipopoikapelaa5468
@@pipopoikapelaa5468 as if sandbox games ever had "meaningful content", the whole point of a sandbox is to create own "meanings" out of contents that are completely senseless unless organised and arranged by the player under his chosen premises. just look at minecraft.
you do know you aren't obligated to play the game right?. saying theres no need for completely free mods and games is the dumbest thing ive heard in a while. just because you don't like something doesn't mean it shouldn't exist.
i mean what did you even expect when you downloaded a free open-world survival sandbox mod? an award wining storyline?
I loved the Call of Chernobyl mod because it was basically using the mechanics of Call of Pripyat (albeit still needed a few addons to iron out some kinks). But, it's out of date and more or less abandoned, so I thought I'd try Anomaly. Yeah, it honestly sucks. To make it even playable you have to spend soooo much time figuring out add-ons, and the crafting stuff sucks like why on earth would you have to go through all of this trouble for gun maintenance? GAMMA was even WORSE on that end. Forget all of that nonsense, just let me play open-ended Stalker, that's all I really want. At this point, I'm simply waiting for Stalker 2. The story looks interesting, and hopefully with the open world, you're not necessarily completely tied to it (allowing you to just exist in the world).
I agree. I hope Stalker 2 does have an open world mode after the main story. The new trailer looks sick and gives me hope.
Thanks for watching!
@@BrokenCircle1 Yeah, a free-play mode would be great!
@johncunningham1889 there is old world addon and old world redux for anomaly which attempts to make it more like the original stalker games, other than that there are plenty of mods like legends return or even the original call of chernobyl
as someone who has played HUNDREDS of hours of anomaly and its modpacks, i can i agree with many things. i still love these games and would play them for hundreds of hours more, but only because i have a deeper passion to the IP, having played the trilogy growing up. but god damn, thats what always kills it for me. it's just way too much. game has what must be 90 weapons in its arsenal and ive only ever used around 20% of that because getting weapons is an odyssey.
Yeah it really is too much, for me it always felt too redundant and repetitive. I guess that's all games to an extent but being someone who played vanilla, other mods, and alot of CoC before Anomaly came out I guess I have more time in it so it's like for me I'm more worn out than most.
Thanks for watching.
From my experience its also an age thing. At a certain point, you are not interested in grindy walking simulators where you spend half the time in the inventory, anymore.
Exactly. Alot of these kids don't get it. I've got a house, wife, sick cat, job, etc to spend time on. Anomaly is a waste of time.
Anomaly looks like Stalker for people who doesnt whats Stalker
Basically
@@R132-c7d Anomaly actually is for people who've already played too much Stalker and wants a different experience in Stalker.
I remember downloading primitive SoC mods on the Stalker filefront site over a decade ago. Played a modpack off of there that had an easter egg pink Hello Kitty AK47 hidden in the bandit HQ. Good times.
Stalker is different now. The new mods coming out now don't scratch the itch like they used to. Maybe I just got old, lol.
My conclusion after finishing the trilogy: Gamma is trash.
I cannot understand why it's so hyped up with how pretentious it is
Because people like to be no lifers lol.
GAMMA does suck. Probably the worst of all the Anomaly mod packs. It has a few good features sure but honestly I'd rather just install them individually. Also its not nearly as modular as advertised. Turning off half the stuff breaks the whole game and it runs like ass.
@BrokenCircle1 I absolutely cannot stand that Fallout ripoff health system. Also screw base Anomaly for that ridiculous Artifact condition meter.
I have so many problems with Gamma and I just cannot. I'm so over the bs difficulty and the ridiculously expensive economy in it
Thank you for taking the words out of my mouth pal. You have just got another new subcriber. Anomaly crafting system is the reason why I keep playing COC. I spend my time enjoying the Zone atmostphere and gunplay with smart AI rather than managing my inventory. I'm very looking forward to the improved Weapon Pack [CoC] mod on an updated COC engine
Thanks for watching and subbing! Are they planning to update the CoC engine at all? I really with CoTZ had continued as it actually had a good variety of dynamic quests. Problem with it was the performance was awful and the crashes regular.
I play anomaly with two game changing small mods: Increased loot drops and increased ammo drops. It makes the whole difference when you regularly find full health weapons and armor, as well as realistic full mags of ammo on enemies
Yeah I had that installed. Still repairing weapons was a slogfest. Same with armor.
@@BrokenCircle1I don't understand why you think repairing is a slogfest? I never used the gun/armor disassembly mechanic in anomaly. I always just did quests to earn money to pay technicians for repairs. You're talking about base anomaly right?
I would love a modpack to UnTarkov Anomaly
Sure, check out Old world addon.
@@IW3Xbut that makes it look like shit 😂
@@RogueBeatsARG That's what it looks like after you "UnTarkov" it, i guess. Infact vanilla Anomaly never felt like tarkov.
@@IW3X I mean delete the stuff that makes Anomaly Tedious and shit, i Remember playing Call of Chernobyl with mods and was better experience... The thing its Anomaly its using Improved XRay engine so it hass juicy shaders mods
@@RogueBeatsARGI play Tarkov and Anomaly and I can safely say that most of this hardcore bs isnt Tarkov-related. Its just some misery bullshit that has been scaled to 100 for no logical reason. Still doesnt have that soul the trilogy had though.
This video sums up pretty much why I despise Anomaly. Can't wait for people to bitch when Stalker 2 drops and it's not a hardcore survival sim like they expected to be.
Yup. I'm already seeing loads of people talking about how S2 is gonna suck because 'Anomaly better'. It should not be practically worshipped the way it is. The more Stalker mods I play the more I realize how ass Anomaly is.
@@BrokenCircle1 wording like that is the reason people get mad, just saying... also Bro cmon, If you hate the game so much stop playing it then.
I will say as someone who played CoC I can understand why the hardcore stuff exists, because CoC was essentially "grind easy quests for an hour in the south and then just buy OP shit, go to the north for 10 minutes, realize you are bored because you have 0 character progression and nothing to do" the hardcoreness of anomaly/gamma help make you feel like you are progressing your character with every small purchase and every decision, even if a lot of it is tedious. It extends the gameplay and I think hobo mode stalker where every fight is scary deadly and you have to come up with solutions other than running down a pack of 10 bandits with a makarov, exciting (although fuck the mutants those bullet spongy assholes are too rough in all anomaly variations). I dont know if there is any other way to extend the gameplay of a freeplay mod otherwise, because if there is how come we havent seen it yet in the 10 years since CoC launched? Even IWP is just "CoC but with guns and some other minor things" which still doesn't make up for the complete lack of progression, scripted quests, or story.
Also it feels a bit disingenuous to say the community mods werent tailored to be hard before when one of the most popular was Misery and all of its offshoots and shit like ABC inferno and soup mods like OP
I played it a moderate amount, in a few modding configurations.
It always felt like i have to deal with a tone of BS mechanics, whilst the enemies... didn't.
@@dirtyjack6300 exactly. Thanks for watching
whats your fav vanilla stalker
im trying to understand stalker and you say in videos many people dont get what made vanilla stalker great and are just milsim addicts
what are the best and worst parts of vanilla stalker
Hard to answer. SoC has the best worldbuilding by far as well as the maps. CoP is a bit better on gameplay in my opinion.
Personally what the trilogy so great on it's own is that the journey was linear yet fulfilling, the goal was clear, and they are fairly balanced for average players.
SoC was great for first step into the series as it balances the introduction of everything the zone has to offer, such as hostile stalkers, mutants, places crawling with mutants, build-up to the heart of the zone, etc.
CS was attempted to polish some of it's mechanics, but best regarded as action FPS game since you'll be shooting stalkers 95% most of the time and not so much opportunity experiencing the horrors of the zone.
CoP was pretty open and has a lot good handcrafted sidequest to help you get through the main story and keep you immersed. It was the most polished stalker experience, in gameplay as he said, from other two. But lacks opportunity to revisit locations from previous games, not even the Chernobyl NPP. Which comes to....
Anomaly, what made it so popular is that due to that modpack, of course, and also it's a free game that can anyone can get and play without having any of the trilogy. It also has more content and mechanics for those who want more, which most are just straight up bloat and inconveniencing for some. Additional mods to alleviate those issues, sure, but we are talking the fundamental issues of the mod on it's own, not nickpicking about whether we can, should, or not to customize them based on our preference. It was the base game that was already laid on. Of course no one would give a shit as it's already obvious since everyone had the choice and opinions don't matter because it is what it is.
Sorry for the rant in the end, I might have overthinking this a bit too much. Can't say much about the worst part of the trilogy, they was alright as for me.
SOC is my favorite as it's the most curated experience of the bunch (good mix of open ended play areas with more linear horror/action oriented levels). CoP is probably the most polished and overall solid game in the series however. I like Clear Sky but you can definitely tell alot of it's mechanics are experimental to say the least
Gets shot twice* no specific glue to fix armor. Armor breaks and becomes useless at 75 percent durability. Shot once from aimbot through thick foilage* no bandage bleeds to death. Stalker anomaly in a nutshell. The game could be perfect without all the misery mod esc bullshit and bloat
I disagree. I play heavily modded Anomaly, so sorry if you mean something like GAMMA, b Armor can still be repaired after it gets below 75, and most armors can take quite a few shots
I disagree. I play heavily modded Anomaly on max difficulties, so sorry, if you mean something like GAMMA, you could be right. Armor can still be repaired after it gets below 75, either using armor kits + parts or just armor kits. If it gets past 50, it's probably not worth it to fix it, but if your armor is below 50 durability, you have other problems. Most armors can also take quite a few shots/mutant bites before even going below 90. I do agree that NPCs spotting you across the map and shooting perfectly through foliage is a bit BS, but there are workarounds, such as going out at night with NVGs or installing separate mods which fix this. In my experience, the longer you play the less of a problem this becomes. Also, bandages are cheap and NPCs carry them often, lately I found myself not even having to buy any myself.
I understand that this isn't a game for everybody but I don't believe the specific criticism you provided to be valid. It is clear to me you haven't played this game for very long. And believe me, when it comes to Misery elements, Anomaly is by FAR not the worst violator.
Thanks for sharing this. These are legitimate issues that I also personally dislike in games. Hard for the sake of being hard, too much micromanagement, more carry limits, this sounds very unfun to me. I often mod games to add quality of life improvements to lessen those micromanagement elements.
Thanks for watching and the kind words. Yeah I agree. The people who don't mind these things...not really sure where they're at. I like a challenge in fact I'm playing a new mod I recently found (video coming soon) that is just that. A challenge for sure but not tedious and time consumingly difficult.
I always say I play games to relax and have fun. At the end of the day I've got work to go to, a car or two to work on, a wife to be with, and a house to take care of.
I really think some of the people who like the 'hard for the sake of hard' games don't have their priorities straight.
@@BrokenCircle1 I do like relaxing games, but I also like a challenge as well from time to time. I play games in either hard or normal. That's because a lot of the games I play are designed well, and the difficulty is balanced. One of the games I dislike is Dark Souls 2 and it's because of that exact reason, hard for the sake of being hard, there's even a death counter in the main town. It's clear the team that designed it didn't understand what made the first game, Dark Souls 1, great. The first game while yes it is challenging, it's never tedious or unfair, and every hit you take feels like it was your fault. Not the game's fault. There's no ganks or sudden attacks at every corner for no reason, there's no unfair hitboxes, etc.
@@BrokenCircle1 I think one of the reasons you keep getting hate is because of the "people who like the 'hard for the sake of hard' games don't have their priorities straight." sentiment you keep expressing. Things like Masochism or trying to grapple with a really frustrating or "unfair" task is appealing to a lot of people regardless of employment or marital status or whatever. The issue is a lot of Anomaly and Gamma people seem to be in denial that, that is what it is and pretend its like perfectly balanced and shit. I would argue even from the perspective of "The difficulty is the point." design Anomaly is surprisingly all of over the place and unfocused in trying to do that and there are better mods that came after Anomaly that do what Anomaly does but way better and more concise. Less confused design.
"One that puts the difficulty upto 11 for absolutely no reason."
It does it for fun. This is where I'll stop, because fun is incredibly subjective and these aren't really anything other than subjective critques. I understand why you dislike it; it's subjectively not fun for you and that's fine. In comparison to the stalker player base, it's definitely a minority opinion but people who have been with this game for awhile have developed a taste for a very hardcore realistic survival shooter- that said it is a game, and part of it has to be less "realistic" and more artificial in order to be difficult, and that's what it's essentially aiming to be.
That doesn't appeal to you because you enjoy things more on the casual side, and that's fine too- in contrast to the wider world, you actually hold the majority opinion.
Nice video, I freaking love Anomaly and only agree with your gripes on the fee on the workbench, that's just ridiculous and someone should go to prison for that.
Anomaly has many things that are brought from Misery almost untouched, hence the problems of so many illogical things, they are former fans who wanted something much more hardcore, but they went too far and it became somewhat insufferable, there are certain points that I disagree with, and some that I do agree with. btw, good video essay.
Fair enough. Thanks for watching.
I love Misery, but Anomaly has nothing of the Misery feeling other than all of the thoughtlessly ported items. On Misery you could just buy a gun, fully upgrade it and it would pay for itself in one day of game time.
In Anomaly, you need a dozen repair kits and those hard fo find upgrade kits or spend the entire GDP of Uganda to upgrade your gun, then you need to spend the GDP of Greece just to buy a reasonable ammo reserve for it as NPCs will just drop one or two most of the time (And you'll also have to wait a week of game time because trader restock is scripted and can't be accelerated). Once you have your gun, you now spend half of your time just walking around because most maps are deserted of things you can use it against, unless you go to Limansk/Red Forest.
Anomaly is for dorks. CoC has always been better. Shame they stopped updating it.
I wish Dr X never passed away. For obvious reasons plus so he could have keept working on CoTZ.
I 100% agree, when i originally played STALKER, i started with Anomaly. Then i played the vanilla games and realized the vanilla games are infinitely better. And all of your critiques are entirely justified.
Thank you for that. Alot of people got very mad at me for this one lol
@@BrokenCircle1 XD i can see that, i wonder how upset people are going to be when they realize stalker 2 is another story driven stalker experience haha, i think anomaly has completely spoiled peoples expectations
@@stronensycharte64 not necessarily "expectations", I'd say those "Tarkov at home" mods have spoiled the taste of a truly good game design for players. I get that extraction shooters have gained a decently big fanbase these days, but also - what are these people fanboying over exactly? When did scavenging for every single separate gun part 'n stuff become "superior gameplay"? And why exactly STALKER, an immersive exploration-focused story-driven Sci-Fi FPS, should become a mil-sim grind? I can draw a singular proper conclusion from all these web talks: Anomaly, EFP & GAMMA enjoyers are essentially Tarkov fans trying to create their "ultimate dream EFT+DayZ game that never came to be" on basis & at the expense of STALKER franchise.
@@F1stzz nice summation 👍🏼
@@F1stzz I don't and have never played Tarkov but I very much enjoy stalker gamma.. I love survival games and stalker anomaly/gamma gives me that and more, Who the hell cares if it's not the ideal way to play stalker? If I wanted to that I would go play the original games or stalker 2 when it comes out... Chill out bro, just let people enjoy and fanboy over what they love, like you did with the original games.
I have finished the base trilogy and might give anomaly a try. I might post my impression here later
Please dont, there is dozens of better mods to start your modding journey, popular mod doesnt equal good mod (its the opposite usually)
Many mods are much more polished with better stories, sidequests, mechanics that arent confusing and locked behind RNG walls etc.
Anomaly just isnt a good start
don't. like the other commenter said popular doesnt equal good
and this goes especially for stalker
lost alpha? only good part about it for the entire 10 years of it being out and getting updates has been the maps
true stalker? overrated and overhyped slop that really doesnt feel much like the trilogy
anomaly? a bad port of a bad mod based on a bad mod based on two meh mods ported to a bad engine
Please do, if you just like hanging out more in the Zone you might like it.
But I agree: if you're looking for a story then "buzz off Stalker".
With all respects, I believe that most of the points and criticisms you provide in the video are misguided, biased and I'm hesitant to call them a product of ignorancy or not since you claim to have more than a hundred hours into the game although I don't know how many of those were spent playing the default anomaly and how many of those had mods that affected the gameplay involved.
So, this comentary is both for you in case you didn't know these things and for anyone watching the video who might be interested in anomaly so they get the full picture and not this overly negative partial picture:
3:28 scavenging parts for better equipment is one way to get better gear, one that can potentially save you money in the long run if you bother learning the whole system. It is irrelevant since you can still just straight up buy perfect condition guns and armor at traders if you don't wanna bother with the crafting/repair system.
3:44 yeah you grind, its a big grinding game of doing quest in areas --> getting items and money --> using such items and money to get better gear --> do harder quest in harder areas --> repeat
You have 3 long main quest but the core gameplay loop goes as said and I don't know what to tell you, if this is a poor and awful system I guess entire genres of games that revolve around grinding are bad as well, aren't they? If you wanna complain about how the grind is done, do so, if you don't like grinding consider that maybe this just isn't the game for you.
Still, even then you can go straight for the main quests faster if you wanted to do that for some reason through help setting to make the progression faster or just cut it out entirely through the debug menu to get yourself all the gear you need to go on. The option is there for a reason, this isn't a game with a multiplayer high score competition, this is a Stalker mesh of things to play as you want in a sandbox so use the tools you have in the setting and the launcher.
3:56 you can still pay technicians to repair your items exactly like in the original game without giving a damn for the whole manual repair system and its items. I did so in my first ever playthrough and it didn't hinder me. As I played more I started trying out the repair system slightly and found it to be just a helpful tool to make progression a bit faster by saving you money. But it is completly skippeable and you can just ignore or sell all the repair related items if you desire so to get some extra money for the technicians.
If you spend too much time in menus managing gear consider ignoring the systems and clicking on a technician to get your gear repaired/modified. And if you need more money for that there you have a reason to go on more quest and play more of the game instead of sitting in a menu when nobody is forcing you to.
4:34 if you're overcumbered, have you consider managing your inventory better? Its up to you to force yourself to deal with the stamina penalties because you are holding more than you can carry. The base carry capacity (which can be improved through backpacks and gear upgrades) gives you more than enough space to carry two guns, ammo for them, armor, tools and devices, medical supplies, food and water, repair kits for some of your things and other miscelaneous supplies like batteries or artifact containers. If you have problems with the weight you can always try to reduce the weight of your gear or choose what to grab and leave, you can also plan your routes better so you can make stops at traders or meet with other stalkers to trade as you move through the zone. The game gives you lots of options, I don't know why you decided to endure the penalty and complain like its a punishment sent by god himself.
4:48 you can tweak the economy in the settings
4:56 yes, the game is harder on default than most, that why once more you got settings to make it more accessible or change aspects of the difficulty. As for reasons, some people like it this way? As someone new to the game I can understand the frustration and wanting a more forgiving set of settings but when you know most levels, quests and mechanics well the game isn't that hard and I'd argue that its a bit cheap how you can abuse some quests and systems.
5:06 this is simply false, unless there is a hidden mutant I'm not aware of all I've seen cannot correct their trayectories in the slightest and they are fairly easy to dodge if you decide to. You only have to run sideways in relation to what direction they're approaching, just like in the original games.
5:15 again, it can be tweaked in the difficulty settings. Even then, I think you fail to see why the game might be designed this way. At the start any mutant is a threat the same way any bullet is. You need to pay a lot of attention and pick quests and routes carefully. As you get better gear everything becomes easier and you only find the challenge in the harder areas, but even then, eventually the end game gear is strong enough to make you very hard to kill unless you're making the settings and the game harder. So again, the difficulty is there for a reason and you have tons of tools to deal with it such as being more careful, avoiding fights, getting companions, picking safer routes to travel, picking easier quests, improving your gear, etc.
Still if you dislike it, the settings are there for you to use.
5:32 the hardcore economy gives you incentives to use the crafting and repair system. It doesn't force you to do it.
5:33 Toolkits and upgrades aren't laying around in random abandoned buildings. They're found in stashes, the ones stalkers use to hide their loot and gear, as it is mentioned and reinforced through the games lots of times (including this one), stashes are set by stalkers to hide or keep useful things so they can be stored and safe. I hope you can understand why saying that they are just laying around in random buildings is a misleading argument.
6:10 if an AK would operate with the same degree of durability as in the real world then I think we could scrap the whole durability mechanic from the game. In fact, you could say the same about all the guns. Yes, they degrade fast but otherwise what would be the point of mainteance? And besides that, you have to put hundreds of rounds through an in-game firearm to get to the point where you might have to change a barrel. Doing that would imply getting a barrel in better condition and using a workbench and a tool kit to replace a scratched barrel when you could potentially just clean it. So yeah, it is stupid, its stupid to do in-game too. You have several flavous of gun oils and mainteance kits that are use to keep your gun components healthy. The only case where you would need to replace a component is when you find a trashed gun and have lots of parts to repair it. But afterwards, just using all those repair items that are two-click appliances is easier, cheaper and what the game is going for.
6:36 if you are gonna complain about smoking reducing radiation why don't you complain about how you heal radiation by drinking vodka in the original games and that is enforced?
6:56 Like you said, this is a feature from the original Stalker games. I don't think its fair to criticize it here, you are talking about why you don't like anomaly so shouldn't you stick to anomaly and what's unique about it rather than what it shares with the original games?
8:44 I really hate to say it but, I really think that you're either not great at the game or actively hindering yourself with the settings. The game has tons of guns and if you like the gameplay and doing quests you'll get supplies and money to use whatever you like. The game is restrictive at first and saving for your first guns is hard, but once you have better gear is a snowball from there, because quests that were easy are still available and they still pay well, you will earn money faster by taking on more jobs with more gear and carry capacity and you can absolutly afford everything in the game without grinding for too many hours. Because an expensive rifle might cost you 30K, that around what you will earn by doing the basic "clear the mutants" quests that pay for almost 10K and sometimes involve shooting a pair of dogs. Sure, you'll have to pay for other expenses in the meantime so maybe you won't get your rifle after the third quest, but you can take more quests on top of those that are near the route and increase the income, the better you plan the faster you'll get what you want.
9:26 Or you could just buy them, again, this game doesn't force you to craft. You can buy any item at a trader.
9:34 you're out of luck? You search for them and keep playing.
9:36 And on top of that, you don't have to pay for a bench once you've given the technician three kits. Once again, to use a bench that you don't need to use to progress because the game doesn't force you to craft or use it to repair guns that you can buy for a bit more of cash that would be the equivalent of taking one-to-three more quests at most. And you're gonna find toolkits in stashes eventually, so you only have to pay to use the workbench until that point, if you wanted to.
These are the main missinformation snips that I find with the video and I hope it serves people who don't know about anomaly to get a more clear picture because you didn't mention a lot of details about the things you dislike. Many of the elements you criticize are things that either have ways around them, can be tweaked in the base settings or straight up are systems working as intended that you simply seem to dislike.
That's my whole problem with your video honestly, you just seem to dislike Anomaly and that is perfectly fine. But there is a difference between a game being badly made or designed and you not liking what the game is. I don't like gardening games because I find them repetitive, boring and uneventful, but that is because I do not like the genre, not because the games are badly made. I don't know if your original intention with this video was to simply state that you do not like Anomaly because of the type of game it is, but as a viewer, it seems to have gone in the direction of you trying to convince us all that this is a poorly made game while providing incomplete or misguised reasons alongside other statements to which me or anyone could reply "well, that sounds good to me"
I don't know if you're angry over this mod because of the people who arrived into Stalker without playing the original games thinking this is what the series is about, if so I can understand you but this isn't the solution to that problem. Anomaly is a great mod and a super flexible game to modify for many us of who love the original games and its world. I loved the story of the base games but always hated that I couldn't just live in the zone like a smaller stalker, like one of those side characters with their own adventures behind them. Anomaly made it possible and without it I don't know where this saga would be in popular culture at the moment but I honestly don't wanna know.
The original games and its focus will always be there and more people are getting into it thanks to Anomaly, even if others prefer a modified and uncompleted version of what Stalker is. At the end of the day, I feel great for this game's existence allowing me to further get into the zone, I'm glad it helped many players discover the series and I'm also happy for those who just like to use it as a radioactive milsim, because I fail to comprehend how that is hurting me or anyone and I'm not against people having fun with things in the way that they want, specially if its not my saga.
Good evening and have a nice day.
Wow thats crazy
Facts
Very good detailed and factual post.
I actually sat and read that mountain of text... not one lie was found. Facts are Facts.
Anomaly is everything that I disliked about misery, packed into everything I liked about call of chernobyl. I've not had a super positive experience with anomaly over the years, but I've given gamma a try and it's okay. I don't hate it as much as I used to, but I enjoy call of chernobyl, or rather call of the zone much more, despite some of the cool mods that have been made for anomaly.
As someone new to the Stalker games I instantly got hooked into the parts grind side of this game. From what you're describing the OG trilogy was a fun little thriller romp through the zone without much difficulty or sense of progression where as here in annomaly each tier of a new weapon or toolset expands your gameplay so much. Perhaps It's the type of games I enjoy, sanbox and survival that makes it perfect for me. I don't think the Gamma modpack would have caught on this hard unless people wanted a game that took time and was rewarding in the way it is. Alot of people including me are not playing the trilogy even modded but instead this version of the games
one mod id like is a mod tthat lets u have a goal, like maybe you need tto find a rare artifact to cure your cancer so you have a time limit or maybe you raise money to send to family so now u gotta save money and play cheap, its what i like about stalker stories, your not forced to survive but u choose to break in the zone for a reason, everyone has a goal, id be down for a mod like that and iron man runs would be so much more fun
Sounds like a day at work.
I'm curious why you played Anomaly so much. If you were going to have to tweak it so much for your experience, I feel that it would have been better to play a different mod. The way the video comes off makes me think that you just wanted the story and simpler mechanics, similar to the original games. But you choose to play a much harder and grindier version of these games.
I understand that the elements of the repair system and stamina are just overcomplicated for no reason, but it seems like it was intended that way or at least meant to be harder than the OG series. Anomaly was intended to be open-ended, and you essentially live a life in the zone. I would think that the story ending and gameplay based around the story are not too important as well and that it was intended to be that way.
The way I hear it, the mod was just not made for your audience. Thoughts?
Crafting is not necessarily at all and I will say it is rudimental mechanic, you will waste more time to find all necessary components and recipes, instead, it's more easy to grind up enough money and reputation for any fraction to get whatever you need or want.
True you can grind but that's where it leads me to believe it is poorly designed. Awful crafting system and grinding being the only choices of gameplay seems pretty crap to me.
@@BrokenCircle1 btw, GAMNA has solution for crafting system, but it feels like instead of patching up the wound they decided to break up a leg.
I really dislike gamma and EFP. For the most part I dont have an issue with vanilla anomaly though still feels stalker "enough" that I can have lots of fun playing it. COC still goated
I like ropleplaying. I love imagining im stuck somewhere cleaning shit and piss from the toilets while being addicted to benzos and cheap brandy while also suffering skin cancer. Anomaly, and then gamma - made my roleplaying wishes come true. So yeah long story short this is a modpack more suited for that mindset.
For example - item bloat. When i first talked to Sidorović, and when i noticed that - what the fuck holy shit fucking CIGARS this is mental OMG theres like 10x more stuff now - i was only happy and really loved learning about the new items. When you wait for a blowout to finish, then its a perfect time to do stuff like reading descriptions or the in game encyclopedias.
So no, there is no item bloat. I and many others never said - Item Bloat - because to us its not a problem.
Same for - complicated crafting recipes, i never used crafting. Again, i used to play minceraft with these mods like - autism x1000 run your own nuclear plant for no reason. Ok i admit that the crafting bench mod makes most sense - because you just stuff everything inside and you automactically see what you can craft or not. So its a QoL kind of thing. But even without that i enjoyed crafting, because im roleplaying and i love imagining how was my dumb character drawn to even try and make a fucking phone with random electronics and bolts and a piece of string.
Also - i have been playing the - INVICTUS - challenge for 3-4 years now and i still did not beat it. This just makes all the challenges 10 times more difficult and every problem you mention is now magnified 10 fold. But again, if you really want to prove to yourself you can do it, and you never felt about these issues as - issues - at all, then its the opposite effect - dareisayit.. the intended effect from the devs.
Мужик, спасибо за видео))
Знаешь вот на западном ютубе , который я не смотрю - вы обсуждаете что у Anomaly вообще-то есть проблемы, что мод в целом не про СТАЛКЕР. Когда на Рускоязычном ютубе таких видео просто не существует, люди хавают эту модификацию, записывают одну жизнь, как проходяь за разные фракции, советы по выживанию и прочее. Вместо того чтобы признать что Anomaly - это крайне посредственный мод, который не стоит вашего вниманию , т.к. в нём полностью поломанно то что делало СТАЛКЕР - СТАЛКЕРОМ )
Я вот сам не играл в ANOMALY , но я очень много видел контента по этой модификации, мой друг играл в этот мод ... и для себя я понял, что я не хочу играть в Fallout 4 на движке Сталкера в виде мода Аномалии... ну зачем мне все эти горы мусора ? Крафт, открытый бездушный мир который по сути не ставит перед игроком никаких задач ?
Вот серьёзно, я иду на очередную локацию, что бы что ? Что я получу когда прийду на точку, чем я буду заниматься ? И по сути игрок должен сам себя развлечь в этой ситуации , сам себе придумывать цель, сам её выполнять и прочее... Но игра подразумевает то - что она и без игрока вполне себе справляется сама с собой.
Хардкорность и крафт - это вообще то что сталкеру не нужно максимально. Если не умеешь в баланс - просто делай крафт как основную механику, а игроки с радостью будут собирать всё то дерьмо что для них заботливо подкинет RANDOM ммм... классно полагаться на случайности в огромной игре.
Ребят , играйте в хорошие моды или оригинальный сталкер, А не дешевые поделки на Побег из Таркова.
@@MegaMALLFOY and why do you think I would understand this?
@@BrokenCircle1 YT have translating comments)) in EU or USA YT don't have this function? 😕😕😕
@@MegaMALLFOYi completely agree with you on that, im kinda sad to see that despite anomaly have like the bigger modding community in stalker, the only thing they create is another 69420's ak47 reanimation and other reposition stuff and all (most of it, western goods 3.0 update is lit :d). If people really just want to play this game for singleplayer tarkov look alike then they better off just buy/crack it instead of trying alternatives, because seriously anomaly isn't even balanced or that fun without QoL addons and the generic daily quest are easy to exploit. Beside the mod itself aren't still polished to me and they kinda left it on 1.5.2, and also the mod heavily depends on addons to make it good with there legit almost no one play pure vanilla anomaly explain a lot.
Tho i still find anomaly to be fun at some time if im bored, i see it as the better freeplay mods available other than cotz and area (if u are a maso)
Honestly wished they make more quest addons for anomaly in the future, there already a lot of too much gun reanimation :d
@@TheGuyFromWortnite Мне кажется Аномалия - это сама по себе тупиковая ветка развития для Сталкера, т.к. она далеко отходит от концепций игры.
Даже если у игры будет больше квестовых аддонов , ей возможно это не поможет, т.к. игра сломана в самом ядре геймплея - вместо шутера с приключениями где главное было тайны зоны, эксперименты и простая сталкерская жизнь, мы получили прям тебе хардкорный симулятор выживания в зоне с элементами тактического шутера... чёт мы не туда свернули)))
Могу посоветовать неплохие моды на Сталкер в которых Сталкер всё еще остался )
True Stalker - там точно знаю есть хотя бы английский текст. 7-8/10 по атмосфере ))
Lost Alpha Enchanced Edition - тоже прекрасная работа с отличной графикой и атмосферой игры. И кстати та же LA - является отличной платформой на которой некоторые выпускают свои моды.
@@MegaMALLFOY who cares bro, speak english
As a fan of the mainline STALKER series I just tried Anomaly... And it was awful. I think your video perfectly summed my thoughts while I was uninstalling it.
Definitely going to try out some other mods though.
Thank you for that. Glad somebody else sees it. Yeah the mod has no substance really. Just grind, hardcore, repeat.
Yeah, I ran into the exact same problem with Anomaly. I call it "cartoony hyperrealism."
so a game either has to be 100% accurate realism or not realistic at all to be considered "good"? no in between.. that just seems counter productive. Ah well whatever shakes your peach tree.
Simplicity. This mod lacks the simplicity Call of Chernobly has offered. Misery style mods are only fun If It's your first or 2nd run. After that, It gets extremely dull and boring. And imagine having to pass through Garbage for the 2139812nd time. I no longer find myself wishing to play Anomaly. Not only It lacks quests and an actual story, it's also worse now thanks to the hardcore mods. When I play Anomaly, I want a simple experience. Get a quest, go to a place and kill a lot of people. Take their gear, enjoy the profit. Old World Addon was just a fresh breath, I am glad It exists.
Aside from that, I don't even want to talk about how these mods introduce weapons and armor that do not even fit into Stalker. What's worse is that GAMMA has introduced so many casuals into the franchise and now Stalker games are no longer Stalker games. The community is filled with all kinds of weird people, and they have ruined the identity of Stalker. What's gonna happen next is that when Stalker 2 comes out (doubt It'll ever come out) its gonna have an identity crisis thanks to the new fanbase.
I swear I have seen someone believing their game was glitched when they had entered the factory in Yantar. The guy was complaining about how his screen was messed up with yellow tint and weird graphical artifacts and asking how to fix it on GAMMA discord. When someone replied him with "Turn off the Miracle Machine" solution, he asked "how do I do it, through Mod Organizer or Mod Menu in the main menu?" That alone sums up the entire situation.
We need mods like True Stalker.
I agree completely. True Stalker was fantastic. I reviewed that ahlbout two or three weeks ago.
I played Misery for years and loved just wandering the Zone with no real objective other than I felt like doing that day, kill pseudogiants with only a knife?, go buy one from Owl and head out, clear all of Pripyat out of Monolithians?, just made sure to had enough rounds for the whole thing. Freeplay is FUN, but not when you need to be the Zone's delivery boy to make any real money and bullets are so ridiculously hard to get.
In my experience the mod feels like a reverse Misery, where combat is actually easy but the economy makes Argentina look like Switzerland, and pretty much every derivative mod I've looked at just turns the whole thing into Tarkov at home.
@@tanostrelok2323 Yes. This is accurate.
@@tanostrelok2323 Is Misery freeplay? I never played it. I've played alot of Misery derived mods but never the original.
@@BrokenCircle1 Misery doesn't change a single mission of the original COP story, you're given the option of entering freeplay after you evacuated the military, just like the original. And in my opinion, that's where the real fun of the mod began.
If you have made it to the point where you can clear vanilla COP in Master with nothing but your starting equipment (With the exception of the SEVA for the underground pass) I highly recommend that you try it out, it is indeed a lot harder but barring the psi mutant hiccup it isn't really unbalanced in terms of combat.
Thanks for this not what im looking for. Any stalker mods you suggest
@Thrasher619-zt2jd IWP. Did a video on that recently. Check it out, it might be more what you like
Stalker Bugamma was one of the biggest pieces of electronic garbage I've ever seen. I don't know why the stupid Grok feels so proud of having created this shoddy Tarkov project. Why this obsession with Tarkov? It's IMPOSSIBLE to finish the game on Bugamma. It freezes and crashes a lot. Not to mention the walking simulator, which is boring. Stalker Bugamma is garbage. One bug per square meter.
Pretty much. GAMMA isn't just overrated it just shouldn't be popular at all. It sucks.
@@BrokenCircle1 Gamma is not Stalker. It lacks mechanics such as buying guns for example, it's the biggest problem
@@FenrirGrayhound You can enable buying guns in gamma
I agree with you completely, but I still really enjoy Anomaly.
Fair enough everyone has different tastes.
I like checkin out your videos sometimes and im just curious if u ever tried the metro series of games
Actually I am replaying the first one right now. I've wanted to make a video on them for years. It's nowhere near done as I am in the replay and get footage phase but it will come eventually.
@@BrokenCircle1 nice ill be waiting for it
Ive kept my first and only save from 2021 with all of the main quests completed and basically set for life in-game with tons of guns, resources, everything unlocked and a literal million in cash, and after recently revisiting it i cannot believe i put myself trough all of that grind. Not that i didnt have fun, but getting back into the game is so exhausting, if it wasnt for my stashes i would have to relearn all the stupid repair mechanics.
Pretty much my thoughts.
I've played it since 2018. After this video I finally quit for good. So much BS that just isn't worth it. I'm convinced the people that worship this mod are no life's.
@@BrokenCircle1 yeah some of them are annoying, worst offenders are probably the ones that talk about anomaly as it "fixing" vanilla games.
@@frennauta That and the people that say 'skill issue'. Disliking the way gameplay is set up isn't a skill thing.
I'm kinda new to stalker, any mod recommendations? I've played the original trilogy and i tried anomaly but it got boring quick. I've heard call of the zone is good, and I've tried true stalker but i found the story to be kinda generic and the alife seemed to be dumbed down. are there any other in depth story mods that keep the exploration/open world aspect of the og games?
@@gorg4281 lost Alpha
I think Anomaly is alright even if a bit broken. I always get mods to improve my experience and I can't stand garbage like GAMMA and their Tarkov kids who never played vanilla SoC
To each their own. For me in the end I've finally given up on it. It's too barebones for my liking with all the depth being in the crafting system that I hate.
Been trying more OP 2. It's interesting to say the least.
@@BrokenCircle1 I understand, I do agree with the crafting system and the feeling of spending way too much time on getting mods to run properly that you also mentioned in the video. It is also why I don't have the energy to play Anomaly today
Yeah believe me I do get that. I've honestly given up on anomaly (see pinned comment if you really wanna read a rant lol) Thanks for watching! @@monolith4653
nah dude space rangers did living universe long time before stalker
except stalker was made to be not exactly open world with dynamic world while space rangers has
Honestly? I absolutely love Anomaly, and I agree with basically everything you said, just to different degrees. I remember exploring the plant for the first time years ago and thinking how cool it would be to actually have scripted stories in there... thinking back to trying to get all the way up on the chimney to try and scout for possible npcs...
I agree its EXTREMELY hard to get going and insanely punishing, also you are right it is relatively bar bones and I often find myself having nothing to do besides search npcs to loot while not feeling adventure and progression of my own gear and area difficulty
Yeah its a pretty crap mod imo. Really don't see why so many people like it.
I have a very love/hate relationship with Anomaly (I only play GAMMA).
Sometimes I play, but these days I generally get bored and abandon my playthrough after about 10-15 hours of playtime. I enjoy the atmosphere, presentation and good gunplay, but i pretty much hate everything related to crafting, item bloat and artificial difficulty. Everything is a slog. Tons of abitrary limitations (to the player only ofc) that breaks immersion and logic all the time.
As a result, when I play Anomaly I never feel like I can roleplay a stalker in the Zone. Too many weird design choices that only exist to hinder the player progression, and not in a good or organic way. Inventory clicking simulator pretty much.
I understand the "reward player progression by limiting loot and making everything slow, so that each step is a reward" side of things, but it should be balanced vs actually being somewhat believable, or at least reasonable. GAMMA at its core denies this balancing act completely, which to me, is still a mystery given how good the other moving parts of this modpack are put together.
Instead, it doubles down on slowing player progression, to the point where it's not even fun or realistic anymore. Maintaining guns, healing a wound or dealing with radiation sickness should not require 25 different items. In fact, cleaning guns and patching up armors could be done with maybe 3-4 items max in real life. And the experience could be the same if not a lot better for your mental health.
I guess it's because of the gameplay design choices. Well, I don't like it and I think this is absolutely not what STALKER is about nor should it be.
A much better design basis imo would be to do away with all the item bloat, weapon parts, and broken weapons on the enemies, and to just make ammo scarce in general (less ammo from merchants too). That would force the player to switch weapons regularly, try new strategies, and adapt to their immediate resources. Just like they should.
Instead of, you know, being a hoarder collecting every piece of crap from Cordon to CNPP just to get a working rifle or two in the end... While every other stalker in the Zone can shoot perfectly maintained weapons forever with unlimited ammo.
I can recommend Radiophobia 3, since it has all the good stuff like modern gunplay and graphics, but retains the original story and intent of SoC. Much closer to the original games than Anomaly and its offsprings will ever be.
Yeah you pretty much said it all. Anomaly and its offshoots take the good things stalker has then messes them up with fake difficulty, bloat, and grind.
I hate Anomaly now and since this video haven't gone back to it. Been playing other gsmes and have been much happier as a result.
Thanks for watching.
"(I only play GAMMA)"
Well, there's your problem. You can completely ignore crafting side of things in Anomaly and adjust the economy/difficulty to be more forgiving and the game doesn't suddenly disintegrate. Anomaly with few basic quality of life addons is infinitely better than that flustercuck of a modpack. The biggest issue that you can't overcome is the item bloat, a flaw that everything from this branch of modding shares sadly.
if you do not like how its made - me neither its sometimes nonses just change it
you said you made a mod pack to make it less grindy but the links are to 4 separate mods. and it says there was to many to list. so is there a mod pack that includes all the ones needed to make it less grindy? i don't like the idea of the weapon maintenance being that bad, or the lack of recourses, and having to pay to craft or repair.
@fordman7479 I had put something together but found out after this video it has quite a few crashes. I made a simple mod myself that allowed for faster movement and less damage from fire anomalies. It's on moddb.
Overall however I reccomend Old World. It makes Anomlaly play alot like the OG game.
@@BrokenCircle1 alrighty thanks
Have you tried Radiophobia?
I actually like how difficult it is.
Overall point of anomaly being mid I agree with, but many of your issues with it were completely separate from mine. I’ll have to do a video on it at some point looking at anomaly on the whole
What did you dislike about Anomaly?
i just play Old World Addon with other addons to make it even more vanilla, like original textures, original UI/Footstep sounds, original mutant sounds etc.
kinda new to stalker and tried this mod and i kinda felt the same way. do you (or anyone) have reccomendations for good mods to try?
Thank you for having common sense. First off I reccomend you play vanilla. Shadow of Chernobyl id your best bet there. Clunky but the truest Stalker experience you'll find.
Clear Sky is skippable but good if you want all the backstory. Call of Pripyat I highly reccomend.
Beyond that the True Stalker mod is fantastic though you might feel a bit lost if you know nothing about the original games. Nonetheless it is very polished and well put together. I did a video on that very recently check it out.
Also there is Lost Alpha which is very mixed. Alot of cool things there but alot of not so good things as well (too much walking simulator stuff) but I still reccomend it. Also did a video on that about a year ago.
gamma
play the entire trilogy vanilla (yes including clear sky its honestly second best in the trilogy next to SoC)
after that i suggest going through some story mods like incubator, oblivion lost remake, and FOTOGRAF
and maybe try to get into soup mods like narodnaya solyanka 2016, stalkersoup, and op2.2
the Gunslinger mod for CoP is really good if you want better looking gun models and animations and more "realistic" (its nowhere near as hardcore as Anomaly/GAMMA) while still playing a stalker game with a decent story.
First, what level is that 14:08? Second, I spent a LONG time crafting a carefully curated mod-pack for Anomaly to be exactly how I like it. A lot of mods that remove excess tedium, or replace the tedium with something tangible and increase immersion and the vibes. Some of my favorites For me, are the food and drink animations, the interactive PDA and PDA radio mods, and the climbing mod. That is the beauty of Anomaly for me, is that its huge canvas with a strong starting point to build a personalize experience. Of course, that is not going to be everyone's cup of tea, but when you have been replaying STALKER since it came out, adding my own personal touches feels really good. Thanks to MO2 which is a godsend, I am running 94 active plugins and the game is surprisingly stable. All of these mods finely tune smaller aspects of the game to make it less ball-busting and more of an immersive adventure.
@@DavienMcCarty it's from the more levels addon. I would recommend it. One of the only things up miss about anomaly.
If you want a freeplay mod with more quest variety and less tedious elements try IWP. Fantastic mod.
Hey, I just finished your video, and I think you make some pretty valid points. I do wonder, though, how you feel about gamma? Do you feel as though it fixes some problems that anomaly has, or do you feel like it is a worse version of anomaly?
I think it's worse.
The amount of memory it takes up+performance requirements isn't worth it for how little it actually changes.
I guess that's another issue I have with CoC based mods these days. You mod them so much sometimes spending hours downloading, reading up on, and solving file conflicts only for ultimately minor changes.
Other games with mods usually change alot more. Skyrim mods for instance can add entire massive new areas regularly with dozens of hours of both radiant and scripted quests. I get that Stalker and the X Ray engine are totally different beasts that are much harder to work with but to me the effort required for Anomaly modding in the end just ain't worth it. 80 GB or whatever for GAMMA to stutter like crazy, take forever to load and just have what is ultimatley only a few new things doesn't do it for me.
In terms of what GAMMA does change I am not a fan really. Anomaly will likely never be good for me at least not with the current state of things.
I like radiant quests but I also need scripted story, cool characters to find, and worldbuilding. Since I played vanilla many times all that was already done there so Anomaly and it's derivatives feel like an empty shell to me.
Hope that answers it sorry for errors. On my phone and running on a few hours sleep.
@BrokenCircle1 I actually agree because I recently installed GAMMA and I noticed that the load times are super long and my PC is pretty powerful also I feel as though it doubles down on what anomaly does but barely fixes what it does. I downloaded gamma and anomaly because I just finished the original trilogy and wanted more stalker content but felt underwhelmed with what it offered. I hope stalker 2 isn't like what anomaly and gamma are. Plus, you're all good King, get some rest 👑
Yeah Stalker tends to suffer from that. The vanilla games always left me wanting more. I would recommend True Stalker mod. Better visuals, animations, and a whole new story. It's shortish but it is very very good and actually builds on Stalker rather than changing everything in favor of hardcore difficulty. Really enjoyed playing that mod.
Lost Alpha while not perfect also ain't a bad mod. It adds in loads of content that was cut from the original and redoes most of the game world (for the better imo)@@slacker4486
@BrokenCircle1 Thank you for the recommendations. I'll go check those out.
@@BrokenCircle1 GAMMA is vastly different to anomaly though? it's way more difficult, and tries to be a bit more grounded. the economy, combat, healing, and crafting systems are all totally different.
After 20 hours total playtime or so, Still fixing my weapons and fixing up a good enough Environmental Suit, to get to the X-labs and hopefully not get shot to death by factions who don’t want you in the zone unless you can blend in with the correct faction patches on
i felt like this the first time i played anomaly but i prefer sandbox type games so gamma is up there for me. i started by looking for games similar to DayZ. i guess this is for masochist more than casual players. BUT i can say gamma got me into the world and lore. i went back and researched the book and movie and played CS so far(not liking it too much but i dont dislike it at all, trying call of prip next)
im looking forward to stalker 2. the lore and story is pulling me in and i see they included some elements from anomaly. best of both worlds!
Try SoC next. Clear Sky is the worst one in the series.
To each their own. Thanks for watching and being civil.
@@BrokenCircle1 thanks for the advice. ill buy that one now. i dont agree with a lot of your takes but thats why i like your content. a different perspective. im definetly subbing
@@silentskillz5045 Very cool.
I love anomaly, but some things are a bit jank... Like that scope at 1:07 is an abomination that makes the gun unusable...
@@belzebubukas How do I know you're talking about the Aug without even checking the video?
Yeah I mean to each their own. Fair enough. Thanks for watching.
The thing that kills the immersion for me is that when I kill any stalker (rookie or monolith pros), their guns are ALWAYS below 30% durability. this makes ZERO sense. It's straight up stupid.
@_454_ Yeah I agree.
The original games it makes much more sense to have a variety of conditions.
I know in anomaly very late game you can find guns in good condition but by that point it doesn't matter.
Yes brother i abso-frikin-lutely agree with you, i was playing Call of Pripyat Recently and i am a loot hog so i wanted to download a mod that lets me carry as much as i want to and guess what, there are only 2 tutorials, 1 doesnt work 2 requires some kind of Hex Editor wich makes no sense, and guess what was google recommending me instead of those tutorials? EVERY ANOMALY AND GAMMA REDDIT POST EVER KNOWN and i was so mad
So after i finished the game on the best ending possibe, i tried to play Call of Chernobyl cause i was bored, and i liked it but i shortly quit cause of the Crashes happening every 2 minutes. AND I COULDN'T FIND ANY OTHER MODS TO PLAY CAUSE EVERYTHING I SEE THAT INCLUDES STALKER MODS IS JUST ANOMALY AND GAMMA And so i have no choice
I download Anomaly
Set up the settings
AND SEE THAT YOU CANT EVEN INCREASE THE STARTER POINTS FOR THE STARTER PACK, EVEN WITH MODS
And there is only ONE additional carry weight mod
And The fans Only produce some insane graphics mods that your pc cant handle, AND MORE HARDCORE GRIND MODS
And now because im a S.T.A.L.K.E.R fan and watch Bori4ello i get my recommendations SPAMMED with ANOMALY VIDEOS
And i also hate how much anomaly and gamma overshadows other awesome mods
At this Point Stalker Anomaly&Gamma are just Escape from tarkov With some elements of stalker
Oh yeah and by the way, GAMES ARE MENT TO LET YOU HAVE FUN, NOT MAKE YOU RELOAD YOUR SAVE CAUSE YOU GOT HALF OF YOUR HP EATEN BY A " PM " BULLET
Thanks for watching. Yeah I agree it really sucks that Anomaly has gotten all the attention and effort but not in the right places IMO.
The graphics/hardcore mods are dumb as hell. It mystifies me that there are so many addons for it but the VAST majority of them don't actually add much.
That AUG hurts my eyes.
What the original base Anomaly AUG? Yeah it is awful.
I think I used a modded version later on.
This is amazing, very nice work
Thanks for the support! I appreciate you.
i respect your oppinion an you are right about all the false things anomaly does but HAPPILY all those problems like gun maintenance and Drugs making no sence can easily be bypassed with some simple mods like better economy better traders better repair system and more
Personally, as someone who played the OG trilogy for thousands of hours and has completed several playthroughs for Anomaly and GA.M.M.A, I cannot help but agree with the points you've made.
What really pissed me off about Anomaly was how janky the experience was to begin with and the artificial difficulty it brought; I do understand completely that most of the issues can be resolved with mods or by tweaking the settings in the Gameplay section, but my point is that if that is how the game plays right as I create my character and press the play button, then the very first experience the creators were trying to convey is lacking.
True, most of the things do not make sense, however I would like to point out that the reason why every weapon is in a terrible condition was due to balancing. I can understand as it would break economy, however they could've taken notes from the original games and made that only Stalkers with higher rank would spawn with some really nice gear, mostly around the northern part of the Zone which is notorious for being dangerous, it would make sense to go there prepared and face even deadlier situations. If there was a small chance that a high ranking Stalker were to spawn in a beginner area, make it so that the ammo type for that gun he was carrying is either rare or expensive in the early game zones ( Which I did configure in the menu, and believe me it made a great difference.).
This has been a thing since the Misery mod, and the devs had an equally terrible in world explanation which was:
"You won’t get everything you think you deserve, the Zone is not about fairness after
all, so cut it out with all that nonsense right know and grow some testicles. And yeah, if the guy you just shot
drops like rock onto something or rolls down a cliff, his stuff will get mushed, broken, destroyed. So you
won’t have a chance at dipping in that butter jar at all."
In short, they said "Fuck you, that's why."
There is absolutely no reason for the mutants to have homing attacks, It really pisses me off that I cannot dodge a boar charging at me in Anomaly while it posed no issue in the OG games. And don't get me started on the freaking cats that cannot be heard AT ALL while they're running at you,. You could be wearing an EXO suit, they are still going to take you down in two hits. That could've been fixed by giving us a chance to dodge mutant attacks and actually slowing down the cat enemy and making their footsteps louder.
Guns should be made more durable, as this whole degradation system is made with the goal of forcing you to use the repair system more often and to again, grind for materials so that you may keep them in good condition. I don't have an issue with oiling my gun every once in a while, it adds a touch of immersion and bonding with your weapon. But I do have an issue if my equipment is breaking after three enemy encounters and I have to oil it once every two days.
I personally don't have the issue with the grind, as long as it makes logical sense and is actually rewarding (Which again, I solved by tweaking the gameplay settings in the menu.).
As for Anomaly not having any good side quests, I agree. It heavily relies on the radiant quests and grind to keep you occupied.
There should be more interesting side quests like in the OG games which have a story to them and would actually give you more meaningful rewards and incentivize you to explore the new locations that were added in the mod.
However, I do understand that this is not much of a game, but a storytelling engine. Anomaly is most fun when you create your own character, give him personality and figure out what is his purpose in the Zone?
Is he a mercenary who wants to earn as much cash as possible and leave once his contract with Dushman expires?
Is he a scientist who wants to collect all the artifacts, experiment with them and document them for further research in SIRCAA?
Is he a criminal who was running with his crew in Dark Valley and got tired from drinking booze, smoking and risking his ass for scraps, which prompted him to slowly build his wealth and become a merc?
That's where Anomaly shines, when you use your imagination and create your own story. When you turn it into a post apocalyptic version of DND and decide to give him flaws in order to create challenging gameplay. One of my characters was a merc who had a close call with a chimera and started smoking due to stress.
I will repeat, all of these things that I am complaining about are already fixed by GA.M.M.A , EFP and by tweaking the gameplay settings in the Mod Organizer and main menu, however it should've been like that right out of the box.
And for the love of God, I urge all who started with Anomaly to close the game right now and start with the OG trilogy, otherwise they're in a world of disappointment when S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2 drops.
Well thanks for watching. Sorry it took me so long to respond to your comment I've been really busy at work and all and wanted to give the proper time to sit and read it.
I get what you mean about the making your own story stuff. For me I used to do that alot on CoC back in the day. I liked it but much like Anomaly I found it lacked any real depth but at least it felt freer if that makes sense.
Also the misery devs response to why things are so broken is beyond stupid lol. I've seen glocks put in ovens, dropped from buildings, and run over by trucks and they still work better than the crap in Anomaly so that's invalid lol.
I get it it's a game but man I don't know.
I just really with CoC had been continued and had an upgraded engine. It was so much more true to the original games gameplay wise. Anomaly is just icky to me. Even after I tweaked the settings and spent countless hours trying to mod it.
I never liked GAMMA not one bit, granted part of that was due to the massive stutters I'd get on my rig that even after following the stutter fix guides persisted.
Even looking past that I found it made alot of the base Anomaly issues worse. I don't know.
In a weird way after all this time I still almost want to go back and try it again for some dumb reason even though I've been trying since 2018 and never liked it.
Maybe one of these days I'll mess around with CoC again. It crashed alot but it was still good.
Thanks for watching.
I think anomaly was just a platform for the stalker community and few use it as it's meant. Like if you've ever played operation flashpoint dragon rising, the mod community was crazy and there was a lot of scripted quest mods that were fun af. I feel like if people utilized the engine for anomaly and the ability to mod there could be some amazing fan story-driven projects, or even adaptations of the original games scripted and ported into the anomaly platform. Instead people are looking for hardcore survival or tarkov clones. I personally like efp because of some of the features that it adds and I like preparation with magazines.. But I add a whole bunch of mods and turn off some of theirs to make it closer to the original games, but then add things for quality of life. I'm about to try out the mysteries of the zone mod, to see how the scripted questing is implemented in anomaly... But ya i feel it's more of a platform that people used in the unintended way, successfully. It's definitely not for newcomers. I mainly played call of pripyat, and couldn't get into the other two cuz I could never get them to run(the irony), but I mainly like anomaly for the gunplay, and the"stalker simulator" aspect where it's like a random dude in the zone..and I think that's the main reasons people go to anomaly and it's mods for. And the AI is way better then most AAA GAMES... With extra mods of course😂
Fair enough. Everyone has their own tastes. Thanks for watching and taking time to comment.
Can u check out what stalker unreal engine 5 is? It seemes like a huge thing but theres not really even anyone talking about it outside of its predominantly russian speaking discord.
Why not look it up and do your own research?
I know nothing about it and at the moment I'm kinda tied down with work stuff so won't have time.
@@BrokenCircle1 I mean I tried but I just wanted a second opinion because I don't get why it's not popular
@@gmodiscool14 Well alot of Eastern projects kinda go unnoticed due to regional issues with translation and just different places on the internet.
I have the same problems with the mod, and so, would you post your modpack?
It didn't fix everything. Repairing was still a pain and there was alot of walking simulator gameplay. Also for some reason when I looked at the ground the games framerate would get cut in half. Occasionaly crashed too.
@@BrokenCircle1 I'm sorry but I really dont get the criticism :( if it is so bad - maybe just play another game. And first and foremost, accept that there are people out there who enjoy this kind of gameplay. Not everything needs to be a dumbed down version of call of duty were you have one item for healing, one for repair and one ammo type to collect to mow through hordes of enemies while doing fetch quests to bridge the time between cutscenes.
You talk about it again as if vanilla Stalker was dumbed down like CoD. It isn't. People can enjoy what they want but drastically changing the base game then acting as if it's the best/definitive way to play Stalker just isn't right.
@@Deathoutofhell
@@BrokenCircle1 let me give another comparison ... lets say we are not talking about a videogame but about your grandmothers famous applepie. In that case, her recipe is the best! Everyone who ever tasted it, applauded its taste, the sweetness and the fluffy crust. But after a local news reporter once wrote about your grandma and her cake and published the recipe, everyone in the town started baking it. And other people made adjustments to their taste and their liking. And nowadays there is a version that has pears in it as well and there is an adaptation from a pie to a tart. People enjoy it so much and put the apples of the region to such good use. Now you come along and say ''I hate the apple tart'' and people discuss that statement and you end up defending your opinion with the reasoning ''that it is not your grandmas original apple pie.'' Its 100% okay if you prefer the tart over the pie. But dont go arount talking shit about people because they like tarts or pears or otherwise disagree with you . And for all its worth, ask your grandmother how she thinks about this.
I just beat Anatoly's Story mode as a Loner. "Living Legends" was ok, even though it's just a rerun of Shadow over Chernobyl with nothing new to justify it's existence. The SIn storyline just felt lazy with you having to go back and fourth in Limansk three times! The boss fight was just an op Sin guy within the Chernobyl Plant. UNISIG gave no real direction other then the radio comms you get, and even then it was just killing UNISIG around Jupiter, just to have a anticlimactic showdown at Pripyat with like..5 guys? I also did UNISIG's story mode which has you basically doing everything in Living Legends which is to raid every lab, take random documents (assuming they didn't spawn or bugged out, which it did MANY times in this playthrough with 0 addons!) just to end up back in Pripyat to kill Strelok..Then you finish. Aside from only crashing once in this mod, it's way too annoying with all it's maintenance mechanics and even the binoculars and enemy target finder on sniper rifles were disabled for "immersion". Very sub par for one of the supposed "best polished stalker mods" out there.
1000% agree and that was kind of my point with this video. There are so many better mods out there. For freeplay I recommend Team Lite or IWP, for story I say True Stalker.
Only reason Anomaly is popular is because a few big youtubers picked it up.
I honestly don't get how this video is supposed to be "ragebait" as the folks say in the comments, the points you made clearly emphasizes the issues that me and my friends who have been long-time STALKER fans have with Anomaly: We don't have problems with Anomaly existing, we play it now and then, but we absolutely despise how it warped STALKER's unique identity into discount Tarkov: Roadside Picnic Wannabe Edition.
Last time I introduced my cousin who's a diehard GAMMA fanboy into trying out the trilogy he is out-right appalled that the originals are nothing like his favorite mod. That sentiment is so commonly shared and parroted that newcomers just assume STALKER to be this realistic tacticool Slavic extraction/survival experience and completely disregard it's roots. I also hate how that also puts a lot of weight on the development of STALKER 2 because I bet your ass they're going to be so sad that the game won't feature a decked out M4A1 with all the lasers and flashlight gizmos and artificial difficulty bumped up to 9000 so they can LARP as their USEC PMC in Chernobyl.
Again, I have no issues with Anomaly being a thing, but boy do I disagree when people put Anomaly and it's modpacks on a pedestal and call it the definite STALKER experience, because that's plain bullshit.
Wow, even the Anomaly players here are confused by themselves, lololol
4:30 bro never played clear sky i guess
Wrong.
@@BrokenCircle1 in my opinion the stamina penalty in clear sky was wayy more exhausting than in anomaly
I really like the soc freeplay mod because it’s a mostly vanilla mod, but it feels new
What SoC freeplay mod? What's it called?
@@BrokenCircle1 I found it when I was browsing stalker mods in mod.db, set it for shadow of Chernobyl and look up freeplay
If I can’t spend 7k on this game then it sucks.
Hehehehehehe