I think OLR is based around circa build 1935, but it’s using stuff from all the early builds and also incorporating material from the design documents heavily.

Anyway, as long as older versions are available it’s fine. At least they aren’t trying to justify those new changes as “lore accurate” and push them on everyone like a certain Skyrim modder who shall not be named, right? Please say yes.

I’m not sure about this honestly as a lot of the community is in russian, but they have the older version up at least so that’s a good sign.

I heard the A-life implementation in 3.0 is very impressive, so there’s that. But yeah it’s kind of unavoidable with projects like this. Same thing goes for the Unofficial Patch of VtM: Bloodlines. Eventually the fan group dev team starts running low on material to restore but want to keep working and so start extrapolating single lines of unimplemented code references into full fledged quests and taking throwaway sentences from design documents and turning them into wholesale mechanics and stuff like that.

You’re welcome, always happy to talk STALKER! If you want to try OLR, make sure you grab the 2.5 version as they apparently started inserting more liberal/fanfictiony changes in version 3+. You can download it here (don’t worry, the installer lets you chose English as language).

CPU has been a bottleneck for CoC/Anomaly forever since Xray was originally made in that time when people thought super fast single core processing was the future. So GSC optimised it for that idea. Instead it turned out clock speed has pretty much flatlined since then and multithreading was the future. Plus it doesn’t help that all the offline simulation of what the world is doing in the background offsceen is incredibly CPU heavy.

STALKER modding is absolutely crazy, not quite as large as Skyrim but also harder to quantify since in addition to the by-now massive Anomaly scene there is also a massive scene that’s still spread out over other older offshoots, particularly in eastern Europe. They’re very big on modding and remaking the original trilogy there (STALKER is huge there in general). Hell, I actually have Oblivion Lost Remake installed and ready to go, which is a fan-recreation of the original vision of Shadow or Chernobyl, recreated from design documents and early dev builds that have been leaked. GSC famously had to cut down their vision massively to get the game out the door and OLR 2.5 has been described by many as the closest thing we’re ever going to get to what they actually wanted to make (Oblivion Lost was the original title before it became SoC).

Yep, Anomaly is built on the 64-bit Xray-Monolith engine, which is derived from GSC open sourcing the X-ray Engine back in the day. Though a lot of work has been done on it over the years at this point. Hell, there are two recent further engine forks being worked on right now that will hopefully be merged into main one day: one implementing dual-render PiP scopes in a very smart way with negligible performance loss and one implementing rudimentary multithreading that can give particularly weaker systems a huge performance boost.

The engine guys working on Anomaly are wizards. Those and the guys making custom shaders. The game looks absolutely fantastic these days, almost as good as STALKER 2 - and that is UE5.

Best way to think of Anomaly is as the successor to Call of Chernobyl. It’s really an incredibly impressive project. As I’m sure you know from your time modding the landscape used to be a complete clusterfuck with CoC and Misery and hundreds of forks and submods and what have you. Anomaly basically collected and unified everything into a single stable common platform to work from.

At this point the modding scene of STALKER is probably on the level of non-Skyrim Bethesda games and there are not only thousands of mods but dozens of high quality precompiled modpacks that let you plug-and-play modlists with hundreds of mods without issue. Or you can be a deranged nutter like me and setup your own modpack.

If you used to play close to vanilla CoC back in the day you’ll be amazed what the community have been able to wring out of this old ass engine.

This is far from my first time in Anomaly, so I think that’s a reason my posts have been a bit briefer than my usual rambling. But I can try to be a bit more elaborate going forward. What to do in Anomaly is so heavily dependent on what modpack (or custom modlist) you’re running though. They can play out completely differently and sometimes have entirely different approaches. Like, playing GAMMA and playing EFP are entirely different animals.

How much have you played before?

Still dividing my time between trudging through the Chernobyl exclusion zone in STALKER: Anomaly and perusing scripts and configs to resolve conflicts and crashes as I either discover them or provoke them by continuing to either tweak existing mods on my list or add more to the pile.

I get like this frequently with modding, I don’t know if it’s a latent perfectionist streak or just your garden variety hyperfixation but I tend to lose myself in the desire to make everything just right and get stuck on that over actually playing. But I think I’m having fun with it as I’m hacking my way through making compatibility patches so maybe it doesn’t matter?

It would be fun to actually finish the Mercenary storyline though. I haven’t even progress past the starting areas of Cordon/Meadow/Garbage yet…

Remedy made some GTA slop?

Even better, Remedy themselves are! Rockstar are publishing it though as they own the rights to the IP. I’m super curious about how they’ll turn out, especially with James McCaffrey’s passing.

It was literally the only way Alan Wake 2 was getting made, no other publisher would finance the project after Alan Wake 1 sold poorly and Sam Lake/Remedy really wanted to make it.

Unbelievable game for its age, it looks bonkers good for a 2005 release with some really impressive particle effects and particularly distortion effects. Shockwaves from explosions and slow motion bullet traces look phenomenal still and really smooth, clean and sharp.

Gunplay is great and holds its own against most modern releases, with literally every weapon barring the oddly anemic assault rifle feeling amazing to use. The combination of extremely intentional level design and the insane-for-its-time AI makes every fight fun and different.

If you haven’t played it yet it’s regularly sold on GOG for like a dollar and I consider it a must-play. Make sure to grab the Echo Patch and dont forget to play the Extraction Point expansion too, which is included in the GOG edition and is phenomenal - perhaps even better than the base game.

I really loved FFTA. Is it your first time playing it?

STALKER: Anomaly. Finally finished up my modlist, landed on a grand total of about 430, so now it’s time to playtest and see if it actually works without crashing and feels good and balanced to play. Just started a Mercenary playthrough yesterday and so far so good. Managed to clear out the bandits at the vehicle station in Cordon as is custom but the real test will be the first handful of missions over in Meadow. I’ve been wanting to do a Merc playthrough for a while but the start is rough in this modlist setup as you can’t get Fanatic as a free companion and you don’t get to start with a shotgun. At least starting off as neutral with the loners means you can start out in Cordon. It’s going to be rough until I get a working gas mask, dosimeter, detector and repair the first shotgun I find.

All in all though it feels great to be back in the Zone.

Shame it’s just the original Splinter Cell. I’ve been wanting Chaos Theory on GOG for years. Also would love an actual PC port of the OG Xbox version of Double Agent, but I know that’s dreamland copium. It’s an awesome game and easily the better version but trapped in the Xbox ecosystem.

Putting my final touches into my STALKER: Anomaly modlist and creating the last couple of compatibility patches. I think I’ll end up at 400 mods which is a nice round number. Hope I’ll get to start my playthrough this weekend.

Will also try to get through another chapter of Alan Wake 2, I was on a replay of it when I got derailed but I do want to finish it and finally start the DLCs.

Had this on my watch list for a long time and every new video it keeps looking better. I’m still of two minds about the black-and-white - I get the idea and it works for the theme but I can’t decide if it’s worth it or if I miss the detail color would add. But at the same time maybe it would make it too bright and cheerful for the setting and story?

Still looks super cool and I’m looking forward to playing it.

Anytime! One thing I appreciate in Jade Empire is that they attempted to do something different with the good/evil dichotomy. It doesn’t always come off properly and it’s often constrained by the nature of the game (you can’t really opt out of the main quest for example) but I appreciate the attempt. Instead of just good/evil they try to make it a “Good Samaritan versus Hardcore Darwinian” dilemma based on opposing philosophies that aren’t necessarily good or evil.

I just hope someone takes Nintendo to court over that latest bogus patent so it can get thrown out.

If you ever decide it’s time to jump on New Vegas, the Viva New Vegas modlist has Wabbajack support now I believe. So you should be able to install the most stable and baseline recommended modlist with just a couple of clicks.

Caveat is I have not played NG2 on Master Ninja because I already hate myself enough, I don’t need more misery . Apart from some single chapter challenge stuff I guess. But I have never felt like pulling off UTs was significantly challenging compared to relying on combos and OTs. You’re moving around so much anyway that an on-landing UT is often easy to pull off as long as you have 2 essences in the air.

What I find most fun in NG2 combat is using all the combos from the move list of the various weapons, and using OTs strategically for i-frames. But UT spam just seems so much more efficient and easy.

Maybe Master Ninja is significantly different, I don’t know.

Oh there’s more than just on DeviantArt, fan games like Pokémon Uranium are full of fakemons that can rival anything Nintendo is putting out.

I’m sure it will happen at some point as I’ve mentally had it on my to-do list for quite some time. But… it might take a year or two. My backlog is extensive.

Thanks, I’ll definitely save this for some day in the future!

I also tend to enjoy the process of setting up your own custom modlist, but after being deep in that rabbit hole before with Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout: New Vegas, Baldur’s Gate 2 and STALKER (all 4 games + Anomaly) I don’t know if I have it in me to learn the ins and outs of another mod landscape 😅

Mapocolops is one of the best Let’s Players out there. Always engages with the story and tries to pay attention, likes reading everything and getting immersed, very genuine while still managing to be very entertaining in an authentic way instead of contrived and faked. Also regularly plays retro games, which is very refreshing and sets him apart a bit.

Do you have any large and complete modpacks to recommend? I don’t know that I have it in me to learn the lay of the land from scratch.

Also, have you used the Mantella mod any? It’s actually a similar mod that got me back into STALKER Anomaly. Really fun immersive use of AI for roleplaying and forming attachment to your companions.

This year in particular has been absolutely insane. I’ve played more releases the same year they launched this year than any in recent memory and still feel like I’ve missed out.

UTs were perfectly balanced in NGB in my opinion. You need a perfect equilibrium between the power/damage of the move, the amount of safety it gives you (i-frames), the charge time it requires and the enemy count (essence generation). NGB hit all of these were UTs were a powerful tool that felt earned whenever you pulled them off and never too powerful.

In NG2 you get an eternity of i-frames, insane tracking that often has you teleporting around the room between enemies (like Tonfas) and a delimb system that means it’s easier for UTs to feed themselves. Which is exacerbated by the design philosophy being “kill hordes of enemies quickly” without tweaking the 2-essence-cost of a full charge UT and even reducing the basic charge time.

I will begin by pushing my personal agenda: Jade Empire is a super underrated older Bioware game and I think could fit your description. While you do amass a large set of followers over the course of the story, they mainly reside at camp. While out and adventuring you’re only ever bringing with you one at a time: exactly the sidekick you’re looking for!

If you want to stay isometric I hold Baldur’s Gate 2 very highly as far as retro RPGs go. You do have a party of six there however. You only have 3 companions for the first few hours though, so at least you get eased into it. And you could just choose to not have a full party if you want. Will make the game a bit harder, mind.

Fallout 1&2 are also retro RPGs and pretty much just better than Arcanum in every way. Not really a party focused experience, you can have companions but they’re more like the sidekicks you mentioned.

Neverwinter Nights 2 just recently got an enhanced edition and that’s also a smaller party experience. The main campaign is decent, but the expansion Mask of the Betrayer is often brought up as one of the best CRPG stories of all time and heralded for its stellar writing.

They have been for a long time now. They’re only going to keep getting worse until someone or something stops them, and I can’t see what that would be.

Better recommendations for… what? For Arcanum or for RPGs in general? 😄Multiverse Edition was pretty good as far as Arcanum goes and I’m glad to have played it, but there are certainly better CRPGs out there.

If they would have finished and polished NG2 then it could have been the best action game of all time, for sure. It still delivers that “playable cocaine” feeling that’s very unique, and Chapter 1 of NG2 is probably the best level in the whole franchise and one of the best action game levels of all time.

The problem is all the absolute nonsense in the game, and the abundance of pretty much garbage levels. I think like half the levels in the game are outright bad. Also stuff like how completely broken UTs are. It’s obvious the game wasn’t fully playtested and balanced, and so the super powered UTs were slapped on as a bandaid. But they’re not really fun to use and end result is a mechanic that you at best feel forced to resort to just to get through levels, but most of the time try to actively avoid using in order to actually have fun.

I love both games. I think NGB is a better game, but NG2 has higher highs. The combat in NG2 is more viscerally satisfying and fun to play around with, but the game is an unfinished, untested and unbalanced mess. I still love it, and Chapter 1 of NG2 is the best Ninja Gaiden level or the whole series, but NGB feels much more complete and balanced.

Great review, as always I love your content! You mentioned a higher price point but I don’t think you mentioned the actual price anywhere in the review. Or did I miss it? I guess it’s just a quick search away.

I really need to get into modding Skyrim at some point. After playing and modding Morrowind and Oblivion heavily back in the day I just never got into it with Skyrim. I never played Skyrim much at all frankly. I was too invested in playing and modding New Vegas at the time. And then later on I found other games, and recently over the past years it’s been STALKER Anomaly filling the craving of “heavily moddable sandbox game”.

I haven’t watched it myself yet but I’ve heard a lot of good things about Mapocolops playthrough of it and I’ve watched plenty enough of his other Let’s Plays to vouch for him in general.

Ah I see. It’s included in Multiverse (plus a lot more). I can recommend it if you’re ever doing a second playthrough, I thought it was pretty good!

I have barely been playing any games at all this week. I have managed to finish a grand total of one chapter of Alan Wake 2: Final Draft I think.

Instead I’ve been spending pretty much all my time modding and fiddling with STALKER: Anomaly. Yes, I’ve relapsed. I can’t help myself. I said I shouldn’t do this anymore and should focus on finishing complete narratives instead of playing around in the Chernobyl sandbox but I just got the craving again. And tweaking your modlist until it’s perfect is just an addiction in itself - making everything work together and throwing together patches in WinMerge.

Maybe when I feel my modlist is finished and ready to play my hyperfixation will give out a bit and I can at least finish AW2.

Is Drog’s patch the Multiverse Edition? That’s what I played back in like January when I played Arcanum for the first time. Fixes a lot of things but still can’t polish the turd that is Arcanum combat sadly.

Disney probably.