Stalker Anomaly's economy is brutal but genius

[Just_a_commenter]

As a veteran S.T.A.L.K.E.R., I appreciate covering Anomaly. c: The economy can be crushing, but at the same time, if you're smart you can thrive. AP ammo is genuinely useful and crafting is very valuable.

Playing with the GAMMA modpack makes things even better imo, but here's to hoping some people see this and enjoy some *free* fun with Anomaly!

[raphaww]

I really admire that you're so passionate about games that while you are playing or developing games you just say to yourself "Hey, that's cool, I'm going to share it so people can enjoy it too".
Keep it up, we love what you do.

[Knuckles]

>> Garbaj found a game where you can play as Garbage Hoarder
>> loot economy is genius!

[maxamillionjazzhands]

It's funny that cigs reduce radiation, because the biggest reason tobacco is so bad for you is not the nicotine, but because the plant itself is radioactive. The tobacco plant absorbs trace amounts of uranium and radon from rock layers below the soil and does not want to let the stuff go, so the radioactive tar builds up in your lungs and spit. This is why vapes are non carcinogenic (but still unhealthy for other reasons) as their nicotine is derived from specially bred tomatoes or other nicotine-containing members of the nightshade family.

[zacharyk]

One unmentioned nugget here is that players are like water, they find the easiest path. I've seen quite a few games have some depth and complexity, and then just offer people a bypass and then be surprised when no one does the harder process. Like if anomaly had cheap guns or cheap repairs all the complexity to finding the repair components, or pulling better condition components out of another gun, you wouldn't bother with any of that. Also that feeling when you do get yourself a gun at high % and keep it that way is very satisfying and it's really a shame that something like tarkov has zero equivalent.

[Jamato-sUn]

I finished the entirety of Witcher 3 only drinking water. There are like 50 types of food in it I never even tried This is SO different.

[SpecShadow]

I remember playing older version of Anomaly, when they just dropped new storylines, and had issues with finding crafting recipes. Played on Normal (progression and difficulty), did a bunch of side jobs and finished main storylines - found maybe 3? item crafting recipes manuals....

[Josh-Neo]

tbh this game looks better than most modern games

[Nipah.Auauau]

One thing I would like to see is how an economy is balanced when there are different "brackets" of purchases. Like, how do you keep the act of buying ammo meaningful when the player is buying tanks? The best example I can come up with is MGSV Phantom Pain that split its finances between money, immediately available resources from in-mission briefcases, and "delayed available" resources from shipping containers and employee assignments.

[MechMK]

Filing a damaged locking head is, ironically, one of the *worst* things you can do. The locking head is the piece, that keeps the gun from exploding. Removing material from an already compromised part will only make it even weaker.

[Fottrel]

i've played a ton of stalker anomaly and a lot of its idiosyncrasies and difficult economy mechanics had become so normalized for me that it is very interesting to see them highlighted in this way. for the past week i've become completely addicted to the anomaly modpack "GAMMA" which i think takes a lot of anomaly's disparate systems and unifies them brilliantly. it's more challenging in some ways than base anomaly but it's also all completely tweakable so you can customize how much of a challenge it presents. for instance, I don't like campfire saving so i turned it off but i'm using the mags redux mod so i actually have to worry about packing magazines and consider how many magazines i should carry with me. side note: imo mags redux actually does some amazing butterfly effect re-balancing of tons of guns because while a good rifle may have a small 30 round magazine in vanilla gamma, with mags redux you can usually just go buy higher capacity magazines which makes so many guns way more viable!
gamma's biggest change imo is how it re-emphasizes anomaly's crafting and repair systems. in gamma, traders do not sell weapons. the only way you can get guns is by finding them and repairing them yourself. the toolsets you find in anomaly are heavily gated behind zone progression, so to actually find expert tools for some of the more powerful recipes you need to find them north of army warehouses, which means you need to go shut off the brain scorcher. it makes that anomaly quest feel like PROOF that you are becoming a damn good stalker, because now you can start thinking about tier 3 NVGs and possibly even exoskeletons if you can make it past the goons in radar. also, stashes are ALWAYS empty unless they've been marked by other stalkers as quest rewards, so memorizing all their locations is nowhere near as cheaply rewarding as it is in base anomaly. it made stashes feel rewarding again instead of being sort of a memory puzzle chore you do while traveling.
once you're actually surviving, you find yourself relying on traders less and less. i basically make all my own ammo now, breaking down looted ammo and then using the materials to craft ammo for the caliber of the guns i'm actually using. i make my own medicine, occasionally stopping by doctors to pick up uncraftable base medicines. i make my own repair kits, cook my own food, and craft my own equipment. it's a euphoric feeling, being self-sufficient in such a hostile place! long excursions can become far longer if you know how to replenish your supplies in the field.
after about 20 hours of gameplay, i'm fairly comfortable with my gear and resources and i find myself feeling like gamma is actually being very generous! it heavily heavily rewards knowledge and planning in a really satisfying way. FOLKS GO PLAY GAMMA
hot tip: go hunting for the Moonlight artifact once you're getting comfortable in the midgame. getting a moonlight up to high efficiency grants *90%* psy resistance. controllercels are seething

[enriquecadlum]

While i appreciate the sense of scarcity in the game, i absolutely hate the rpg styled tiered loot system in the game because of how "loot drops" scale with your "player level", a thing that didnt really matter in o.g. Stalker games. It's why all you ever get are crap weapons that work perfectly fine in the hands of your enemies. When you loot that Sig550 off a Monolith stalker who was taking good potshots at you at a clean pace and at a reasonable distance, you pick it up and get a 25% durability gun that jams, has lost significant accuracy, cant be repaired and can't be sold, plus all the corpse has is less than a magazine worth of old ammo because your rank is low as opposed to whatever ammo the Monolith guy actually had, and whatever condition the gun was really in.

Its artificial difficulty that only applies to the player and i don't appreciate that.I love challenging games that are set up to make you think on the move and improvise when shit hits the fan, but i despise it when the same mechanics dont apply to the rest of the sandbox NPCs. The illusion of Emergent gameplay becomes just that, an illusion. You realize the game is just stacked against you in order to feel harder, and thus instead of the world dynamically interacting with everything that inhabits it, in reality its just trying to make it hard for you to breathe.

The zone cares for no Stalker, yes i know, but that should apply universally and not just the player. If a pack of bandits ambush a Duty Stalker with high level gear, said gear is looted by the bandits and said bandits were then killed by a chimera, it's the lucky day of whatever lucky Loner or Merc or whatever Stalker just so happens to stumble upon it. I want the game systems to actually converge, not just statically apply and react to me exclusively.

[OperatorMax]

As a fellow Stalker player, Im my opinion, the "ultra hardcore realistic immersive" mods like Misery, Radiophobia, Anomaly and Gamma

Are pretty much responsible for forever dividing the community between "traditionalists and progressivists"

I wanted to like Anomaly, I really do, but I just gave up, the game wasn't fun or challenging, it was just tedious and tiring (item bloat, things costing fortune after fortune, loot from enemies being 0%-1% durability, enemies touching you leads to losing your entire health, your character's breathing being more annoying than the panting in the OG trilogy, etc.)

"Why yes I'd like to play a apocalyptic survival adventure game that has been modified to be like Tarkov while also losing every bit of the original game's true identity" - statements made by the utterly deranged

Mods like these, most players these days are just Tarkov players forever blurring the line of "what is Stalker about anyways ?"
This madness has to stop, Stalker is not Tarkov and it will never be Tarkov, or some "hard but rewarding punishing experience"

We have all been played for fools
I just hope Stalker 2 retains the classic gameplay where it's not a tedious slogfest with bloated inventories and dying in 1 shot or mutant attack or bleeding every single time (which from the trailers, is promising)

[whcw]

Reading the title:
"not another overly analytical video essay"
Noticing it's from Garbaj:
"oh. His videos are brutal but genius"

[keysmith]

Was not prepared to see someone talk about Anomaly in 2023, the game is still challenging no matter the difficulty. One of the biggest money savers is maintaining your items, like stones to repair your multi tool instead of paying 5000 roubles for a new multitool on survivalist economy difficulty.

[ashtonkilburn]

Stalker anomaly: the game where you get alcohol poisoning to negate radiation poisoning.

[LuisC]

STALKER has always been THE game(s). It never fails to deliver on being awesome

[stevebutters]

Kids today and their anamoly... we played vanilla like real men! And we cried over gamebreaking bugs and shoddy mechanics like real men!

I am very happy stalker is getting wide attention now, it's always been one of those niche games I loved that I couldn't understand why it had no real love outside of the subreddit and modding community.

[gabrielmariano]

Another layer on how cool the economy is is how different factoons have merchants for different items (e.g., some areas do not have doctors or some factions solely sell warsaw pact guns and ammunition). Knowing where to sell and buy different items can save you heaps of cash, especially if you become reputable with those factions.

[mitchellwright]

An apt description of all STALKER games; “Murder hobos fighting other murder hobos, some of which are literally fucking insane, others just want shiny rocks to sell to other people, and the military is just kinda watching them from the sidelines, think Baltimore”