Should You Play S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s Strongest Mod?

Calls him Sidorovich anyway

Intro 0:00
Major Changes 2:30
Living Legend 34:39
GAMMA 50:02

[ИльяВалуев-яж]

As a guy who beat GAMMA's invictus mode (a.k.a ironman mode or 2-life run), I'd say it's not that bad, took me just about 135 attempts, some involving 50hrs+ of progress lost. No, i don't need psychological help. I think.

[torimaritime]

5:27 - Basically, that's your radiation resistance. If you were irradiated, it would flash the nuclear icon, white means minor, yellow being medium, and red meaning you should stop standing next to the nuclear reactor.

[subrezon]

To anybody thinking about playing Anomaly - take your time to look through the settings, there is a lot of quality of life stuff disabled by default, including: fast travel to visited locations or to manually placed backpack stashes (use with care, it will let you teleport even to locations where enemies have respawned), vanilla minimap in the corner (for people who don't know every location by heart), vanilla fullscreen PDA (for people who use it a lot to remember where to go and what to do), option to skip the animation of looting mutants (which gets old & annoying somewhere around mutant #5).

Also, treat the "progression difficulty" less as a difficulty option and more of a flavor option. While higher difficulties are objectively more difficult due to less loot, higher prices and lower quest rewards, the easy difficulty allows you to more or less buy whatever equipment you want, try out lots of weapons & armors, not pay as much attention to the repair & upgrade system, and overall have a more dynamic & faster paced experience. This option is much better for multiple playthroughs, or shorter play sessions, or if you generally don't have a lot of time to play, offering the best time/enjoyment ratio.

The high progression difficulty basically requires you to engage with the maintenance & upgrade systems due to technicians being prohibitively expensive, craft as much equipment yourself as possible, almost never buy weapons & armor and repair looted ones instead. It slows the game down a lot, severely restricts where you can go (especially early on), but also creates this very engaging dynamic of "what are the strongest enemies I can realistically whack with my current equipment?", where you start off hunting weak mutants & bandits with your shitty starting gear, eventually loot & repair a pump shotgun and a nice pistol or maybe even a basic rifle, gear up to hunting stronger mutants & military stalkers, maybe some mercenaries here and there, repair your first armored suit & assault rifle, then start poking around mid-late game areas to fight some strong mutants & Monolith, eventually waging systematic extermination of entire Monolith-controlled locations to hunt for specific weapons & gear. The progression is very slow, but very engaging. It's very exciting to find a cool weapon in an absolutely destroyed state, fully repair & upgrade it, you start feeling very attached to those guns & armors. Very cool experience, if you are into this sort of thing, and have the time & patience.

[TheDarkkilla]

Ah yes, the Red Forest.

Where a simple package delivery turned to a massive gunfight with nearly every available Merc and Monolith soldier in that entire arena with monsters coming in third party style and making a mess of things.

I lost more money doing the job and getting the pay than what it was worth and set me back a good bit on armor repair and meds.

My guy was more medication filled as the average human body is in water.

[Turntapp]

28:45 It's good to note that in the gameplay settings there is a fully fleshed out fast travel system, its just disabled by default.

[thatsplinter]

8:05 You can return your PDA to it's previous position with the shift key! When I figured this out, it made so many things a lot easier.

[yono]

The entire point of GAMMMA is to slow down the game and make every bit of progression feel like a great triumph, combine that with ironman mode and you've got one of the best hardcore survival experiences playable

[butterphliz]

the crafting is only overwhelming at first because of how many items there are but it quickly becomes easy within a playthrough

[waltonkromer]

Im not purist for one side or the other but I definitely see where people are coming from when they say how anomaly/gamma deviates from the traditional STALKER feel and I tend to agree more so on Gamma given I feel its just a little over bloated in terms of the mechanics, weapons, systems, and some of the devs decisions it introduces, but both experiences have their fans and anyones within their right to enjoy STALKER however they wish. Personally prefer base anomaly given how modular it can be and I can just pick and choose what I want to install, as I like some of the more survival oriented mods that I feel deepen some of the mechanics already present in STALKER but appreciate how much more limited it is in terms of weapons and gear as I feel it fits better with the authenticity of the setting and the OG games.

[mentosvagabond]

10:25 You can hold F (the use button) to highlight item in the ground so you can find your gun easier.
I notice that newbie to anomaly never knew of the repair system and alway has to grind money for repairing their armor and weapon endlessly.

[kingbandoalways]

Thanks! I'm going through a stressful situation lately and your speech pattern and comedy is just making my day alot better thank you ! This is a great video.

[davidiobrando]

I've grown to absolutely love the weapon/armor repair system in GAMMA.

At first, I didn't have a single clue what to do, I really hated that I found a sick ass gun, but simply couldn't use it. So, after hours upon hours of research and hundreds of hours of time played, I love it.

It is really intricate and not at all beginner friendly, but the feeling of finding a RD-9x39 and a SVDS, stowing them away, finding Expert tools, crafting an Advanced weapong repair kit, finding the necessary weapong parts, repairing those parts and finally assembling a truly deadly weapon set-up is beyond rewarding.

[thrustybagladeur]

GAMMA is hella fun man. The crafting system is for sure a lot at first, basically requiring the player to spend at least an hour or 2 just learning it. But once you do, the game and progression makes sense and it's fairly balanced. Most of the earlygame you will have shitty old weapons, usually the starting SKS until you can get a decent shotgun or sniper. Then you bump up armor, or maybe get an AK. It really makes you feel like ur just another STALKER in the zone, trying to get by.

[romantolstykh]

You do a great job with these videos. Natural and relatable

[grzyb]

The pda sounds are some of the best sounds ever and can fit into any survival fps game imo, even dayz or maybe even unturned

[nicholas]

DONT WORRY SIR, IM FROM S.T.A.L.K.E.R. G A M M A

[christopherson]

Anomoly being my first feel of stalker (I've seen and know about the og games) im loving it. playing on the lowest difficulty still makes the game tough, and that's what i love about it.
there's the repair system and it feels great. scrapping guns for parts, using those parts to fix up your gun, or maintaining it is super rewarding. crafting ammo, devices, and other stuff is there too, its all there. its nice to have an option to use money rather sparingly but it draws away from learning a new mechanic that Anomoly offers. thats why alot of people complain about GAMMA.

now i understand these arent "true STALKER experiences" but they are to me. At the end of the day, play however you want. enjoy games however you want.
they are all valid.

[Pebbleguy]

2:00 I'm gonna be honest, the "too tactical" thing is just a nitpick.

The heart of the problem is the fact that Anomaly & its modpacks has started to literally OVERSHADOW the original trilogy.
Also there are some Anomaly/GAMMA/EFP fans that have a habit of just disrespecting the original trilogy by acting like it doesn't exist or is so terrible its worth skipping.

Anomaly/GAMMA/'EFP are all good mods but their design philosophies are totally different beasts from GSC's design philosophy.

GSC focused on creating a story driven game with simple mechanics for the trilogy.

Anomaly devs and its modpack devs focused on creating a survival sandbox with more complexity to the vanilla mechanics and additional mechanics not present in the trilogy.

[Blap]

A new mod just dropped, "True Stalker".
It is insanely good. Story Focused, multiple protagonists, and perfect gameplay.

[Mastermind]

quick tip bud... if you hold down 'F' you'll get name pop-ups for any items near the direction you're facing, making gathering items from the ground MASSIVELY easier, quicker and more efficient (works for artifacts as well so long as they're on the ground and not in stash, storage or corpse), however it also means that if there's A TON of items stacked together, you might end up picking them all at once

Edit: DUDE!! :D i can't believe how hard i laughed at the part with the scared dog while you're crossing Limansk at 22:15 :D :D it just fit the emotional pain perfectly with the area :D