

But because it was a broken mess, people have a negative opinion of it. Clear Sky is a pretty good game, IMO, and much closer to the core design ideas behind STALKER than the other games.

However, for Clear Sky you need to use this version of the Sky Reclamation Project. Shadow of Chernobyl and Clear Sky really, really need their unofficial patches, especially CS. What you should do is follow the instructions on these pages. When people are bored with a game and know it inside and out, paired with a lacklustre understanding of game design in general, things go weird really quickly. STALKER modders have this weird "out of touch with reality" problem where they think that the best way to improve STALKER is to make it obscenely unbalanced and difficult. I do not recommend using any mods that modify the gameplay until much later. I think the Steam versions sometimes have the vsync fixed applied where the GOG versions don't but I can't recall. The steam version and the GOG versions are basically the same. To reiterate if you're just wanting to play through og Stalker regular single player then something like Aurora is more suitable, otherwise I'd just recommend googling "best Stalker graphics mods" and go from there. Pair this with the Call of Chernobyl factions mod and Enhanced A-Life (enemies and friendlies move around across the entire map regardless of where you are) and it makes for a really unique experience. There's even a mode in there that when you get killed it spawns you into a random soldier's body (can be from any faction on any map) that was already roaming around before you spawned in them. You choose a faction to be a part of and can take on bounties to earn cash. It adds new weapons too.Īlso if you call Call of Pripyat and have already beaten it I highly recommend the mod Call of Chernobyl, it's basically a sandbox version of Pripyat that includes maps from og Stalker and the expansions. I like Autumn Aurora 2 personally as it has a bunch of community done bug fixes, and includes lighting and weather mods like Astmosf3ar, though it does change the base gameplay to be more difficult in terms of shooting damage (and maybe AI tweaks not sure). If you mean playable as far as does it hold up on vanilla visuals I'd say ymmv, personally vanilla Stalker is a bit too old looking with the flat lighting.
