STALKER: GAMMA
kinda neat for crafting soup slop. the simulationism's as fussy and overdesigned and ridiculous as you'd expect from a modpack for a conversion based on a long line of other conversions, but there's something interesting here even if (like me) you can't find yourself getting excited over lubes, files, repair kits, trigger swaps, and all that gun gooner /k/hole shit
you make a character, choose a faction, and roam the tarkovian void of the GrokZone where everyone's strapped with God's Favourite Full Auto until it's your turn to whip it out and it suddenly has 3% durability. you go out on quests, come back with broken loot, hope to one day find the right parts to fix the loot, then go find more broken loot. crucially, since no one would ever engage with this by choice, vendors don't sell guns or clothing due to [lore bullshit]. OG-7V warheads are fine, however
in a weird way its inconveniences and elaborate pedantry cycle back around to feeling like an unusual kind of pandering: jerk off instructions for firearm perverts where selective realism morphs into rubbery cartoon unreality. it's evident as soon as you see that bolts are limited use consumables while non-mutant NPCs can idle inside anomalies with impunity that very little of the ostensible grounding is aimed toward verisimilitude but rather at creating a kind of delirious survival fantasy. an uncanny realm where gun repair's as byzantine as it gets, but the tasks themselves land somewhere between arcade and absurd. where you're expected to understand the order of operations required to mend any given ailment, but you're frequently asked to kill the same people in the same house in the same map by the same guy for the same payout
it all kinda reminds me of something like path of exile where its true nature is the space in between what you might mistake as the core verbs. while the gulf isn't anywhere near as staggering as the distinction between effort put forth in making an ARPG build (99%) vs effort put forth in performing that build (1%) it operates under a similar premise where the reward for navigating the more granular build layer is the increasing ease and deprioritization of the action layer, even using near-identical itemization patterns in order to reinforce and prolong the optimization process
to its credit the payoff that comes about thru a combination of systemic mastery and good clean RNG is potent. trimming down loadouts to the most lithe and streamlined combinations of items, learning what's worth pilfering, and finally repairing that one rifle you found hours ago is all very rewarding, and the gambles you're liable to make in order to flip the odds can result in some of stalker's most dramatically emergent scenarios. it's all in service to loot at the end of the day, but it doesn't make limping into hostile territory half asleep and half dead to stow away from an emission in secret any less compelling. when i'm all woozed up on yadulin and a bloodsucker nearly kills me only to get fried by a burner at the last possible second that's the kinda Good Shit that temporarily supersedes the skinner box
the problem's that there just aren't enough of those moments to counterbalance the grind longterm. for all the improvements to combat AI, a-life, animations, weather, emissions, anomalies, artifacts, hit effects, campfires, "tactical fonts", barbed wire shadows, and so on, the game still runs ragged by the midpoint. once the initial discovery process wears off you're looking down the barrel at dozens of hours of mmo quests for the sake of gear you don't really need or an MSQ that isn't really worth engaging with. banking everything on progression makes sense given anomaly's inherent freeroam potential, but it leaves little room for the world to exist as anything more than half temp agency and half casino once you've successfully survived and made it north
the silver lining's that despite some heavy dependencies this is a true modular setup and almost everything here can be altered or outright removed if it's not to your taste. odds are there's a configuration that maintains much of what i like while carving off much of the bloat, and maybe one day i'll bother to figure out what that is. for now tho, i'm alright