There are lots of survival games, but there are also lots of games which could be survival games with the right mods installed. Over the course of Survival Week we’ll highlight a few of those games and i) write a diary of our experience playing with it ii) explain how to do it yourself.
Evil is nothing if not thorough. Usually I prefer to hone my experience with a series of small mods – other entries in this week-long series will do just that – but no combo comes close to the scope of the most twisted survival retool yet hatched: MISERY.
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STALKER: Call of Pripyat is fun but muddled. As with all open-world epics it attempts to be a bit of everything – survival trappings exist but seem afraid of offending. To starve to death in Pripyat you need to put in the hours, stoutly ignoring flashing warnings and stacks of food until you drop dead of acute stupidity.
No more! MISERY gives you the irradiated hellscape you always dreamed of. Food is scarce, and tooltips report nutritional content in kcal. In addition to daily activities, anything which involves your metabolism (medicine, for instance) whittles away at your stamina regen, regen soft-capped at 33% of the norm.
Thirst is now a factor, as is sleep cycle. Power naps aren’t enough to stay alert; in the Zone you’ll need regular rest to remain on form. Don’t say MISERY doesn’t spoil us though – you come equipped with a free sleeping bag! Bear in mind that ‘sleeping rough’ and ‘human burrito’ are pretty much interchangeable.
How does it change the world?
Chernobyl is not the place to do your Duke of Edinburgh’s award. The environment is now incorrigibly hostile. The Zone’s Anomalies rock greater radii and eat flesh with gusto. These radioactive hotspots don’t feature in the tourist brochure.
Anything that moves, shoots or oozes is better equipped for combat. AI is sharper and more willing to cut you, and there are further changes which outdo your everyday evil: bloodsuckers and cat mutants.
Bloodsuckers are the base game’s betentacled stealth predators. You hear heavy breathing, you back the hell away. Except now they’re silent until they spring for your face with a scream. And there are frickin’ dozens of them. Bring your twitch reactions.
You think cats can be dicks? Imagine cat mutants. These are unique to MISERY, designed to keep you on edge while trekking. The bushes which obscure you from carnivores may also contain a feline who prefers his own company. It’s like a pick ‘n’ mix in which every fifth jelly bean is a really angry cat.
MISERY isn’t without mercy, and stealth has been reworked to compensate for the wildlife’s murderous tendencies. The emphasis is on careful movement and planning, not playing radioactive Rambo. It makes for a more tense time in the wasteland, shoving STALKER close to the border with survival horror.
We’d be raptured for real before I finished picking through this preposterous mod. If MISERY’s filthy sadism has caught your interest, its homepage gives the unabridged changes.
Call of Pripyat is £13 on Steam and a fiver on Amazon. MISERY transforms it into a misanthropic survival title better than many built for the purpose. Any fan of clinging to life by the fingernails ought to experience STALKER’s mutant strain.
Do I need anything special?
MISERY requires a clean Call of Pripyat installation. If you have history with the game, back up your saves. For Steam purchasers, they’re found here by default: C:Program Files (x86)SteamsteamappscommonStalker Call of Pripyat_appdata_savedgames
Clear all trace of STALKER from your drive, and install it afresh.
How do I set it up?
MISERY 2.1.1 is the latest iteration. Download it either from the official site or via ModDB . I prefer the second method – you’ll need an account, but the download will get done before the decade’s out.
If you can work a PC, you can install MISERY with ease. If you can’t work a PC, that raises awkward questions about RPS’ readership.
Extract the files you downloaded and run the .exe as an administrator. You’ll need to consider the experience you’re after, and the rig at your disposal. Call of Pripyat dates back to 2010, but MISERY can push any PC to its limits when prompted. Here are the key choices and my personal preferences:
USS Specialization
MISERY brings three classes of soldier to STALKER. Recon is a close-range fighter, Assaulter takes the middle ground, and the Sniper is in the next county. It’s worth reading up on their finer points, but your decision can be switched via the main menu.
I picked Sniper, because I am camping scum.
Field of View
Increase. Increase! Playing on default is a powerful emetic. For 16:9 monitors, the modders recommend an FOV of 83. I’ve found this agreeable. Ninety produces clipping issues.
Switch Distance
This setting can claim the soul of your processor. It’s the distance at which AI is fully simulated; the higher the number, the more alive the world will be and the more steam will issue from your rig. I decided that my i5-3570 and GTX 780 Ti warranted the ‘enhanced’ setting. So far no screaming circuit boards.
Difficulty
Rookie or MISERY. Do the right thing.
Dark Mode
For the daft. Why wait to be parboiled by Anomalies when the sun does it just as good? In Dark Mode, daytime play is lethal. I’m both pleased and surprised to report self-loathing below the threshold necessary to install this variant.
Last Words
To keep MISERY smiling, don’t launch it via Steam. Create a shortcut direct to the .exe and flag it to run as an admin each time.
Now to finish things off. Run the game, navigate to the options and then controls. Unbind quicksave. You heard me! Do it. What good is survival if you’ve got nothing to live for?
You can read more Survival Week articles over here.
It’s been nearly a decade since the launch of STALKER: Call of Pripyat, the last of Ukrainian studio GSC Game World’s trilogy of bleak and atmospheric open-world survival shooters. It is memorable for being set in a fictionalised and incredibly haunted vision of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, which is not only irradiated but overrun with reality-warping anomalies and mutant monsters.
The series puts you in the shoes of freelancing mercenaries – the titular STALKERs – wandering this horrific environment in search of fame, glory, or perhaps just a big payout.
STALKER has developed a strong modding scene with an appropriately devil-may-care attitude regarding the reuse of each other’s work, and even the legal status of the games themselves. It would be foolish to try to summarise even half of the mods produced, so instead, let’s take a look at the three titanic projects that define the STALKER mod scene as it stands today, each one built on a foundation of dozens of smaller projects and two standalone releases.
This should help tide you over to 2021, the year GSC Game World estimates for Stalker 2’s release date. So, here we present, in order of their accessibility to newcomers, the Big Three:
STALKER: Lost Alpha: Developer’s Cut
By Dezowave (ModDB page)
The original STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl was a bit of a mess. The result of years of protracted development hell, it was buggy at launch, and had swathes of planned content left on the cutting room floor. Lost Alpha is a community passion project that picks up the pieces. It is the result of poring over details from leaked test builds of the game, design documents, and early magazine previews, from which the fan team then assembled their own version of the game. This is the game STALKER could have been.
More punishment? Here are the best survival games on PC
Despite retelling the story of the original game, albeit with a few more cutscenes and quests to improve coherence, Lost Alpha introduces a slew of new features. The majority come from later games in the series – Call of Pripyat’s weapon upgrade system, for example – but many are entirely new. The most liberating is the ability to purchase and maintain vehicles to drive around the greatly expanded world map, while the larger environments allow more room for the AI factions to live and breathe, lending the Zone a new and unpredictable edge.
Lost Alpha also tries to increase immersion through basic survival simulation aspects. Food, water and sleep are important, although not as demanding or frustrating as they initially sound. Inventory management is a little more complex too, with your backpack and combat-accessible toolbelt (make sure you put your bullets in there) becoming separate panels.
The end result is both nostalgic and exciting for what it adds, while also becoming more accessible for newcomers – an aspect underscored by the inclusion of a slickly-produced PDF manual. Lost Alpha is a visual treat so long as you’ve got a PC capable of running it. Built on a much later release of the original’s X-Ray engine, you’ll need a beast of a rig to dial the game up to its higher settings, but it is scaleable enough as to run decently on just about any recent gaming PC. That said, an SSD helps mitigate some long load times enormously regardless of your machine.
STALKER: Call of Chernobyl
By Team Epic (ModDB page) What benefits oragnizations gets from ms excel to one.
Call of Chernobyl is the most straightforward of the big three STALKER mods. As far as game mechanics go, it is as plain as they come, and no more advanced in the graphics department than Call of Pripyat. But that is not a mark against it given that the main appeal of this mod is found elsewhere: CoC is a huge, non-linear sandbox. It is an ideal next step for players who have completed at least one game in the trilogy and now want to explore.
Call of Chernobyl features a huge non-linear world consisting of every map from all three original games, plus several all-new environments. While there is an optional Story Mode offering some direction, it is easily eschewed in favour of more free-form play. Pick a character from any faction, complete missions, explore, and scavenge. It is the core elements of STALKER without any of the fluff, and lets the AI factions – human, monster, and animal alike – do their thing unrestricted, capturing locations, getting into fights, and generally making the world feel alive.
Call of Chernobyl features a few alternative play modes, including a zombie survival scenario, but the best of them is absolutely Azazel mode. It is part roguelike and part quantum leap, in which dying immediately transplants you into the body of your nearest squadmate – or a random NPC if you haven’t picked up any friends.
A huge, non-linear world
It is not uncommon to find yourself on the opposite side of a battle after death, or even in the shoes of the man who just killed you. Appxmanifest xml windows 10. Dying in games is very rarely this exciting: one untimely death might lead into a dangerous (and potentially ironically lethal) quest to find your previous loot-laden corpse.
Rather pleasingly, Call of Chernobyl also has a burgeoning mod scene of its own, with add-ons ranging from weapon packs to AI overhauls, and quite a few rebalances. You are free to tweak, tinker, and tune until you get the STALKER sandbox you are happiest with.
MISERY
By Misery Development Ltd (ModDB page)
Billed as a ‘full-concept modification’, Misery lives up to its name. Picture it as a gruelling depiction of a life scavenging for money, ammunition, and meaning in a hellish wasteland that chews up and spits out human spirit. Get used to seeing the world through the grimy, damp visor of your helmet, with only the barest hints of a HUD to orient you in the world and help you manage the minutiae of daily life in the Zone.
Misery is a gorgeous-looking mod
As depressing and bleak as Misery is, it is an often gorgeous-looking mod, especially in terms of texture detail and lighting. This comes at the cost of higher detail settings absolutely trashing even high-end gaming PCs – beyond even Lost Alpha’s efforts. But at least you can watch the developers’ live-action intro video before your rig crashes. The short further drives home the desperate, lonely atmosphere of Misery, instilling a sense that the devs have suffered to create this art, and want you to suffer with them.
The STALKER games were never easy, but Misery is positively cruel. For less masochistic players, the mod does offer reduced difficulty with ‘Rookie’ mode, which you can choose during installation. Lower AI weapon accuracy, reduced damage taken, and a slightly less brutal economy does drastically raise your survivability, but only to the point of it taking two or three solid bursts of gunfire to kill you instead of just one.
To enjoy Misery you must immerse yourself totally in the harrowing situation, both in and out of combat. Long-term survival requires you to strip old weapons for parts and use precious glue and fabric to maintain your own equipment. There are a thousand fiddly pieces added here and an absurd number of new items to use or sell. It is intense and demanding, but given that it is currently ranked as the single most popular mod on ModDB, there is clearly a market for this bleak survivalist simulation.
Stalker Call Of Chernobyl Vs Misery
The Misery team’s ambitions don’t end there, either – with the release of version 2.2, they now plan on officially porting their mod to support Call of Chernobyl, in all its free, standalone enormity, effectively creating a sprawling gestalt hybrid. A true standalone sandbox simulation of life in one of the worst places on Earth imaginable. If nothing else, Azazel mode will help the bitter pill of sudden death go down a little easier.
Call Of Misery Install
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