The sun is beating the UK into sweaty submission. Flowers are blooming, there is blue where there’s usually grey, and lollypops are the staple food source. Summer has finally decided to show up and make the world brighter and sort of happier, so this weekend I closed the curtains and spent my off-time fiddling with Stalker. I decided I wanted to pretty up the original game: I wanted pitch black nights, livelier fauna, blowouts, lovely skies, and more interesting weather. Unfortunately I’d forgotten I’d already modded it, so I ended up with a broken mutant of a game. I’m reinstalling now. It wasn’t at total waste: on my hunt for the Shadow Of Chernobyl mods I discovered that the long-awaited Misery 2.0 for Call Of Pripyat is out this month. And it has a trailer.



Knowing Misery 2.0 was out there has kept me from returning to Pripyat, hence me modding the first game instead. It’s a kitchen sink mod, touching on every part of the game and using other mods when it needs to. Diverse NPCs, faction fiddles, additional economics, and a reworked UI are all in there. But I’m most interested in the world receiving an update, so the promises of tweaked atmospherics (distant weather!), and an enhanced grass distance really did make me excited. It’s one of those particularly Stalkery trailers, with sweeping landscape shots and text that’s tough to read, but with every glimpse it makes you want to reinstall.



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So naturally I just uninstalled Pripyat and wiped every mention of it from my HD. I’m not going to flub this install up. Come July 31st, I shall be ready.

And now a request: when I first visited GSC to see the original Stalker, it had a mode that let them watch the Zone without taking part in it. They even had an overview that tracked the movement of all the actors in the Zone. Was that command ever discovered? I’d imagine not, but I can only hope.