No problem at all, I love Anomaly and modding it (as you can tell) so I will happily talk your ear off about it if you give me half a chance to. And I’ll be happy to give further help or tips in the future if you want to, too.

Enjoy diving into the rabbit hole, I’ll keep an eye out for future weekly threads to see what you end up with!

That’s awesome, do you know if it has the DLCs included? Survival (part of the Mission Mode DLC) is my favourite part of the game for quick access mindless action.

In general NG2 is an incredibly unique game. To this day there is nothing quite like it, you will either love it or hate it - and probably both in equal measures. It was unfortunately rushed out and released in an unfinished and unbalanced state due to some internal issues at Team Ninja, and you see this particularly in the later levels and the higher difficulties. But when it hits and it’s delivering fights against groups of humanoid enemies it really delivers a feeling of “what if cocaine was playable?” that no other game matches.

Will be interested to hear your thoughts, and let me know if you want any tips. It doesn’t really play like any other action games.

Are you planning on giving Ninja Gaiden 2 a spin? You have a chance to experience the original Chapter 10 staircase fight, where there are so many enemies on screen at once the game slows down to full-on bullet time time dilation because there is too much game for the hardware to handle.

Can’t believe I’m shilling for Nintendo for the second time in like a month but this seems to be a type of fantasy Donkey Kong: Bananza could fulfill? That whole game’s selling point was fully destructible environments.

Yeah, Discord replacing forums and places like ModDB is definitely terrible. I hate it too.

For me I kind of approach modding in reverse, almost. I tend to first canvas as much as I can and put together a collection that I like, and then I will playtest and if I run into specific issues I’ll look for further mods that solve them as I go. For me it saves me time because I know right off the bat there’s going to be things I want to change, and I don’t need to play vanilla first to know that.

Also a note about that document I linked: it’s very very far from being comprehensive. It was made to save me time on the Discord because users kept asking about mods to add onto the baseline HACR pack. So I have omitted a ton of essential mods (as you could tell) simply because they were already in HACR base. But it’s something at least.

Yes well, development on official Anomaly versions is extremely slow, and so Demonized releases his modded exes on a much faster development cycle.

Yeah, the modding landscape is very messy. A lot of presumed foreknowledge, very user unfriendly and also very scattered. Nexusmods for Anomaly is largely unused, ModDB is a mess and a lot of stuff is now scattered across various Discords, sometimes with important patches and additions buried deep inside threads with absolutely zero discoverability.

I would personally recommend some weather mod, I find vanilla weathers pretty underwhelming in comparison. There are a bunch though, Melancholy Weathers is close to a 1.0 release. But I have that opinion about most things Vanilla Anomaly. It does its intended job extremely well, which is to be a stable and unified platform for modders (compared to the mess of Call of Chernobyl-based mods that preceeded it), but it’s fairly lacking without add-ons. Although I may just have been ruined at this point, I have played and modded Anomaly a lot.

Another thing I forgot was the Mod Configuration Menu. A lot of mods will also depend on that for configuration. It’s so easy to forget all these absolute bedrock foundational mods, sorry! Here is another must-have: Beef’s NVGs.

Final recommendation (for now) is Dark Signal Audio packs. These are some of the best sounds you can find for Anomaly. They work fine with the other audio mods from that sheet I linked, you can futz with the load order in MO2 to decide which should overwrite what.

Let me know if there is something else specific you’re looking for, I can go back and sift through my stuff and refresh my memory. But I think the absolute best way to get a baseline grasp of what exists out there is to download some modpack(s) and look through their mod list. Even if you decide to build from scratch yourself later rather than use something as a baseline, it will help clue you in into what mods exist.

Okay. I already knew that much, but thank you. Yeah that is the reason I only use IsThereAnyDeal.com to find sales, instead of like G2A/Kinguin.

Wait, I’m out of the loop here. What is this G2A fight? I don’t use that site because it’s greymarket and often ends up not actually supporting the developers, but would still like to know what is happening.

Enjoy! The intended experience is playing on Hard (semi-permadeath, you have limited extra lives) but I recommend playing on Normal. I started off on Hard but restarted on Normal because I still have a faint hope of actually finishing the game and I think it’s a little too difficult to pull that off on a first playthrough on Hard (and I’m not going to start over if I lose my save after 15 hours).

But keep that in mind when playing. The tension and stakes are just so much higher when you have limited extra lives. It definitely does heighten the experience.

It’s worth sitting through as “homework” for the later games, in my opinion. It has some great moments still, and the story is interesting. But yeah, a bit too much clunky combat in similar-looking forests.

I almost forgot! You may already be using them, but you’re going to need a version of the modded exes as many mods depend on them. They are already baked into the PiP engine mod if you go digging on the GAMMA Discord, but if you don’t then grab them here. Use the MT-Test version if you don’t use the PiP exes, it has more performance. (I can’t live without PiP anymore though).

Also visually Screen Space Shaders, Atmospherics and Weather Expansion are used by many. I also really like Arrival.

But there is a ton of stuff you can add, an entire Toxic Air/Gas Mask system like in Metro is available if you want and so much more. If you like having companions around the TALKER mod lets you hook up AI to get dynamic dialogue.

Making your own custom modlist is definitely the most satisfying thing, although I recommend using some kind of vanilla+ mod pack as a baseline just to save time. Last year when I was playing and modding STALKER Anomaly I used the now-defunct HACR, but it lives on spiritually as Null Point. That should be a good moddable baseline. Back then when I was hanging out in the HACR Discord I put together this document of some mods I liked that I added on top of the pack. I haven’t played or updated that document since last winter though and there’s been some new cool stuff.

Otherwise there are tons of YouTube videos out there that list like, Top 10 X-type mods for STALKER Anomaly, those are a good way to find new stuff. ModDB is full of nice mods, although unfortunately a lot is moving to Discord now. Hang out in the STALKER G.A.M.M.A. Discord server, that’s (unfortunately) a place where a lot of new cool shit gets posted. There is an engine mod on there that gives true Picture-In-Picture scopes with negligible performance hit, if you care about that stuff.

Also, make sure you know your way around some kind of text-comparison program like WinMerge or your favourite code editor because you’re going to have to merge some scripts and make your own patches if you’re building your own custom modlist.

I really want to get to FF XII some day. I never got around to it, but the Gambit system intrigues me so much. I loved the tactics system in DA: Origins, I even installed mods to make it even more advanced and had a lot of fun setting up programming for characters to be sort of self playing pianos.

Also I like the Ivalice setting.

I haven’t actually been playing any games for the past week, so I don’t have all that much to talk about. Today was the first time I actually sat down and played anything, which was some random Ninja Gaiden 2 survival mode on Xenia Edge emulator and then a couple of fights on my ongoing playthrough of modded Ninja Gaiden 2 Black. The latest custom moveset mod from ShowR18 dropped the other day and so I played around a bit with the new toys.

Otherwise I want to get back to my first playthrough of Darkwood, which I only just started last week. Game is incredible, absolutely top notch horror and atmosphere - without a single deliberate jump scare. Some of the best sound design you’ll ever hear, and some just brutal, oppressive survival horror. I am not easily spooked, but this game gets to me. Almost to the point where I am not sure I will finish it, actually. The convergence of gameplay design and audiovisual design during the nights in your hideout make for some of the most tense moments I’ve ever experienced in gaming. It’s similar-ish to the powerlessness you feel towards the xenomorph in Alien Isolation, but this might honestly be scarier.

Oh man, are you playing vanilla Anomaly? It’s a solid place to start and all, but the rabbit hole goes deep when it comes to modding. STALKER has a huge modding scene, especially in Eastern Europe, and there are tons of plug-and-play modpacks out there. If you’re into the game and want a more elaborate, more refined experience there is a metric ton of content out there, whether you want more survival/scavenging stuff, a vanilla+ experience with just better graphics or a classic unhinged STALKER Soup.

Yes, agreed. It’s perfectly understandable why we’re not really getting games like Witcher 2 or to a certain extent Dragon Age: Origins with any kind of regularity. Any executive signing off on the budget for a truly branching storyline game would need to be absolutely unhinged. I hope some of the now-larger independent studios might give us something like that in the future, but otherwise it seems to be relegated to the genre of cinematic choices-matter games like Until Dawn and what have you.

Well, what I am talking about when I’m talking about branching narratives is not really endings. There are tons of games with tons of different endings, especially these types of combinatorial endings where they’re cut together out of various parts that answer individual side quests and whatnot. Many games can technically have hundreds of “different” endings, but they’re not branching narratives.

I always use Witcher 2 because it is a very rare example of a truly branching storyline. Siding with Roche or siding with Iorveth means getting two completely different experiences. I didn’t really see that in BG3. Imagine if you could join up with the Absolute in Act 2, not kill Ketheric and have a completely different Act 3 where you’re buddies with the trio? That would be a branching story.

As far as I can tell in BG3 the main story beats just kind of have to happen, and you might get some flavour one way or the other or some fake choices but the story is the story.

Is the game actually that branching? It always felt pretty linear to me, although granted I only played it once myself and watched Welonz and Mapocolops Let’s Plays of it. Like sure, you can have some player agency on a micro level in the moment-to-moment stuff, but the story is the story. It’s not like Witcher 2.

Or did you just mean Raphael? I guess the player might have some agency on how much to engage with him.

I personally did not get the feeling that he was a “main boss” due to the way he was dispatched sort of to the side of the main plot. So for me it felt more like “weird that a side quest is getting this much fanfare”, even though I loved the moment itself.

But I absolutely agree that he was by far the most charismatic, impactful and narratively supported villain. There are a lot of things about BG3 that I seem to have liked way less than the general public, but I did love Raphael. I wish he was the defacto final boss and main antagonist.

I hate this. And presumably this is happening because some sort of market research consumer psychology findings show this is preferable and leads to more sales. Which somehow makes me hate it even more.