Look, I’m not one to tell someone they’re playing a game wrong. There’s nary a yum you’ll find me yucking. You do you, man. Want to turn the Sims into a murder-house? Great. Want to talk to the monsters in Doom? Me too. Want to turn Skyrim into a pitch-perfect recreation of the single most destructive conflict in human history? I implore you to go for it.
But the first mods are already rolling in for Stalker 2, which released yesterday, and I’m beginning to wonder if some people get the point.
Take, for instance, the 15th most-popular mod at time of writing: Unlimited Carry Weight. You know what that does: it completely kneecaps Stalker 2’s carry limits to let you haul as much loot as you like around The Zone. My response? What is even the point of a Stalker game where you aren’t choosing between two beautiful, precious armour sets like you’re picking which child you’ll never see again? What’s Stalker if you aren’t slouching towards the nearest vendor—who is multiple kilometers away—loaded down by guns and bullets and sausages because you absolutely refuse to let loot go to waste?
What is the point of a Stalker without suffering? You might think I’m joking, and I kind of am, but I really do think removing the friction from Stalker is like painting over the Mona Lisa. You need to take an Orthodox mindset about these things. Stalker is a game about cutting your own way through a world that doesn’t care about you at the best of times, and is actively hostile towards your continued survival at worst. It’s about achieving your own greatness, not having it handed to you by game mechanics that bow in deference to the player character. It’s about having a really unpleasant time because you’ve decided it’s a price worth paying for the rewards it’ll net you later on. It’s about hard choices, and modding them away? Well, might as well play Skyrim.
Ahem. Sorry, I got carried away. Look, install whatever mods you like, but things like removing encumbrance limits and mods that make Bloodsuckers and Poltergeists into pushovers by dividing their HP by four defang The Zone, and The Zone should have fangs. Really big ones. That hurt you in real life.
That being said, a lot of the mods are just about optimising the game to eke a slightly better performance out of it. In fact, the most popular mod right now is literally called “Stalker Optimizer,” and as much as Stalker fans joke about the jank being part of the experience, I would like the game to get to a point where it’s not quite as stutter-happy and crash-prone as it is right now, as much as I loved the game in our Stalker 2 review.