Stalker Anomaly is a free fan-made project that combines content from the 3 Stalker videogames and various related mods into a single huge sandbox game. It is perhaps better known through Stalker GAMMA, which is just Anomaly with a lot of extra addons on top.
I love Anomaly, but I probably hate it even more. Every time I play it I start hating it for it's flaws, then I try to fix those flaws by creating my own mods, and then I get burned out because the codebase is a nightmarish mess of spaghetti that keeps getting worse and worse the deeper you go. Despite the frustration, there's something extremely immersive about Anomaly that makes me keep coming back.
The more I try to fix it, the more there's a part of me that wants to fork the entire Anomaly project and just clean up all the code and data files. It's a miracle that there's so many mods and addons for the Stalker games and for Anomaly, but I wonder how much more there would be if the code was more understandable and pleasant to work with. After all, I would be making tons of addons for it myself if I didn't get bogged down trying to untangle the web of confusion.
Unfortunately I don't have the time to do it. I've spent multiple weekends just trying to understand how something works, only to run into a brick wall of overwhelming complexity or "this must be called from within the engine" or otherwise not making any useful progress.
What's wrong with Anomaly
The biggest flaw of Anomaly (in terms of game design) is bad progression. Anomaly is treated too much like a sandbox game: you can play as the member of any faction, each one starts at a different part of the map, and the difficulty/enemies/items/loot of the world have to work for all faction playthroughs. As a result none of the difficulty/enemies/etc really change even if you travel across the whole world, you'll just end up at the starting area of a different faction. The map ends up feeling extremely flat, and it's made worse by the fact that you can walk right through several maps without running into any enemies. It feels barren compared to the origial Stalker trilogy.
Another way to illustrate the problem is that you can grind procedurally generated quests in the beginner town until you have endgame equipment. It's made even worse by the fact that your reputation won't transfer to all parts of the map, so the starting town ends up having endgame gear for sale but many other places don't. There's no real incentive to explore which makes exploring feel meaningless.
Weapons are very realistic, which in part contributes to the satisfying immersion of bullet-in-the-face being deadly even from a pistol, but it also means that there's very few enemies that can survive a shotgun shot to the head. That further flattens the feeling of progression because it's very easy to get a shotgun and nothing feels like a big upgrade over that until you get a weapon with a good scope. When you do get a weapon with a scope, nothing feels like an upgrade anymore.
On the note of weapon progression, every shop has like 7 different pistols, but there's no reason to use any of them because every other type of weapon is far superior, they're just kind of useless after the first 20 minutes of gameplay (assuming you didn't already pick a second weapon on the starting loadout). Even within pistols the sense of progression is bad: there's one particular pistol that has very large magazine and automatic fire mode, it's pretty easy to obtain and it's hard to argue for using any other pistol in the game over that one.
Both armor and weapons variety feels very flat, it's often hard to tell what item is better than another because they're so similar, sometimes it feels like someone hit the randomize button on all the stats on all the items. I don't mind small variations of the same item, but even completely different items look very similar in terms of stats.
How to fix it
In an ideal world, I would try to do 3 main things:
- A complete overhaul of all the items in the game, prioritizing interesting gameplay and progression over realism, removing clutter that doesn't add anything to the game (or at least distributing them in different parts of the map in a more interesting way and giving them little differences), making each item more disinct from other items. Same with equipment upgrades, they should have more meaningful effects, I really don't care about getting +5% ergonomics on my gun.
- More "linear" progression so you have to actually explore the different maps and gradually progress into better and better equipment.
- Authored quests just like in the official Stalker games, except instead of a central questline, there would be different quests in different places. Anomaly has a few quests like this I think, but there's so few I can't even recall what/where they were.
I have done a lot of re-designing on consumable items, trying to make them more interesting and varied and less confusing. There's a lot of consumables in Anomaly but they seem to have a ton of seemingly random properties, for example eating some piece of food giving -4% thirst and -1% energy, or drinking water reducing 40 kcal of hunger, or food A reducing 431 kcal from hunger and food B reducing 273 kcal. The only argument I can think of is that those kinds of stats feel more "realistic" or "immersive", but to me they just make the game a lot more confusing without making it more interesting.
Making consumables interesting can go beyond just stat differences though. Here's some things that I've experimented with:
Cigarettes are way too overpowered for healing radiation (the fact that they're almost weightless means you can always carry around a number of them without any cost), I've considered many options for nerfing them. One of them was that rain prevents you from lighting a cigarette, but it ended up just being a minor nuisance without actually fixing the problem since there's always a cover somewhat nearby.
There's way too many food items in the game, I figured that they need some radical differences to be interesting. The 2 main ideas I had was that canned foods must be opened with a tool first, and that cooked meals (and opened cans) will spill out in your backpack if you move around too fast or get attacked. You'd have to bring cooking tools with you and cook on-the-go, eat immediately when you buy food from a trader, or bring a type of food that won't spill. The trick is that most foods that don't spill are rare/expensive or have penalties like increasing thirst, and while canned foods are economical and don't spill when closed, they are kind of heavy and require a tool to open.
There's other less interesting differences, for example bags of nuts/raisins reduce hunger very little but have many uses, chocolate and protein bars give energy/stamina related benefits but are rare, and the 3 kinds of military rations are the best food items (each with different characteristics) but also by far the most expensive. I also turned tier 1 cooked meals from a bowl into roasted meat, it's cheap and won't spill but gives you radiation and is also an inefficient waste of meat. There's 3 tiers of cooked meals, all of them bowls by default. I'd like to further expand the cooking system, but I need to delve into the cooking system script in order to do it properly. That was one of the scripts that caused me to get burned out from Anomaly modding at some point.
I find it very fun to balance things like this and make all the clutter feel like it has a reason to exist. I'm really anxious to do it for all the armors and weapons, I have a lot of ideas for how to do that, and balancing the progression and where the items are found is part of it.
What's stopping me
As excited as I am to go further, everything falls apart when it comes to balancing equipment. Let's say I want to re-balance a piece of armor. What should I set the "electric protection" value to? In order to know that, I would need to know how much electric damage different anomalies/enemies do and how electric damage/absorption is calculated. How strong are electric anomalies in the beginning of the map vs at the end of the map? What does 5% protection do? How about 80% protection? All I know is that the stats don't do what they sound like: it won't reduce electric damage by 5% and 80%.
Even if I knew how they work, I don't know how to balance hazards themselves. I need to make stronger anomalies and stronger enemies spawn up north, and weak ones in the south where you start. I don't even know how/where they are defined in the game's data files.
I have a similar problem with weapons, I tried tweaking the numbers but I couldn't make any sense about what their effect is. Even in the official Stalker games, stats are shown as horizontal bars, not as numbers, so you can only compare relative differences between 2 weapons without knowing what the difference actually means in practice.
The actual numbers on the weapons are way more complicated than this, even if the bars were numbers the game would still do a pretty poor job at explaining what the weapon's behavior is. As far as I remember, some of the stat bars on the window don't actually describe any real properties on the weapon (it's be possible to create a "bug" where the window says X but the actual values are Y).
It's even more important when it comes to bullet protection because bullets have a piercing value. Armor has X% ballistic protection, and bullets say something like "class IIIA piercing".
How the hell am I supposed to balance something like this? I could set up some kind of editor mode and just change the numbers while shooting at target dummies, but there's like 100 different weapons and 100 different armors and 100 different ammo types. I can't just blindly change numbers, I need to understand what kind of calculations are involved with the numbers. But guess what, most of the data on the items isn't used anywhere in the game scripts, they're fed directly into the game engine which I can't see into.
Now let's look at some of said data. The data for those bullets looks like this (yes, all the formatting in these files is all fucked up, and yes I selected all the text so you can see the random mixture of spaces and tabs being used, I did not edit this and all the files I've seen have been similar):
The values relevant for damage are at the bottom, prefixed with k_*. Not shown are k_bullet_speed and k_cam_dispersion. What do all these values do? Your guess is just as good as mine. You can draw some assumptions by comparing bullet types (I included 7.62x39 because the item description of 5.45 says that it has more accuracy and less recoil):
- k_bullet_speed lowers as the ammo gets more broken, but isn't different between ammo types. Seems like a simple debuff on broken ammo, maybe it affects how fast the bullet drops with gravity, but may also affect bullet damage depending on what kind of ballistics calculations the game uses.
- k_disp increases as it gets broken, but is also different between calibers. Maybe it means accuracy ("displacement") or bullet drop with gravity. This could also mean recoil, as in displacement of the weapon, in that case broken ammo would have higher recoil (makes sense) and the smaller caliber has less recoil as mentioned in the description.
- k_impulse is lower on AP ammo, lower on broken ammo, but higher on bigger caliber, so it probably means how much damage it does.
- k_ap pretty clearly seems like it stands for "armor piercing", higher for AP ammo and lower for broken ammo.
- impair is higher on on broken ammo but doesn't change based on ammo type. Maybe it increases how much the target bleeds or something?
- The typical characteristic of AP ammo is higher piercing but lower damage (it pierces through more smoothly and therefore does less damage on the way). That suggests that k_ap is piercing and k_impulse is damage, which is supported by the fact that both go down as the ammo breaks, and both are slightly higher on the larger caliber. You'd logically want crappy broken ammo to do less damage, which also supports k_impulse being damage.
- Some of these values could in theory be inverted, for example lower value means more of something. That's definitely the case with some weapon stats.
- I excluded values that are the same across all of the bullets. That includes k_hit which is 1.0 on all of them.
I can make guesses about what these values do, I could probably balance a handful of ammo types with just this information, but there's about 40 different types of ammo in the game not including the broken ones. And we're just talking about ammo, we haven't even gotten to weapon stats or how armor protection relates against them.
I just get overwhelmed by a feeling of hopelessness when I try to sort this stuff out, it would be easier to make my own game so I start drifting towards projects like Scavgame.
Potential changes
If redesigning equipment is too complicated, I could potentially work on the other goals. One of them is more linear progression. My general desire is that you start from Cordon as usual, and then you have to squiggle through the map, gradually making your way north and unlocking new map transitions through quests or purchases.
The image above is my brainstorming about what the progression could look like and what kind of items you could expect to find around that point in the map. The map transition points are color coded according to a rough idea of how hard it should be to unlock it. Blue = automatically available, green = easy, yellow = hard, orange = very hard, red = you'll probably be 2 layers north (the map is rotated, north is to the right) before you unlock this. Pink = special or path that I'm not familiar with.
The game would still be open ended and let you go where you want, but it would be much harder to take the obvious path forward, and it would be much easier to unlock paths from north to south than the other way round. I imagine the game starting with you trying to make your way either west to the Great Swamps to do some quests and get loot, or go east around Darkscape and Dark Valley into Garbage. The path north from the swamps could be unlocked by doing enough quests in the swamps, or for free from Agroprom's side.
It's also important that the loot is very restricted so you can't get powerful items too early, especially powerful tools like artifact detectors and night vision goggles and weapon scopes. Using flashlights in the dark is super cool in my opinion, but even tier 1 night vision just makes them completely obsolete, and when you get T2 night vision you'll spend half of your time with it turned on.
- Encouraging lamps over night vision: give flashlights and headlamps a much longer range, and add an additional tier of flashligths and headlamps that have even longer range. Shrink the night vision goggles screen texture so that it covers more of your vision, and give night vision goggles a weaker headlamp so there's still a reason to choose T2 headlamp. I've already done all of this. I'd like to nerf night vision more by making it more blurry or vulnerable to brightness, but I'm not sure how to do that.
- Encouraging weapon variety: give the player weak assault rifles and strong other weapons. Broken non-AP AR ammo. Give non-AR weapons better scopes, for example you should be getting semi-auto or bolt-action rifles with embedded scopes but only reflex sights for ARs/SMGs. When you find a 2x scope for an AR, you'll have another kind of weapon with 3-4x scope. And so on. Pistols and SMGs should have other benefits, but I don't know what benefits to give them. I could make them unrealistically light weight, or other weapons unrealistically heavy weight, or make large caliber ammo very uncommon/expensive. Basically take the insignificant differences and exaggerate them until they become significant. In Scavgame, my plan is to let you run and aim and shoot simultaneously while using a pistol or SMG, and make big weapon reload times very slow, but I have no idea how to do that in Anomaly, the former is probably impossible and second probably requires modifying some animation files.
Tier-1 night vision already has the correct shader effects: it has noise, it exaggerates light, and it has an annoying oscillating blur. I just need to tweak it a bit to make the blur stop oscillating (so it always remains in the blurry state and never becomes clear) and to increase the light exaggeration, but I can't figure out how those effects can be modified because the file for it is in binary format. In other words, instead of editing text like "Sigh=lol", you need to edit hex digits like "53 69 67 68 3D 6C 6F 6C" and there's no documentation for them.
Fixing some of the balancing of the tools and devices is doable, but it's harder to actually restrict what the player can obtain. I would need to know how to manipulate stash loot, quest rewards, and NPC equipment and/or pathing (high tier NPCs shouldn't be able to spawn in the south nor travel from north to south). I tried to figure out how this stuff works but I was met with another tangled web of confusion. It seems more doable than balancing equipment though, I found various loot tables and stuff in the data files, although there's a chance that some of it is fed to the engine again and I can't get as much control as I'd want to have. Investigation pending, I guess.
As a side note, the density of enemies needs to be increased, otherwise the world feels too barren and you might just walk right through a map without encountering anything.
Quests
There's another Stalker mod called DoctorX Call of the Zone which is in many ways better than Anomaly, especially when it comes to it's quests and some of the world events (the world feels more varied and alive, Anomaly tends to feel barren and generic by comparison). The way I would compare it to Anomaly would be that it feels "outdated but better designed".
I haven't tried to make a quest yet, but I've explored the concept a little and saved some other Anomaly addons that might be useful for reference. Proper quest creation would require knowledge about a lot of different ways to manipulate the world, like spawning items and enemies and map markers and controlling NPC behaviors and dialogue. It would be a long journey so I haven't found the time and motivation to go too deep into it.
I would want both specific single-time questlines that are always the same, and procedurally generated/repeatable quests. DoctorX has pretty good procedurally generated quests, Anomaly has quests too but they all suck in comparison. The biggest flaw of DoctorX questlines is that it constantly makes you fight against groups of Monolith soldiers that can 1-shot you, I have a huge collection of medkits because I just die from the first shot so I don't get a chance to use them. Maybe I just picked a difficulty that it's not designed to be played with.
Both games have annoying problems with quest locations. Firstly sometimes the quest is just too far away in a place you'd rather not go to and you can't know that until you accept the quest. Secondly you have to return to the quest giver in order to complete the quest, which is just very annoying. Needing to return to the quest giver makes me feel like I can't take quests while traveling around the map naturally.
The same capabilities that can create quests, can also make the world passively more lively. For example I would like to make Agroprom more dangerous by spawning military dudes here and there and making them patrol around the map. Rostok should always be surrounded by at least a couple mutants. Rostok should be occasionally attacked by a group of Freedom guys, and Army Warehouses by Duty guys. Garbage should be often attacked by bandits. Mercenaries camp around in Wild Territory. Items should slowly re-appear on tables and stashes after you've picked them up. NPCs should randomly start fights or do weird things that you can choose to participate in. And so on.
Other stuff
There's lots of other issues with Anomaly, here's some that come to mind:
- There's not enough elemental hazards in the world. It's hard to care about fire protection on your armor if you have to sacrifice a single point of protection against bullets or mutants, because the latter two are so much more dangerous that it's not even a competition. I'd like to see the world filled with more different kinds of anomalies or elemental fields (like those areas with high heat). It might be interesting if half of some entire map was temporarily filled with high heat or something like that and you needed appropriate heat protection or else your health will drain.
- The weapon components system is cool and bad. Each weapon has 3-5 parts in it like a barrel, trigger system, gas tube, etc., each one has a durability and you can swap them. I really like the idea of collecting parts from multiple enemies' broken weapons and putting together a decent one for your own use. An addon called Weapon Parts Overhaul and some others can get you pretty close to where I want it to be, but it's not quite right. The problem is that the weapon itself has a durability too, the durability of the weapon and the durability of the parts seem to be linked somehow because repairing one will repair the other in weird ways. I'm planning to do something similar for Scavgame: there are no "weapons", only "weapon parts" and each part has a durability, whatever stats that part contributes to the total weapon will get reduced as it's durability goes down. Anyway, I'm still exploring options for how the repair/components system in Anomaly could work.
- Psychic health is kind of boring. I'd prefer psy health if it changed very slowly, was difficult to recover, and had all kinds of interesting effects like hallucinations and fake sounds and screen effects. And I mean interesting, not annoying like the stupid cross-eyed blur effect. Psychic locations already have an "intensity", the way I imagine it is that instead of the location draining your psy health, it would make your psy health gradually lower towards the intensity point and stop there. So for example if an area has 40% psy intensity, your psy health would gradually go down towards 60%, slower depending on your psy protection. You could then use drugs/cigarettes/alcohol to recover it slowly over time. Maybe sitting next to a campfire and interacting with NPCs would recover it too. If the psy health was designed like this, you could use it way more often, for example even emissions could lower your psy health by some amount, and you could treat it as something like an "insanity meter".
- Footsteps are almost completely silent. There's a mod called Footsies which makes enemy footsteps audible from further, but it changes all footsteps into human foosteps, and apparently the distance is limitated by the engine. I don't think this one can be fixed.
- Trader prices are too unflexible. I think this is limited by the engine too because the item trade list is just fed into the engine in a specific format, you can't control the price of an individual item. For example you can't make something have a very high value when you buy it, but low value when you sell it. One of my attempts to nerf weapon scopes was to make them way more expensive, but the result was that I made tons of money by selling the scopes that enemies drop.
- I thought about completely re-writing all the damage calculations so it would be easier to re-balance equipment and perhaps even re-imagine how/what equipment protect against, but I think all of that stuff happens inside the game engine. It might in theory be possible to erase all the damage the player receives and create a custom health system, maybe the Body Health System addon has clues for how to do that kind of thing right.
Other people's addons
Here's some notable addons that I use. They aren't necessarily related to what I'm talking about on this page though.
- Dynamic Anomalies Overhaul. Anomalies are probably the most interesting part of the whole Stalker universe so it seems like a no-brainer to add onto them as much as possible. When I played Stalker for the first time, I remember being very disappointed about how uncreative the anomalies were. To be fair this addon doesn't do what I originally expected either, but it's a step in the right direction. I was hoping for more unique anomalies, like something that affects audio or vision or your controls or physics or something, not just landmines with different graphics.
- MagsRedux requires you to manage weapon magazines and manually refill them with bullets, the idea was popularized by Escape From Tarkov. I always set the speed to be as fast as possible, sitting there waiting for the bullets to go in one-by-one is not the interesting part of this addon. I think this makes the game more "mechanically immersive" since it makes bullets feel more real, you can't just keep shooting and reloading as long as you have X bullets, you have to actually be conscious of your magazines and put bullets into them and not just thoughtlessly spray and pray. It also incentivizes carrying extra weapon(s). You might even end up using your melee weapon for something other than smashing boxes.
- Drunks Enhanced Toxic Air is a new addon I'm trying out. I don't know if it'll be good, but I like the idea. The further north you go, the more toxic the air is, so you need gas masks and filters that gradually wear out and need to be replaced. This has a similar effect to the linear progression I'm talking about because you can't immediately afford the gas masks and filters that you'd need up north. In general I like the idea of gas masks being more "real" rather than just helmet with different stats, this too increases mechanical immersion. This also causes underground areas to be super toxic and require special gas tanks, I'm not sure if I like that idea.
- Crooks Faction Identification UI. No matter how long I play, I can never recognize what faction some NPC is in so I can't tell whether they'll be hostile. This shows information about NPCs if you look at them long enough. I like to disable all other information except the faction logo/badge, and put that into the corner of the screen. I'd prefer if the identification only happened when you're looking through binoculars, maybe I can modify this addon myself to do it.
- Stealth makes stealth work more like you'd expect, i.e. enemies are less likely to see you if you're in the dark or not moving. This isn't really gameplay changing, it's just making the game work more like you'd think it would.
- Better PDA Progression and KillTracker. This is also related to linear progression. The first addon causes tier-1 PDA to not show you where you are on the map, so you have to look at the environment to figure out where you are. The second addon shows dots on the map for corpses (similar to the vanilla Stalker games), I merged the 2 addons and made the dots only appear with tier-3 PDA, so all PDA tier upgrades give notable changes.
- 2D Scope Overhaul makes weapon scope visuals look more varied and accurate (the default ones are kind of half assed and incorrect). I don't really care about graphics mods because they're all related to realism and cinematic graphics and tedious hand animations which I've disabled, but I like ones like this which just increase the accuracy and correctness and attention to detail of the existing graphics. For example there's another addon called Exo Servomotor Sounds which makes NPCs wearing exosuits create machine-like sounds when moving around, very immersive little attention to detail. There exists some 3D scope mods, but I don't like how they look since the environment around the scope will zoom in too which looks more weird with 3D scopes.
- New Stash Locations. Finding stuff makes exploring more fun, so the more places you can find stuff from, the better.
- Various dialogue addons. Simply put, NPCs having more varied dialogue makes the world feel more natural and less repetitive. You can never have enough. One such example is Dialogue Expanded Expanded.
- Various UI enhancements, mostly the kind that show more detailed information about items and quests and stuff. For example it's weird that someone can give you a quest to kill a person without telling you anything about who the target is, you can fix that with Extended Task Info, although I nerfed it slightly to remove the rank number and exact location.