We already covered the amazing STALKER series several times here at Sapphirenation. It is one of PC Gaming’s most beloved franchises! Recently, it saw a release for consoles as well – first with ports of Shadow of Chornobyl, Clear Sky, and Call of Pripyat for the PlayStation and Xbox consoles. Then with the launch of the long-awaited sequel – Heart of Chornobyl for PC and Xbox in November 2024.
We are happy for the console gamers but in a recent post from Ukrainian developer GSC Game World, they mentioned that the PC versions of these classics will also receive some love in the form an update. So… how should this be handled, at least as per me?
How should such an update even be done?
This may seem odd but I believe that the games should probably not be patched on PC, rather a re-release should take place. A Legends of The Zone remaster should be available separately on Steam/GOG. It can be argued that current series owners ought to get a certain discount for the game though or even for free. And making it so that if you buy the Legends of the Zone you also buy the originals seems like a good idea as well.
But why handle things in this manner? Well, there are a few reasons.
The first and most important one is that what was changed in the console versions of the games cannot be handled via a simple patch. It is a bit deeper than a simple update and it would ruin progress and saved games for current players.
The second reason is that the STALKER series already has 18 years of (official) modding history and almost all mods that rely on the original games to function would break in case they all get upgraded so heavily. Now some modifications would be fixed, others don’t really need the original games to function, and users on GOG would be able to go back to an older version of the game, but the vast majority would be rendered unplayable. And depending on how exactly GSC handles the updates, fixing the few mods that will have their authors still active and interested may take a lot of effort.
Chilling with the boys.
The third reason is simple – it would allow GSC to make more money off this since showing it up as a remaster of some sort would for sure bring more players and fanfare. Showing goodwill towards the originals and their mods will avoid possible adversity with the fanbase as well.
What did the Console re-releases bring to the games?
While current generation consoles are weaker than modern gaming computers, they are still much faster than any machine from 2008 or 2009. They easily run the games maxed out and in fact have several minor graphical upgrades over their original PC releases.
The biggest one is the addition of grass shadows. You see, the original version of Shadow of Chernobyl way back in 2007 had grass shadows as an option. However, an update for the game actually broke that functionality and since the performance impact for 2007-2009 era computers was severe, GSC never bothered fixing it. However, on modern systems, even low-end ones? This is irrelevant. Any modern GPU, even entry level ones like the Sapphire RX 7600 would easily clear this even at 4K. And as far as visual upgrades go, as we know from modern mods that re-enable this, it makes a very noticeable change to how good the game looks.
2008 graphics btw…
The other addition is the inclusion of nicer motion blur which is always a nice option for people who like this effect. It can of course be disabled at will.
Other changes to the game are support for controllers natively (obviously), better UI scaling by default, superior optimization especially on the CPU-side, an update to a modified and somewhat upgraded version of the X-Ray engine, 64-bit support (massive!!!), and updated development tools (important for modding) even if slightly. Oh, and support for FXAA which is fine… I guess.
This is enough to classify the game as a sort of soft remaster of the originals. It does not go as far as I would go if I were to personally remaster these classics, but it does beat out their vanilla, unmodded PC counterparts and has better performance than all but the most in-depth modifications.
What should GSC add/change further to this soft remaster?
Now if I were GSC I would make a concerted effort towards looking into the legendary reclamation mods. Those are bug fix mods for the original games that fix many of the issues still present within the games in spite of their numerous patches. To give GSC credit – they have released patches for the console version of the games that place them ahead in stability to the current vanilla PC versions, but they are not close to parity with the Reclamation mods yet. What I am asking for here is to take the extra step and copy what modders have achieved and fix the remaining issues within the games, alongside content that got cut from the games due to typos (mostly stashes affected!). Speaking of typos, there are in-game locations or armours that are mis-named due to translation issues. Fix that!
This dude’s armour is misnamed in the English versions of the game.
A major engine change or graphics change bar what was done to the consoles is probably out of the question. However, perhaps some minor ones would be possible? I would appreciate support for other modern anti-aliasing techniques. High-quality temporal anti-aliasing as an option and changing the original A-tested MSAA to outright super sampling. Oh, and a modern Ambient Occlusion method would be awesome as well!
Something else that could be done with relative ease would be new settings that go far above the game’s original ultra settings. Higher draw distances especially for foliage and shadows and lighting would easily run on modern hardware, let alone potent machines like the Pulse RX 9070 for example!
Simply adding foliage shadows and expanding the foliage draw distance would upgrade this scene massively!
One thing that GSC is unlikely to do but would make sense in my opinion would be to port changes from later Stalker games into SoC/Clear Sky. Namely ones that won’t change the games, but only enhance them. For example, the inverse kinematic introduced in Clear Sky would honestly help SoC’s outdated animations a bit and the dynamic rain wetting effect would make the Wild Territory look so cool! And both of these games would benefit from Call of Pripyat’s improved Contact Hardening Shadows and the improved 1st person armour hand models (which are not present at all in the 2007 release). Many models, foliage, and textures were redone in the 2008 and 2009 classics so retrofitting them to earlier releases would keep coherence with the art design while still helping the older titles. Of course, this should be done intelligently since there are exceptions here where upgrading may be a bad idea for artistic reasons.
Lastly, I would appreciate it if the games received support for more advanced modern keyboards with hall effect switches – their feature set could positively impact immersion in games like STALKER.
About the mods!
Let us cook…
The original STALKER games have a thriving modding community to this day. A show of extra goodwill from GSC would be to give us access to any remaining older builds that hadn’t seen the light of day alongside more of the tools for the original releases and any from this new release. While we have managed to make our own or reverse engineer most of what was needed, it may still help a bit long term.
I remain hopeful…
STALKER 2 has had a rocky launch but there is potential there. A lot of potential… but one thing which I love about PC gaming is how our games are eternally living alongside our systems. As we upgrade our parts, our games upgrade alongside us. Capitalizing on the fact that our games are eternal is smart. Old games with just a small bit of love can generate hype and profits even decades into the future while entertaining fans old and new alike and being a part of our art form.
Let us hope GSC does good here – it will help both them, the originals, and the sequel!
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