[CCIP]

Haha yeah. I'm travelling tomorrow again! But I'll hopefully soon be back for good. Sorry for disappearing, life just threw a bunch of curve balls at me in the last few months, and I'm still getting my bearings. Hopefully I'll settle down again soon.

I haven't played the original CoP - I've really become disappointed in stock STALKER games since getting into some of the more advance modding. I don't want to play the "normal" game anymore. I really wasn't happy with Clear Sky, even after the Complete mod for example - but can tell you right now that with Misery it is anything but a rail shooter. It's brutal, but I've advanced the main quest very little - and from what I understand, it changes the story anyway, and splits it into three different "classes" of characters that you can play, each with their own different quests. It's definitely not a mod for everyone, but because of all the detail and sheer difficulty, I literally spent a week game time just to get to a point where I was "breaking even" - that is, had money to feed myself and have a bit of a reserve on the side and a decent gun. Then I spent another week game time working my way through the first few quests and earning enough for something better than a leather jacket as far as armor. Now I'm ready to tackle a bit more. I'm sure it wouldn't take so long for more experienced players, but wrapping my head around how things work and fighting the utterly brutal AI for even the smallest gain sure took a while.

Stuttering is a bit of a problem in Misery on my system, but i got it to a point where it's tolerable. Again though, I think the title of the mod was a smart move - it's always good to point out that it's not for everyone. It's a brutal, largely gloryless grind to even survive, let alone get anything accomplished. The new features add so much "stuff" that you will often find yourself spending a good chunk of the game day tinkering with stuff in your inventory and figuring out just how to keep your gear in one piece, what to do about the crappy guns you found, and what to eat next. Not exactly riveting adventure. There were a lot of complaints about earlier versions of Misery especially, with some people calling it an "obesity sim" because your character would be constantly tired, hungry, and barely able to carry anything. I can't vouch for that since I only got into it with the current version, of course, but at 2.02 things do seem pretty stable and difficult but playable. Although you will find it almost impossible to do some of the quests, even ones that you get on the first day, until weeks into the game - until you have a hazmat suit and some serious weaponry, you will simply not survive anywhere near certain anomalies and enemies. And earning that suit and weaponry takes an intense amount of grinding. I don't find it as bad as some games' version of grinding, because literally any encounter with an enemy has a very high % chance of you dying and requires lots of skill, but it's still grinding nonetheless. As a survival sim though (and I actually wouldn't shy away from calling it a sim - it's more detailed/overloaded with features than ArmA or its derivative DayZ in some ways), it's pretty satisfying. Mostly because it succeeds at turning the Zone back from a theme park with exciting action rides into a terrifying, miserable, nearly-impossible-to-survive place. It's not "fun" anymore, and I mean that both in good and bad ways.

@RedOctober1984 - yeah, don't bother with Misery for now, it won't run properly on your rig unfortunately. Also did I mention that it's a 2.6GB download? You might be able to get it to run, but you'll probably find it hard to move around without constant stuttering. The main "problem" with Misery is that it increases the distance at which AI entities and objects are tracked by the game, and greatly increases the number of them. Even if you reduce that distance to minimum, you'll find that the game keeps loading new objects every time you move.
One plus (or minus?) is that it massively increases the visual range and engagement range for AI. Most of my firefights in old Stalker were within 30 yards. My average battle against humans now happens at 100 or so. And if any of them have proper rifles, they are brutal and kill me almost as often as I kill them.