Reader, you’re looking at (an article written by) what might be the first person in history to 100% Stalker: Shadow of Chornobyl – Enhanced Edition on PC. GSC Game World properly released its “fully remastered and optimised” touch-ups of the original Stalker trilogy—Shadow of Chornobyl, Clear Sky, and Call of Prypiat—this morning, free for all owners of the originals, but I used games writer privilege to fully scour the Zone in a 23-hour playthrough over the course of last week. I really like Stalker, what can I say?
Colour me surprised, then, that at time of writing the Steam reviews for all three games in the remastered trilogy currently sit at Mostly Negative, while scrolling down to the reviews themselves reveals a sea of angry red. I had no problems in my own playthrough; had players somehow gotten their hands on a different version of the game than I did?
Not quite. Take a look at the reviews themselves and you’ll see that a lot of the complaints stem from changes GSC made to the games’ audio and Soviet-era relics. What has players—especially Russian players—most angry is the removal of the original games’ Russian-language audio track. Although the game still has a Russian interface and subtitles, GSC has removed that audio for this re-release (which the studio also did for the collection’s console ports last year).
“Iconic Russian voices removed for political reasons,” laments a review for SoC. “I’m not from Russia or Ukraine, but I played it on Russian language. And now you use it like instrument of propaganda against Russian speakers,” reads one for Clear Sky.
There’s a lot of that kind of thing for all three games, which is perhaps to be expected, but with the console ports also having Russian audio removed, as well as Stalker 2 launching without Russian voiceover, I can’t imagine anyone is truly surprised. What is a touch more surprising is that these Enhanced Editions remove bits and pieces of Soviet iconography that are still present in the original games. I can confirm that the monument outside Chornobyl itself, which reads “ChAES in the name of VI Lenin,” has been straightforwardly deleted, leaving just the two concrete blocks it used to stand on.
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This, like the removed Russian audio, is a holdover from the series’ console ports, but I confess I wasn’t aware of it myself before I played. Given that other Soviet relics, like posters, were also removed in those console ports, it’s likely they continue to be absent in the PC remasters, but I can’t confirm that myself.
I’m unclear as to whether the removal of these things is a personal choice by GSC devs in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, or a response to Ukraine’s own laws on decommunization, which forbid particular displays of Soviet and Nazi iconography, and which may have been responsible for a cancelled Ukrainian Mortal Kombat release back in 2019. I’ve reached out to the studio to ask about that, and I’ll update this piece if I hear back.
Anyway, if you were just going to play in English and aren’t too fussed about Soviet monuments, is there anything in the negative reviews currently tanking the games that you should care about? Just the one. Aside from the cultural criticisms, many players are complaining of blurry graphics in all three of the Stalker Enhanced Editions, particularly with FSR and antialiasing active.
Now, I have to be honest. I’ve played 23 hours of Shadow of Chornobyl and absolutely none of these complaints are familiar to me. The game looked sharp as a tack on my 1440p monitor, 4K TV, and OLED Steam Deck. Nevertheless, enough people are complaining about it that I don’t think you can say they’re making it up. Perhaps it’s a problem of a particular hardware configuration or maybe I just have low standards, but if you’re the kind to be bothered by this sort of thing, it might be worth waiting to play until GSC addresses it. I’ve asked the studio about this, too, and (say it with me) will update if I hear back.
For now, here are some comparison shots I took of Shadow of Chornobyl and Call of Prypiat running on my machine. I’m not on our hardware team (no actually useful skills, you see), so I leave it up to you to decide if they represent an unacceptable level of blur. As for me? I think these are the best versions of Stalker you can play today, even as someone who also misses the Soviet relics.
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