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modding

Stalker 2’s latest patch finally fixes A-Life, arrives alongside 700GB of official modding tools

by admin June 25, 2025

It’s taken a while to get it sorted, but developer GSC Game World has finally managed to fix Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl’s wonky A-Life system as part of the post-apocalyptic shooter’s latest massive update, meaning players can now expect a bit more life to their wasteland adventure as NPCs pursue their own goals and live their lives. Oh, and official modding tools have arrived too, but you might need to delete a game or two to install them.

Starting with A-Life, it’s been the beating heart (or possibly the brain) of the Stalker series since its debut in 2007, creating a more dynamic, and more emergent, post-apocalyptic landscape by simulating NPCs – including stalkers, bandits, and mutants – that would move around the world, hunt, fight, and interact even when offscreen. Stalker 2’s version of A-Life was supposed to take things even further, but like much of the game at launch, was pretty broken.

GSC previously explained much of Stalker 2’s A-Life weirdness was down to optimisation hurdles, with the studio ultimately having to significantly reduce the size of the area around players that A-Life worked in order improve performance. Some initial fixes arrived shortly after release, but it’s only now, some seven months later, the system is finally working as intended.

Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl — Guns & Looting Showcase.Watch on YouTube

As per the studio’s latest patch notes, today’s huge 1.5 update – AKA the Guns & Looting update – now simulates life for all characters, and not just those in the player’s view. NPCs will “continue to live their lives and pursue their goals in the Zone until they meet their end”, and can be encountered resting or interacting in different locations. Additionally, players can also meet the same stalkers after some time.

There’s a lot more besides A-Life, though; patch 1.5 introduces new features – players can now experience the Water Electric Tornado anomaly out in the Zone, for instance, and acquire the Kora handgun and Three-Line Rifle – as well as AI and combat improvements, balance adjustments and bug fixes, plus various quality of life additions. That’s alongside the release of official modding tools for Stalker 2, which are currently available via the Epic Games Store. Interested parties might want to brace themselves, though; you’ll need somewhere in the region of 700GB free harddrive space to install them.

Eurogamer, if you’re wondering, gave Stalker 2 three stars, calling it a “mess of bugs and jank that nonetheless stays faithful to the open world survival shooter of yesteryear.”

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June 25, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Skyblivion devs used their Bethesda visit to fight the good fight, asking Todd and co to bring back Skyrim-style official modding tutorials

by admin June 21, 2025

While the prospect The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered turning out to be a real thing had folks wondering what that might mean for Oblivion remake mod Skyblivion’s release, Bethesda were quick quell fears of a shutdown.

Both sides have been openly chummy since that point, with the studio behind The Elder Scrolls even having the team of modders pop by for a visit around the time their project was being shouted out on the official channels. We’ve now learned a bit more about how that social call went and what the two sides chatted about.

Speaking to cheery RPS fanzine PC Gamer, Skyblivion project lead Kyle ‘Rebelzize’ Rebel revealed that the studio visit came about because he’d been planning a trip to the US around PAX East, and decided that since he was going to be in the area, he’d ring up Bethesda and see if they’d mind Skyblivion folks popping in.

Cue a day at ToddCo HQ that the modder recalled ran from 11AM until 6PM, with Bethesda’s devs and Todd Howard himself chatting to the Skyblivion folks about their work. Naturally, it sounds like the studio’s devs were curious about how the modders have found building their own interpretation of Oblivion using Skyrim’s tools, with Rebel saying that “how we experienced using those tools, what kind of issues we run into, and what we’d like to see in terms of documentation” were all big talking points.

As for the feedback the Skyblivion folks offered, the project lead said he kindly asked Bethesda to consider bringing back the official creation kit tutorial video series it released on YouTube when Skyrim got its tools. If you’ve not watched these vids, they’re basically short how-tos narrated by different Bethesda devs that explain the ins-and-outs of the modding process.

A way to get started with Skyrim modding using the CK by making a basic dungeon, if – as I was when I used these videos for exactly that last year – you don’t know your bum from your elbow when it comes to actually making mods or the navigating the practicalities of game development.

Sure, there are plenty of good tutorials you can find if you’re looking to get into modding more recent Bethesda games like Starfield or Fallout 4, with some even being by high-profile modders, but it’s cool to have the devs who made the thing you’ve been playing talk you through the tools they used to do so. They’re pretty good teachers, and it gives you an extra level of appreciation the next time you delve into one of Skyrim’s dungeons. You’ll know just how much work went to ensuring the enemies don’t all get stuck on the same rock and eliminating void-leaking gaps in the ceiling, and it’ll be good for your soul.

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June 21, 2025 0 comments

GOG one-clicking modding announcement image, showing Bloodlines, Doom 3, Fallout London, and Heroes of Might and Magic 3.

Product Reviews

GOG says it won’t repeat its ill-fated Daggerfall GOG Cut with its new one-click modding program, not least because it can send more than one message a day to modders now

by admin June 20, 2025

Remember the Daggerfall Unity GOG Cut? Odds are you don’t. It was, in essence, a pre-modded version of The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall, in the excellent fan-made Daggerfall Unity engine reimplementation. The idea was that if you wanted to play Daggerfall but didn’t want to go through the rigamarole of modding it into modernity, you could just download the GOG Cut and be on your way.

But there were issues. It quickly became outdated as the mods it included got new updates that GOG didn’t wrap into the GOG Cut, and even if it had kept everything on its latest version, some of the included mods just didn’t quite mesh. It wasn’t the best way to play Daggerfall in the 2020s, and ended up delisted from GOG’s storefront earlier this year after languishing there since 2022.

But GOG is taking another crack at modding with its one-click mods program, which will let you install stuff like Skyblivion, HoMM 3: Horn of the Abyss, and other meaty mod projects much like you install any other game on the platform. As it begins to flex its fan-content muscles, it says its learnt a lot from the DF GOG Cut experience.

“In this case, usually, for the mods it will be on them [to keep mods up-to-date],” says GOG’s Rudy de Marco. “They will have more access than previously, because at the end of the day it will be easier for everyone to trust them to actually update their stuff whenever they want, right? So that’s how we plan to go.”

(Image credit: Bethesda Softworks)

So, presuming mod authors keep on top of their updates, we shouldn’t run into yet another scenario where mods on GOG end up woefully outdated compared to their counterparts on sites like Nexus Mods. It’s not a free-for-all, though: GOG of course has to approve which mods it hosts on its service, and de Marco tells me that the store does “give heads up” to studios whose games are being modded on the platform. “It’s for us, but for the mod creators as well, right? There are stories in the past where mods could have been shut down completely for a specific franchise, and it’s not something where we want to put anyone at risk… We are kind of a middleman to make sure that everything’s okay.”

I get the impression that GOG’s come quite a way from the first days of the DF GOG Cut. Which, you know, you’d certainly hope is the case. In our chat, de Marco told me that assembling the DF GOG Cut was so ramshackle that “Our main person in charge of [the GOG Cut] did not have a premium account on Nexus, so he could send one message a day to people that weren’t his friend.” Kind of made securing all the necessary permissions for mod authors a bit hard.

I’m interested to see where GOG goes with modding. The whole scene has hit interesting times in the wake of the departure of the 24-year head of Nexus Mods, with some users fearing the site’s new owners might put the stalwart platform on a path to enshittification. Perhaps we’re due a shake-up in the mod-hosting scene. Perhaps GOG is well-placed to take advantage of it. It probably has a premium account by this point.

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June 20, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

An Elder Scrolls voice actor is teaming up with top Fallout 4 modders to livestream a 48-hour modding jam for charity

by admin June 12, 2025

A group of prominent Fallout 4 modders will be livestreaming the creation of a big mod over a single weekend later this month. It’s part of a charity drive led by voice actor Wes Johnson, probably most famous for providing the dulcet tones of mad Daedric prince Sheogorath in Oblivion and Skyrim.

The gang – led by Kinggath and the team behind the popular Sim Settlements mod – will be letting viewers decide the specifics of the mod via a stream this weekend, with the actual mod creation streams then taking place on Twitch across June 28th and 29th.

The modathon is part of this year’s edition of Voiceapalooza, an annual charity drive in aid of the American Alzheimer’s Association that sees Johnson and community-run charity initiative Fallout For Hope organise a bunch of streams to raise funds for the cause.

Last year, this time-limited modding element of it saw a similar group of modders create a Fallout 4 questline called Shady Motives, raising over $30,000 in the process. In addition to a story starring Johnson, who’s also voiced the likes of Fallout 3’s Fawkes and Oblivion’s Lucien Lachance, that mod included a player home, custom weapons and armour, and a fully-voiced companion.

So, basically a mini-DLC worth of stuff that was then uploaded to Nexus Mods and Bethesda.net once any kinks were ironed out for anyone on PC or Xbox to give a go. This year looks like it’ll produce a fresh mod of a similar size and scope, with modders Kinggath, Elianora, Neeher, Jazzhands, Otellino, Sagittaurus, Niero, Erika Ember Studios, Veta Phoenix, and greenFoxel all set to stream themselves creating and working on different aspects of it.

Interesting to check out if you’ve ever been curious about how the modding sausage is made, or you can just keep an eye out for the mod going live once it’s done. There’s also a stream on Kinggath’s Twitch that’ll see watchers vote to decide the details of the mod that the group’ll be building – that takes place this Saturday, June 14th, kicking off at

You can find all the timings for the different streams that make up this modathon in this Tweet, and find all the streams that’ll be going live on mod-making portion on June 28th here.

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June 12, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

GOG announce a new new one-click system aiming to “take things to another level entirely” for fuss-free modding

by admin June 9, 2025

After providing a go-to place for very big and very buggy Fallout 4 mod Fallout: London last year, GOG have just announced that they’re expanding their efforts to be a go-to place of you want to easily play high-profile or must-have mods for certain games.

The old and also new game merchants have revealed a new initiative aimed at offering “seamless mod integration”, as well as announcing that they’ll be hosting Skyblivion – the modding project remaking Oblivion in Skyrim’s engine that currently targeting a release this year – when it arrives.

Dubbing this integration push GOG One-click Mods, the retailers have tapped a selection of mods that either provide new stuff to do or key tweaks deemed can’t miss. The goal is to let you avoid the perils of time-consuming mod installation when you fire up the affected games.

The initial group of “handpicked” mods includes the aforementioned Fallout: London, Doom 3’s Phobos mod, Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines’ Unofficial Patch, and Heroes of Might and Magic 3’s Horn of the Abyss mod. Skyblivion’s set to join that gang once it comes out.

We asked GOG what went into selecting those specific mods as the starter group, wondering if factors like established relationships with certain modding teams or a desire to host mods for games that sell well on the store had played into it. “It was a mix of all those things, frankly,” a GOG spokesperson responded, “from the mods’ popularity and our existing relations to the quality, the quantity and the type of content they offer.

“Cultural impact also played a big role. Horn of the Abyss, for instance, is now an absolute must-have for anyone who loves Heroes of Might and Magic 3; once you have it, you cannot imagine playing without it. On top of that, some of our team members have deep ties with the modding scene, offering – completely unbiased, of course – insights on which mods we should prioritise. In some cases, it made the outreach process and contact with creators much easier – simply because there are mods we know and love, and communities we’re already part of.”

GOG claim this initiative “definitely takes things to another level entirely” compared to what’s gone before. “While we are actively working to expand it further, community response to these initial titles will be a key factor in shaping what comes next,” the spokesperson added.

It’ll be interesting to see what affect this initiative has going forwards. Right now, it only affects a few mod for a few games, so I can see myself using it to have an easier time when jumping into Skyblivion for the first time and giving Fallout: London another go. However, it’ll have a long way to go to factor into the largely Steam and Nexus Mods-based nature of the majority of the modding I do when I’m not grabbing one of these big, once-in-a-blue-moon total conversions.

It’s not going to be possible to seamlessly integrate every little mod, and if certain key mods for certain games end up as part of the inititive and others don’t, that could potentially cause some headaches. We’ll just have to see how things go.

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June 9, 2025 0 comments