I am a beta-tester of Call of Chernobyl (if you don't know that already) and I did numerous streams of it occasionally for both communities, western and eastern. There have been lots of rumors circulating around CoC, some might be false, some can be true. Those who know english and frequent CoC's ModDB page and read our developer posts and comments might know some of the things I will try to explain here. If something else is unclear, don't hesitate to ask me about anything - I will do my best to give you the most accurate answer.

First, I'd like to explain what Call of Chernobyl actually is - It's a standalone global freeplay mod on top of a customized map pack (22 outdoor maps and 9 indoor maps, from all three Stalker games as well as from the builds) with AI spread all over it, which also utilizes heavily modified X-Ray 1.6 engine under the name "OpenXray". That's all there is to it, just a freeplay mod with a bunch of maps and a custom engine - Almost all visuals, core gameplay mechanics, weapons and factions and other things are as close as they can get to the original vanilla Stalker feel, with the only exception being the NPC variants from the Variation Mod by Darkenneko, as well as skyboxes and emissions, which are all from Atmosfear 3 by CrommCruac. It's completely devoid of any eye candy that was considered unnecessary, and there is a reason for that - while Call of Chernobyl is a full-scale freeplay modification after all, the development team fancies it as a full-fledged free Modders' Resource.

Yes, a free Modders' Resource. Free as in complete freedom to do anything with it as you please. CoC is intended to be a base for all your future mods, community patches or even full-fledged gameplay overhauls, custom story mods, Solyankas and other Vasyanopaks. It will provide you appropriate tools to work with it, as well as a proper documentation which contains everything you'll need to know - all the new functions implemented in the OpenXray engine, instructions for creating your own quests as well as random dynamic quests which any specified or random NPC can assign to you. Released raw assets for the SDK will help you in adding new stuff to the maps. The openly available engine source waits for you to fork it and expand its functions even further, and if you feel generous enough, you can propose all the changes you made to be included in the standard package so that everyone could enjoy playing CoC with them. Call of Chernobyl is fully open for everyone after all, so why shouldn't you be, too? We are all here to make an example of what we can achieve if we are determined enough to bring the best possible Stalker experience to everyone.

Enough chit-chat about what CoC strives to be, now it's time to tell you about how Call of Chernobyl actually plays. After selecting your difficulty, you will be greeted with a window in which you can select your faction, the loadout assigned to the faction you've chosen, and all the way up you can write down any name you want to be used for the Stalker you want to play as. The window will also have a checkbox for the Ironman Mode, a feature many of those who do "permanent death runs" will enjoy. If you die in-game when you play in Ironman Mode, all saves done for the entire playthrough will be removed. When you finally start a new game, you will be teleported to the base of your faction, which in case of Loners will be the Rookie camp in the Cordon. First thing you're going to notice is the weather - Modified Atmosfear 3 combined with fixed lighting in the renderer does its job magnificently. With the new changes in the code, the trees are now swaying, and its intensivity depends on the weather. Open up the console and see how you can change your field of view on the fly by just typing in "fov x" and "fov_hud x" (where X is a value you want to use for it) without replacing or tweaking any engine binaries.

On your way to Sidorovich you meet Fanatic and Wolf, guarding the entire place. Of course, many old characters you know from the entire trilogy will return. Sidorovich will be sitting on his butt inside the bunker as usual. Nimble has moved to the Cordon and will offer you his weapon or armor delivery services. Barman sits peacefully in his Bar and serves alcohol to Stalkers. Forester didn't move away from his tower in the north of the Red Forest. Guide, Doctor and his dog keep their Clear Sky friends occupied - Yes, Doctor's tamed pseudodog freely roams around the base and nobody cares. So, you open the doors up and Sid's ugly face didn't change at all. Next to you is a stash, time to see what somebody else left here for you. All over the game, all over the maps there are exactly 515 boxes with randomly generated equipment in them. The stash's content is generated procedurally during the initial game start, the content stays the same in one game but in different playthrough it can be either completely different or just empty. Once you discover all 515 stashes in your playthrough, their content will be generated again. Try not to pack your stuff in them because who knows what might happen, oh wait, you won't have to do this ever because the backpack in your inventory already fulfills this function for you. Once you activate the backpack, it is placed on the same spot you're standing on and you'll be prompted to give it a name - After you name it, the stash's location will be marked on your PDA.

Now that we've been introduced to a few basic things, it's time to get us a quick job. Sidorovich can task you with either eliminating a target of his choice, or he will tell you to clear the ATP from the bandits, just like you do in the first game. Wolf can also give you a job to hunt down mutants near the village. Random stalker will tell you to fetch him this and bring him that for quick rubles. If you visit the Clear Sky base, you can also get tasked with escorting a group of scientists who want to do research on anomaly fields. For now, let's assume you've skipped the first task Sidorovich wanted to give you and went for kicking the bandit arse in ATP. Sidorovich tells you to seek assistance from Fanatic. And this is where things get interesting - talk to him and he will become your companion throughout the mission. Time to introduce you to the companion system. You can talk to your NPC to give him orders, but many other mods have done this already. You can now control your companion without talking to him - All you'll need to do is press a key on the numeric keyboard. Number 1 on the keypad toggles the NPC's behavior, Passive Mode makes the companions just follow you and not attack anyone at all, Assist Mode gives your companions some awareness and they will keep their guns steady until the moment you open fire first. Aggressive mode makes your companions shoot everything and everyone who dares to stand up against you. Number 2 on the keypad controls your companion's movement. You can either make him stand still in Wait Mode or continue walking in Follow Mode. Number 3 on the keypad makes your companion move to the area you are looking at - Hold the key down and the destination point will have a glowing marker there - once you let the key go, the marker vanishes and the NPC moves to that spot.

On your way to the ATP with Fanatic, you might meet some of the old friends. The cats, Izloms and rats have been restored back into the game, and not only them - the standard Mutants got some variants. Some are smaller than usual and some are bigger, the blind dog now has a full-black variant which will irradiate you to hell if you'll be in his vicinity, Burers will shoot fire and electricity at you, and the Poltergeists have got a very, very dark sibling. Due to the improved weaponry, you actually have a chance against them all rushing at you. Gunplay is a fundamental part of the gameplay which in its vanilla state needed immediate improvement - At this point, we've taken some cues from the AMK Mod. The damage has been increased slightly, the bullets fly faster and travel much farther. At the audiovisual point, the weapons are purely vanilla - Sounds, models and animations remain unchanged. The weaponry is not the only part of Call of Chernobyl which took inspiration from AMK - the Mutant and NPC spawn rates sometimes can get very very close there. Together with Fanatic you reach the ATP and cleanse it of all the bandits who reside there. The job is done, Fanatic walks away free, you go back to Sid and you receive your payment. Suddenly, after you check your list of missions, you will notice that the first task you got right after entering the Zone is about the Brain Scorcher. Yes, this thing has been turned back on by the resurgent Monolith forces and you have to put a stop to it once and for all, and you are going to need proper protection, so here you are, preparing for your great journey to Sakharov to get a working psi-protection helmet from him. And before you ask, yes, the big brain in Lab X16 got turned back on too, and yes, the Wish Granter has been reimplemented too - it is fully functional and it patiently awaits your arrival. What wishes you'll be able to make, I am not going to tell at all - it will ruin the surprise.

On your way to the northern side of the Cordon, you can see a helicopter patrolling the area from above, waiting for you to make one wrong move or shoot one wrong person, flying around you in circles like a vulture seeking for dead meat to feast on. The helicopter is not something you should screw with, especially when all you have is a Makarov and a TOZ. The military can call in a chopper like that anytime with a radio so that the chopper could gun you down or provide suppressive fire for the military to run away and hide. Luckily you don't do anything remarkably stupid like trying to take it out a Makarov and it just ignores you. Be wary though, helicopters display different behavior per map area - Wandering next to the road like in case of Darkscape is fine but if it spots you near a military perimeter, it will not hesitate to blast you on sight. And don't you even think about damaging it too much, unless you love dealing with an endless swarm of rockets flying at your face. Let's assume this didn't happen in our case and we move to the small Loner camp north to the bridge. In one of the buildings you meet one of the mechanics scattered all over the Zone - every crowded place has at least one of them. He can fix guns for you, but forget about the upgrades - you need to find him a box of tools first. There are two kinds of toolkits in this game - Basic gunsmith toolkit and the Advanced gunsmith toolkit. So you haul your ass back to Sidorovich, buy the basic toolbox off him, bring it to the mechanic and so you are now able to perform first-tier upgrades to your equipment. Luckily toolkits come in cheap and the guys who need it are not that far away from the trader at all, and they can even reward you with either money or offering you a discount.

You start to make your way to the northern military checkpoint when suddenly an emission happens. Quite uncalled for if you take the time into consideration but to hell with it, let's hide. All maps have been carefully filled up with zones which are safe from emissions, so you just sit and wait this one out. Let's not go into semantics about how the Atmosfear 3 emission looks like, because we already know. Of course, all outside areas (maybe except the Generators) are subject to the effects of Emission, but there's nothing to worry about - safe zones are not a rare sight in CoC and there's a big chance you might already have reached one before the Emission enters its lethal stadium. So, let's go outside of the building and check out one of the anomaly fields in the vicinity. You pull out the detector and navigate smoothly through it and pop some artifacts out of the ground. Surprise - they are legit artifacts from Shadow of Chernobyl. Almost all possible classic artifacts from Shadow of Chernobyl have been inserted into CoC without any problems and they all work smoothly with the standard CS/CoP ones. Two droplets and a crystal thorn, sweet. Let's go to the northern checkpoint and meet the friendly... Ukrainian Military Forces? Well, so it has come to it - time to show these jarheads who's the boss. You check out the nearby stash that is laying on some huge rocks in hope that there's something useful in it, when suddenly you discover how wondrous the random content generation can be. A shiny Goldfish to the collection, and these soldiers won't be taking it away from you. One by one, you put them all down. You loot the corpses and then you notice and pick up an AN-94 Abakan in almost perfect condition. You load it up and fire it in full-auto just to test it out, and it seems that the development team really thinks about everything. First two shots have been fired in 1800 RPM and the subsequent shots have been fired normally in 600 RPM, just like a real AN would do! Comrade Gennadiy Nikonov would be very proud.

At this point we're gonna enter the Garbage, and here's where I'll stop for now. That's all I can say for now about what Call of Chernobyl is, how it feels and plays. I can as well write an entire big book about how Call of Chernobyl plays in all possible areas if really necessary, but let's restrict ourselves to the Cordon for now. To sum things up - complete openness and honesty about what CoC wants to be, loads of maps, true freeplay, better weather, procedurally generated stashes, dynamic tasks, keypad-controlled companions, ballistics and spawns bordering on AMK, restored laboratories, cut mutants, clever helicopters, custom anomaly fields, ShoC artifacts and an accurately functioning Abakan. As you can see, there will be a lot of things CoC will live up to. Some ideas about the gameplay or the mod overall can be good and other ones might be out of place - if these will prove themselves to be actually enjoyable additions to Stalker, then everything will be alright and Call of Chernobyl will live up to its expectations. If not, then we are either open for any of your suggestions to make it even better, or it will wither away in the endless sea of other very ambitious, yet unsuccessful projects. Remember that you too will be able to take part in success of CoC by contributing to its assets - Make a patch, mod, script or anything else, the community and its contributions were, are and always will be the deciding factor of freshness and liveliness of not only CoC, but all Stalker mods around. Right now, Call of Chernobyl is at the final bug-fixing phase, it can be safely stated that it's 99.9(99999999)% done and an official stable release might happen soon enough. Full list of features can be viewed here.

And here's another small word from me - I don't think that I might put up with streaming Call of Chernobyl again, because first of all, I consider showing off full gameplay streams and features to be complete hype-killers when done improperly (and in my case it happens often, sadly - compare my earlier streams to the Frozen Zone videos, now THAT is how you show something off). Second thing is, I don't have a microphone to spice the gameplay up with. Giving proper commentary will be a challenge for my slightly boring monotone voice and vocabulary - my russian or even english are still lacking and I will need some time to train myself on that aspect. All of these problems can be worked on and maybe later I will become someone who's truly worth of your attention. Until now, there is a lot to live up to.

This was Koma, and this entire text has been translated to Russian by Felinix, a good fellow and an administrator of "Всякая АТМТА".