Summary
Yesterday, GSC Game World launched the Legends of the Zone Enhanced Edition on PC, a remastered bundle of the original threeStalkergames. There’s a lot to celebrate, namely controller support and achievements, but one look at the subreddit and store pages, and you’ll see that plenty of fans aren’t happy, as every game in the trilogy launched to ‘Mixed’ reviews on Steam yesterday.
The collection has removed or replaced several examples of Soviet imagery, likely due to the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, which forced several developers at the Kyiv-based studio to flee to the country’s western border.This led to numerous delays for Stalker 2, withRussia even launching a disinformation campaign against the game. As a result, the studio refused to launch Stalker 2 in Russia, removing Russian voiceovers and subtitles. Now, it appears to be following suit with the original trilogy’s remaster.
However, fans argue that the Soviet imagery in the first three Stalker games wasn’t condoning Russia, and so it shouldn’t have been axed in the enhanced editions. “Most overdone censorship in a video game in ages,” writes one reviewer. “The main appeal of game’s world set in Chernobyl [sic] is that the place itself is trapped in 1986. ‘A museum of time’, according to Yaroslav Kravchenko of GSC in their documentary behind the making of Stalker 2. Abandoned buildings and radioactive surroundings serve as a permanent link to the disaster, with rotting hammers and sickles and propaganda posters constantly reminding us who’s responsible for this incompetence.”
“A Massive Downgrade”: Stalker Fans Have Even Penned A Letter To GSC
On the series' subreddit, one fan, u/SurDno, evenpenned a letter to the developer directly, signed by the “Stalker community”. It congratulates GSC on the launch of the remaster, and thanks the studio for “providing those versions for free” to those who already owned the original games, while also lauding the new features and quality-of-life improvements (including Steam Workshop support). But they also decried the sweeping changes made to the Zone, and calls on GSC to either revert them, or add an option to add the original content back for yourself.
“The atmospheric integrity of the Zone relies on preserving those historical elements,” the letter reads. “The games are set in a place stuck in [the] time of the Chornobyl catastrophe, and the remnants act not as a tool of propaganda but as reminders of the consequences of [a] totalitarian regime. The Zone’s appeal has always been about its unique setting - not just the anomalous nature of it, but the place and time that most of us have never been to. Removing those elements is directly robbing the players of the immersion that made the original releases so great.”
Incredibly bizarre to remove Soviet imagery from the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone when it practically exists as a monument to the institutional failures of the Soviet Union. It’s not flattering to Russia in the slightest.
GSC Game World has not yet addressed the backlash, but negative reviews continue to pile in, as many criticise not just the removed Soviet imagery, but the blurrier visuals, input lag, and other issues with the bundle.
