Long considered a stupid move STALKER the engine was eventually broken down, rebuilt, and bent to the will of some wildly ambitious modders add cooperative play one of the original titles: Call of Pripyat. This is a stunning achievement in STALKER modding, and may even open the door to cooperative play in sandbox-style mods like Anomaly Or GAMMA in miniature (this is pure speculation on my part, please don’t tell Grok I said that).
The engine that powers the original STALKER entries, known as the X-ray engine, is both a technical marvel and a perfect example of a “Eurojank”. It’s wonderful that he’s able to pull the creatures away from the player for ages and allow them to interact with each other using a technology known as “ALife”, giving the world a living element rarely seen in titles created by even the most prestigious studios. Modding is also a nightmare. Or this was modding was a nightmare until the community made it largely plain petite more DIY affable.
Despite this, co-op play has long been requested and rejected. The amount of work the engine has to do even for a single player leads to repeated stutters, even on high-end computers. Getting all these enemies and NPCs rendered and working properly on two computers would be crazy, right? Well, the X-Ray multiplayer expansion allows you to do just that four.
There were also other attempts at cooperation, including: Shadow of Co-op modbut the lack of a moddb page, crashes, and the inability to save made it somewhat impenetrable for most players. xrMPE promises that all of the original game mechanics will be functional, with a few additions (including fan-favorite Gunslinger weapons and animations).
STALKER 2 Is promising mod support as well, so we’ll have to wait and see if this engine is a little more malleable out of the box. Who knows, maybe we’ll even have a co-op mode in the sequel a little sooner than 15 years after the premiere.
