Deadly anomalies, dangerous mutants, anarchists and bandits... None of them will stop Duty on its triumphant march towards saving the planet!
Смертельные аномалии, опасные мутанты, анархисты и бандиты не остановят "Долг", победоносной поступью идущий на помощь мирным гражданам всей планеты!
Freedom: Western funded mercs trying to do a color revolution in the zone, put hits on neutral stalkers that cut into their profits, allies with bandits
Duty: environmentally conscious adults who let neutral stalkers hang out in their cool rustpunk city and donate all their artifacts to ecologists.
Explain to me the lore, why are there factions?
I started playing it, but then I had to kill some gopniks in a parking lot and thought "this sucks, why am I killing these poor idiots? Why can't we all scavenge in peace?" so I quit it
Basic faction overview:
-Loners: Typical Stalkers come to escape the struggles of their life outside the zone, either searching for quick riches, or to avoid prosecution for crimes, debts, etc. Generally neutral, friendly, and cooperative.
-Bandits: Loners and other faction members that have turned to crime within the Zone to survive/get rich. They steal, rob, mug, hustle, and kill anyone they can get one over on to steal all their weapons, food, medicine, and artefacts. Depending on the particular game, they are anywhere between automatically aggressive to all non-bandits to basically Loners but with a different set of factions that they will automatically become violent with. Lower level bandits can generally be reasoned with or intimidated into being compliant, but their bosses are pretty much categorically mob boss scumbags who you should only cooperate with if you're looking to get rich at the expense of someone else's misfortune.
-Military: Ukrainian military personnel that are either running special forces operations into the Zone, or manning military outposts and checkpoints into and out of the Zone. Outsiders to the Zone, their attitude toward literally everyone in the Zone is somewhere between maliciously dismissive and outright hostile. Depending on the game, their standing orders are basically anywhere between "keep the vagrants corralled in the Zone and let God sort them out" and "shoot to kill, these are criminals nobody will miss".
-Duty: Founders are ex-military personnel abandoned by the Ukrainian government after special forces operations went sideways. After surviving, they form a faction that acts as a Zone-based paramilitary force who believes that the horrors and supernatural forces of the Zone are dangerous and should be studied in secret by scientific personnel, only so that it can be understood well enough to be destroyed. Perpetually at odds/war with Freedom, though the level of hostility varies depending on the time and place. Live under strict code of conduct similar to a military cadre, to give members a sense of purpose and belonging in a chaotic place. Freedom and Duty are in a tense ceasefire by the time of the latest game, and have very little sense of comity between each other.
-Freedom: Anarchistic (though not necessarily in the leftist manner of the term) faction that believes the wonders of the Zone should be open to the world and researched openly for the good of mankind. Believe that, in spite of the dangers of the zone, there are great things to be discovered within, and the Ukrainian military and Duty are misguided in their efforts to hide the Zone from the world, with some members believing that the evils of the Zone propagate precisely because Duty and the military are singularly focused on killed anything "mutant" or "unnatural" in the Zone with impunity. Drink and smoke weed a lot, call everyone "bro", friendly with basically everyone other than the military, Duty, and the Monolith.
-Monolith: Brainwashed former Stalkers and military personnel who serve a mysterious hivemind entity formed in the breached reactor at the Chernobyl NPP. Basically a religious cult, who like to collect artifacts as religious icons and blessings, and also tend to build antennae out of scrap in the Zone for reasons unknown. Hostile to literally everyone that are not Monolith. Highly effective fighting forces with advanced equipment, may possibly operate as a partial hivemind in combat, and are even able to use secret weapon development documents found within secret military labs in Pripyat and the surrounding area to develop things like Gauss Rifles.
-Ecologists/Scientist: Government personnel with outside funding that are sent to work with the locals to study the mutants and artefacts of the Zone. Motivations and ulterior motives are opaque, but they pay very well for work, and have access to advanced medical and scientific equipment. Pacifist by nature, and pay for security details and exploratory squads from the local Stalker groups.
-Clear Sky: Breakoff group of the hivemind that controls the Monolith that seeks to destroy the Zone. Disbanded by the end of STALKER: Clear Sky.
Think of it in a manner similar to Fallout (in the big picture sense). 'The Zone' is the area you play within, which contains powerful anomalous artifacts, but there are also mutated humans and wildlife who seek to kill people. From a lore standpoint, while some of the artifacts are insanely powerful, they also have extreme drawbacks. This is part of what gave rise to the various factions vying for control/power inside the zone
Each faction has different aims within the zone; for instance, Duty (red above) seeks to impose order via militaristic force and seek to keep the Zone and its anomalies contained by killing anything mutant or those who oppose them, Freedom (yellow/orange) believe in freedom of access to the Zone and it's eccentricities, Ecologists are government scientists, Monolith serve the 'consciousness' created within the zone, etc
And of course you have free stalkers, bandits, and so on
similar to Fallout
Yeah the problem is that while Fallout is a whole world, The Zone is what? 50 km in radius at best? That makes it hard to believe in non-countries factions and shit trying to seize or whatever a region.
well the Ukrainan military is by far the largest force, and there are also a lot of mercenaries hired by western interests fight there as well. And mostly everyone still has to resist being killed by mutants and anomalies while in the zone, which makes long term control difficult.
Yeah, and the lore behind how the Zone exists and what it can do gets real fucking wild if you dig deeply enough. There's stuff about the Monolith's obelisk-like deity possibly being, like, a satellite thing sent by aliens that crashed out of orbit a thousand years ago, to the Zone being a conscious entity that is adapting to intruders and growing stronger for it.
Most of the memes of this series are, like, deep-fried pictures of Ukrainian military dudes saying "it's gonna get way worse" and CHEEKI BREEKI IV DAMKE, but the actual lore of STALKER is weird as shit.
the Monolith’s obelisk-like deity possibly being, like, a satellite thing sent by aliens that crashed out of orbit a thousand years ago
the real interesting thing about that is that it's basically a leftover from the real early stages of development (before even the Chernobyl setting had been settled on), when it actually was just a 2001: A Space Odyssey monolith, complete with the whole idea that it causes beings arounds it to "evolve" (which was how the mutants were explained away). They changed it later on, but still kept that aspect of the lore as speculation by in-game characters
There's only a few thousand people in the entire Zone at any given time. It's an incredibly deadly and hostile environment. The Ukrainian government's authority extends exactly as far as the range of a conscript's rifle and no further. People who aren't familiar with the Zone's dangers, with outdoor survival, with combat, and with stealth will die very quickly. As a result the factions can operate with relative impunity since they can simply go to places where the Ukrainian military can't easily follow them. Also, it's Ukraine from 2007-2009. If you need to get through a military checkpoint you call the guy you know in the army and show up with some cash and some vodka.
In the US the Zone would be locked down tighter than the border, with layers of defenses, drones, constant patrols, cops, and god knows what else. But Ukraine is poor and very corrupt so the borders of the Zone are very porous and the only effective means the government has to act within the Zone are a very limited number of special forces soldiers who have been able to learn enough to survive there.
The US military would be responsible and efficient at something, particularly at keeping people safe from some danger
:doubt:
Oh god no, that's not what I meant. I meant they'd lock it down tight and shoot anyone who came in or out.
That would be a good job. No, if the Zone happened in murica, every single evangelist death cult would claim getting infected with the mutagens is good, written in the Bible, a human right, the only way for people to get eternal salvation, and the only way to free murika from anarchotransmuslamism
Instead of Duty and Freedom we'd have positivity culture wellness hippies trying to put Kolobok up their asses to experience a higher vibrational frequency while Evangelicals decide the Wish Granter is god and start sacrificing children to fulfil increasingly violent yet inane prayers.
The Loners are kind of a catch-all term for all stalkers who are unaligned with other factions. It's a not a group with clear, coherent goals - there's various subgroups within it which have different goals and ideas. Bandits (the guys you were shooting at) are supposed to rely more on robbery and extortion, kind of operating like a local mob. In that first mission, they're holding a guy hostage for information, and later on when you enter the Garbage you'll see them robbing a guy, and trying to lure you into a trap. In Clear Sky, they also do a whole lot of robbery, including a bunch aimed at you, and in Call of Pripyat there's side-quests related to them holding a guy hostage for ransom and doing loan-shark schemes.
I'd say that having this clear Loner-Bandit distinction is kind of weird overall, and the lines ought to be a lot more blurred, with some Loner groups also using similar methods, and the Bandits not being a unified faction but rather separate gangs that sometimes fight over territory. And of course it's rather impractical for the Bandits to have their own uniforms distinct from the Loners so you can tell them apart. But there's some design considerations here - representing the scenario I proposed would be a lot harder to actually do than just having 2 clear factions, and while it might sound cool it can end up frustrating in practice (there's a reason games do actually try having distinct visuals for enemies - it can be very frustrating to get shot by someone you couldn't identify because they weren't visually distinct).
As for the other factions:
- Duty is a faction that believes the Zone is an existential threat to humanity, and is dedicated to containing it in the short-term (by hunting mutants, and establishing order in the Zone), and somehow destroying it in the long-term.
- Freedom on the other hand believes that the Zone is a wonder and ought to be studied so it can benefit humanity. They want this to be a free process however - as it stands, the Zone is being studied, but specifically by Ukrainian government agencies, while Freedom want the whole region to be open to everyone, not subject to a specific state.
As a consequence, these two factions are in conflict - Duty thinks Freedom are idealistic idiots who would unleash mutants on the world, while Freedom thinks Duty are militaristic morons who would destroy something wondrous that can spit out artifacts which can heal any wound and render one immune to fire.
other factions are:
- the Military, who are pretty self-explanatory - they're trying to control the Zone on behalf of the Ukrainian government, and as such are opposed to all stalkers (except for ones they've hired) since simply being in the Zone is illegal.
- the Ecologists represent those government agencies I mentioned - they're the ones officially sanctioned to study the Zone, and typically cooperate with the military.
- the Mercenaries are an enigmatic faction - the mercenary part is pretty clear, but who hired them isn't, with it being implied that it's some outside party (perhaps Western intelligence agencies) with an interest in the Zone.
- the Monolith is a faction of religious fanatics, who worship the Monolith/Wish-Granter (a supposed alien artifact in the center of the Zone) and violently oppose any attempt to penetrate deep into the Zone
I think the big distinction between Loners and Bandits is that Loners, most of the time, will leave you alone and have a loose fraternity with each other. They don't work together, and they won't go out of their way to save you unless you have a personal connection, but they do have a loose code of conduct and mutual respect. They're the survivors, the guides, the people who map the zone and understand and respect it's secrets. Their goal is to exploit the zone for whatever they can find that is of value, and survive.
The Bandits, on the other hand, are mostly petty criminals with very little experience in the Zone. Whereas the Loners want to find riches in the zone, the Bandits explicitly want to take from other people
the chad Loner faction guy who hangs out in front of the Freedom base to loot all the bodies while Duty and Freedom fight each other
Makes zero sense that Duty's base in the Bar, where all sorts of stalkers hang out, and there's arena with fights to the death. While Freedom resides on an actual abandoned military base, doesn't allow anyone else there, and keeps an eye on the barrier so mutants and Monolith can't advance. They really should've been swapped.
