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Олександр КузьменкоGameDev Eng
21 May 2025, 13:23
2025-05-21
Remasters of the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. parts received low ratings on Steam due to players from Russia who are "burned" by the removal of Russian voice acting and Soviet symbols
Ukrainian studio GSC Game Worlds has released an improved re-release of the first three parts of the STALKER series, which faced numerous negative reviews from players. Some of them point to objective shortcomings, such as bugs and blurry textures, but most of the negative reviews come from Russians. They were offended that the Ukrainian developers «took down» the stele with Lenin, which was in the original.
Ukrainian studio GSC Game Worlds has released an improved re-release of the first three parts of the STALKER series, which faced numerous negative reviews from players. Some of them point to objective shortcomings, such as bugs and blurry textures, but most of the negative reviews come from Russians. They were offended that the Ukrainian developers «took down» the stele with Lenin, which was in the original.
STALKER: Legends of the Zone Trilogy Enhanced Edition was released on May 20th for PC, Xbox, and PlayStation. Shortly after its release, the games in the trilogy received negative red ratings on Steam, indicating that player feedback was overwhelmingly negative. Most of these reviews came from Russian gamers.
Although the STALKER remasters are not available for purchase in Russia, GSC Game Worlds has made the re-releases available for free to all owners of the original games. The main reasons for Russian discontent are the cutting of the Russian voice acting from the remasters, which was in the original, and the removal of Soviet symbols.
«Look at the reviews themselves, and you’ll see that most of the complaints are related to the changes GSC made to the game’s soundtrack and Soviet-era relics. The biggest ire among players, especially Russian-speaking ones, was the removal of the Russian soundtrack from the original games. While the game still has a Russian interface and subtitles, GSC removed them for this re-release (which the studio also did for the console ports of the collection last year)», — noted PC Gamer game reviewer Joshua Walens.
He has already completed the remaster of STALKER: Shadow of Chornobyl and says that he has encountered practically no problems.
«The point of this 'improved edition' is not to improve the game graphically, but to remove the Russian voice acting and shoot at the sounds of the language :),» one of the Russian players wrote in his negative review.
«Half of the game is voiced in English, half in Ukrainian, and some lines in Russian that they forgot to cut out. How could they give a f*ck to these remasters, they literally put a couple of filters on them and removed any Russian-Soviet elements…», complains another.
Joshua Walens points out that there are a lot of such reviews in all three remasters and confirms that the developers did indeed remove the stele outside Chernobyl itself with the inscription «Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant named after V. I. Lenin» in the remaster, leaving only two concrete blocks of it.
A stele from the original STALKER: Shadow of Chornobyl. Screenshot: Joshua Walensa
Stela from STALKER: Shadow of Chornobyl remaster — Enhanced Edition. Screenshot: Joshua Volensa
«It is unclear to me whether the removal of these things is a personal choice of the GSC developers in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, or a response to Ukrainian decommunization laws, which prohibit certain displays of Soviet and Nazi symbolism and which may have been the reason for the cancellation of the Ukrainian release of Mortal Kombat in 2019», — noted Walens, who added that he had made a corresponding request to GSC.
However, many players have complained that STALKER: Legends of the Zone Trilogy Enhanced Edition is a very basic remaster, lacking in improvements (such as achievement and controller support) and having its own flaws (bugs and blurry textures upscaled by AI). However, Walens says he has barely encountered these issues and believes that it is «the best version of STALKER you can play today.
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