L.U.R.K. is an amazing mod, and it's not even easy to see that it is. An amazing amount of effort was put into subtle features that make a lot of difference to the game's atmosphere, especially the weather. Instead of vanilla STALKER's sky fading into gray and everything being shrouded in permanent fog so the devs didn't have to make distant landscapes, the LURK authors went and made it themselves. And then added a ton of different kinds of weather, before realizing they had to remake all their distant landscapes for each of the dozens of different types of weather. And they still went and did it all, just for a feature they could easily have scrapped because "well most people wont care anyway".
After all that their plans for improved AI were also fucked up by their weather cycles, again thanks to the original dev's shortcuts. So they had to remake it all a second time. LURK was delayed for months because of this but it was worth it, the AI is a LOT better, even compared to the latest STALKER game Call of Pripyat.
The amount of changes and new content is amazing, and I think they did a flawless job at implementing it, as people who haven't played the game in a long time like Yoda hardly even notice they're not playing the original. It all fits into the STALKER experience seamlessly.
It's been a month since I've played and there's been a bunch of updates already, such as porting Clear Sky/Call of Pripyat graphics to SoC. They've also almost completed a completely reworked arena (and yoda you'll be happy to know it doesn't suddenly end), and they're working on porting all Clear Sky/Call of Pripyat maps to SoC. Definitely play this if you have stalker. In fact buy stalker, then play this.


