DraQ said:
Outdoor locations are nice in CoP, and Pripyat is pretty freaky even in full sun, my only problem is that you never get the "OMG Dafuq will I find... OMG dafuq have I found!!!1..." moments in latter STALKERs.
I liked documents and I liked nonlinearity, but X8 simply lacks atmosphere. It has no mindfucks and you're fully familiar with all you encounter.
Compare X18: Dark, 2-3 previously anomalies, new artifacts, remains of unencountered faction, unexplained phenomena driving your SAN down, four unencountered kinds of mutants, glimpeses of fucked up stuff (alien/mishapen tube fetuses).
Tho I did feel that X8 did it greatly by surprising you with certain scary moment, I do agree that I didn't expect to get any WHAT THE FUCK MAN moments like the ones I had when going through X18, although I also believe that the other underground areas in SOC are way under what X8 offers, Agroprom aside from the bloodsucker wasn't that great, and the lab at Yantar was pretty much shooting everything in sight and then backtracking while you... gun down everything in sight, and then you have the CNPP underground which is an almost exclusively firefight zone with the added bonus of being able to get a different ending.
It's much harder to put mutant animals down in CoP IIRC, even if you're accurate.
I have to say though that my mutant combating tactics are pretty much running for my life/spray and pray, I never tried to headshot dogs or other mutants so maybe that has something to do with it.
New behaviour and tactics notwithstanding the animals in CoP are definitely after your ass. In SoC they did attack you because you're full of delicious meats, but typically ran away after finding out you were also full of hurty/killy bullets and not afraid to dispense some.
I am going to check that when I install COP in my laptop, I probably didn't notice it because I played with Alundaio's AI mod when I got the game.
I liked how lethal the anomalies were, though, and how lethal enemy fire was. I also liked that you were always low on money.
While I appreciated the sense of discovery that the first game offered, it also had a lot of dumb errors that destroyed much of the experience, for example, the retarded stash system that makes exploring by yourself really unrewarding and the horrible as hell secondary missions which are a mix between Fedex, stupid Fedex and kill kill kill with the added annoyance of having a time limit not only to finish the tasks, but to get your reward too, gah! By the end, the only thing I really liked were the "hardcore as hell" shooting parts... thankfully, starting from Yantar Lake I was pretty much killing Monoliths/Soldiers/Mutants every five minutes and I got a lot of fun from that.
Then, you have CS, a game that, while replicating almost every thing SOC did wrong, also gave me much more of that intense shooting experience, which added to the fact I installed a mod that removed the stupid stash system along with some weapon tweaks and lots of bugfixes made me enjoy it much more than the first part.
Until the fucking A-Life system got destroyed by some stupid bug that didn't get fixed, and as if that wasn't enough, the final boss fell from a bridge and got stuck, making the last moments of the game as anti-climatic as they could be, sigh.
Anyways, right now I am playing SOC Oblivion Lost 2.2 with the anti-stash system mod+weight reduced to 40.0 kg and I have to say it has become a much better game, though I am getting a lot of Game Over screens thanks to the military at Agroprom, I left half of my ammo at the car park at Garbage, and while I wasted most of the other half killing the dozen bandits in the way to Agro, five of them attacked the park and massacred Gus along with the other guys that were guarding it, damnit
Edit: I forgot to mention the stupid percentage that made some of your shots fail even if they hit the target, but thankfully I discovered that while in the Cordon and installed a mod that fixed it.