Overall, I'd say that "not especially dangerous" is my primary criticism of CoP. The areas feel like a theme park, where you can generally walk anywhere with little to no fear of encountering anything dangerous. Say what you want about how annoying respawning bandits and whirlgig anomalies in the middle of the road were in SoC, they contributed to the feeling of constant danger. You couldn't just sprint across the countryside towards your destination, and expect to be fine. In CoP you do this all the time. People warn you about the Jupiter complex being dangerous, but there's nothing there, save for a few dogs and a scripted mercenary encounter. Pripyat mostly has packs of dogs and rodents roaming about. It just feels very themeparkish and compartmentalized. Walk to objective without a care in the world, complete objective, walk back to claim reward. It doesn't help that the maps are fairly small. Slightly bigger maps and a greater density of mutants, bandits, hostile stalkers and random anomalies would have helped CoP a lot.
Wholeheartedly agreed.
You could technically sprint a lot in SoC, but you had to know the area well or you ended up suddenly crushed into a ball the size of your fist which then exploded for seemingly no reason.
Also, Svarog detector was overkill.
I disagree with running back to trader with weapons, because in SoC they were worth very little while also pretty heavy. Armour was more worthwhile, but overall it was the artifacts that were most profitable, plus you could pawn off excess consumables and ammo you generally collected anyway.
My second criticism would be the narrative. I'm not expecting crazy plot twists and superb writing from a Stalker game, but there's basically no plot in CoP. Even though SoC's plot was a bit of a trainwreck at the end, it nicely fit with the setting and themes of the game. I was intrigued and curious while playing SoC, and this, for instance, made locations like X18 a lot better. In CoP, it was more like "eh, I'm in the neighbourhood, guess I'll go check out this crash site". You spend most of the game looking for dudes, eventually find them, and then it's time to kill Monolith again. They sort of tried to make it into a story of all the people in the region, but didn't really characterize any of them properly. That said, gathering the squad and venturing into Pripyat was cool, and the ending was definitely the game's strong point. Way better than the abomination that was SoC's canon ending.
I actually enjoyed the story of CoP much more. It might not have had a lot of twists (like the one with Strelok), but it actually attempted (and somewhat succeeded) to make the original reveal less derpy. It also didn't have cringe worthy sidequests with cringe worthy writing (seriously, mutant parts sidequests for scientists, I literally cried while reading dialogue).
Of course, lack of something like x18 sucked, but I guess the lack of feeling of mystery was mostly caused by zone not being especially dangerous. Ok, Zone in CoP is still a pretty harsh place - you have to wear protective equipment, you may end up eaten, gunned down or die in an area with distorted laws of physics, but if you stayed sharp there was little actual danger. Zone in SoC was a place where you were happy to just have came back alive, coming back with loot and no extra holes was downright euphoric, and hardened veterans routinely drunk themselves unconscious to just to forget about some things they witnessed *other* than majority of their friends and acquaintances in the zone having died horribly, because that was actually one of the things they could have got used to.
So I'm at a bit of a loss here. I can recognize that, as a game, CoP is superior. However, I had more fun with SoC, and it was a much more memorable experience in general. Is Clear Sky worth trying, bros?
If you have money to burn or torrent at hand, then yes.
It's horribly broken, literally falls apart near the end (as in one guy threw the entire endgame together in one evening with the help of a crate of booze, then the game shipped without further testing or corrections), features inconsistencies, delayed game breaking bugs, lack of proper aiming with SPAS and grenade launchers (inherited by CoP), lack of proper aiming with pistols (fixed in CoP) and is very combat centric. It also has somewhat broken ballistics (most glaringly some projectiles just vanish past their designated effective range which is fucking short), homing grenades (with very limited blast radius) and selling guns is actually worthwhile.
Otoh it has effectively the harshest economy, artifacts are actually rare, anomaly fields are actually fucking dangerous , you can die very easily, and most of the area is SoC with improved (and often changed, but still consistent) area connectivity, plus two new excellent areas - swamps and Red Forest (different part).
Alas it misses any worthwhile dungeons (though Red Forest is definitely tense exterior) and ending areas are linear and mostly shit (Limansk has some interesting stuff - namely space bubbles - despite being linear, but it's still not particularly interesting, because it's effectively HL2 in an otherwise open game). Oh, bloodsuckers are annoying and suck. Poltergeists, OTOH, are ridiculously lethal (which is pretty cool) thankfully you may even avoid encountering any of them.
Visually it's about on CoP level.
