DraQ, what SMG in particular is bothering you ? I think it should be possible to edit some file, no ?
VSK-94 you get as part of your starting gear as recon. It's referred to as "sub machine gun". It's a sniper rifle, for fucks sake, intended to be a cheaper alternative to Vintorez. It's pretty much as far from an SMG as it gets.
Going back to SoC Complete. Something very interesting happened – I was send to get a special rifle in the dark valley for a duty guy. When I get there, I cant find the rifle, and the indicator on the map changes to Agroprom institute. I think “WTF ?” and go there. Then, when I reach Agroprom, the map location indicates a place on the underground. So I enter it and start looking for the rifle until I find it in the corpse of a fucking bandit! The motherfucker robbed the rifle from dark valley and brought it to Agroprom!
Actually, it was probably just the guy from DV who travelled to Agroprom. This happens a lot, NPCs generally move around.
By the way, that’s something Im finding really cool in the Stalker series – the fact that it combines a somewhat simple shooter gameplay with RPG concepts of open-world and emergent gameplay, resulting in a kind of “RPG-Light” experience, managing to share some cool similarities to RPGs without the complexity/overload of stats, micro-management, etc.
I don't consider those concepts RPG exclusive, but yeah.
Back on topic, I recently had another go at the series. After completing Call of Pripyat, I have to say that gameplay wise there is little reason to go for SoC and CS. SoC is playable with the complete mod, but the sandboxy part is non-existent and the gameplay is pretty shallow. It had great novelty value in its day, but apart from the story, there is little reason to play it when we have CoP.
Actually, there plenty such reasons. Grenades work better, GLs work correctly, anomalies are more lethal and widespread, atmosphere is better and game generally has stronger survival feel.
In CoP there is little risk to the Zone and anomalies are walk in the park.
Clear Sky used to be a buggy mess, and it pretty much still is atm. One good thing about it is that the sandboxy bit starts to feel right (still pretty rough around the edges, though), you get artifact detectors, equipment upgrades, emissions - but story wise, it is very, very poor, and the whole faction warfare shtick is very clunky.
Equipment upgrades were shit in CS, and they fucked up gameplay by making unupgraded gear too shitty to be usable (AK-74, for example barely managed to contain its spread to your FoV when you looked through the scope - in single shot mode). Ballistics of some low tier weapons was also shot, with shotgun pellets and pistol rounds simply vanishing in mid-air after travelling less than 20m (who the fuck wrote this shit??).
Still, repairs were effective money sink so the economy worked nicely, and both anomalies and enemies were deadly. Some areas (Red Forest in particular) were really cool too.
Too bad the ending was unbelievably shitty.
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