Played through STALKER Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat again. Clear Sky was about how I remembered it when I first played it. Great, varied area design with a similar atmosphere to the first game, and even surpassing its tension and forlorn quality in some areas; places like the Red Forest stand out as among the best in the series. But gameplay wise everything is overshadowed by the misguided and poorly implemented faction wars system. Because so much effort was put into the factions there is very little side content unrelated to it, and the content related to the factions is repetitive and frustrating. Many of the areas end up feeling extremely empty if the player is not particularly interested in dealing with factional conflicts, and some areas, like the aforementioned Red Forest or Limansk which visually are so attractive, feel almost completely devoid of content beyond the main story-line related missions. There are some side-quests that can be initiated by random stalkers, but these are exclusively mundane fetch quests and the rewards for them are all so paltry as to to be insignificant when compared to faction rewards (which makes a catch 22-like situation where the faction missions are so repetitive and boring that I did not want to do them but the rewards for them are so good that they make the non-faction quests seem pointless). Story wise it presents a nice prelude to the story of the first game, while simultaneously leaving certain mysteries unresolved and having different enough characters that it does not end up as a pointless prequel as so many prequels end up. It's a lot like Half-Life: Opposing Force in how it presents an opposing viewpoint to Strelok.
Call of Pripyat was surprising to replay because I had not tried it since playing it when it came out 8 years ago. Back then I remember being disappointed because of how different the game was in structure to both Shadow of Chernobyl and Clear Sky. I personally really like the segmented, limited open world in SoC and CS, where you have individual, open areas through which you are lead through in the main quest, but you can stop at any time to explore these areas at your own pace. Each area being small enough that it can be hand designed. So when I first played CoP I thought they had decided to go in the Elder Scrolls wide open bullshit direction, so I think I was very dismissive and ended up playing through the game quite quickly. On this replay however I really came to appreciate how densely packed both Zaton and Jupiter are. Nearly every corner of the map has something of interest to explore, and most of these locations will be involved in side quests. These side quests in CoP are the real point of mastery in the game, because every single one of them is unique. I mean this is an FPS game at its core and it does side quest design better than 99% of CRPGs. Many of the side-quests are multidimensional, with plot-lines and objectives that can span the entire course of the game, continuing from one area to another (such as a storyline where you are accused of stealing a weapon by a scheming stalker in the first area, who sets you up in an ambush and escapes, and who then returns in the next area to steal your stuff, then leading to the quest conclusion). Some of them offer intricate scripted scenarios (like the bloodsucker lair and the sniper mission), that work amazing well considering how flawed to outright broken many of the scripted sequences in the previous games were (the Duty assault on the Freedom base in SoC that would always bug out in 1 of 100 ways), while others take advantage of the A-Life system for more unpredictable situations. However in making these larger, more consistent areas they had to sacrifice much of the unique visual designs of the previous games, and Zaton and Jupiter both end up looking very similar; there is nothing that offers a real dramatic change of scenery like Yantar or the Red Forest from previous games. Another shortcoming is the final area, Pripyat. At the same time that this area offers the most bleak and haunting atmosphere in the game, that rivals some places in the previous games, it feels as devoid of content as much of Clear Sky. This does in a certain way serve to increase the feeling of loneliness in the area, but that doesn't make up for how disappointing the area is in comparison to the rest of the game. It has every indication that they simply ran out of time, and this is especially apparent in how abruptly the final mission is initiated.
Overall STALKER is one of the few series where the developers carefully listened to criticism after each game and managed to consistently improve on the systems throughout each entry. Despite Clear Sky being so riddled with bugs it did generally improve on the combat mechanics and introduce many features that were lacking in Shadow of Chernobyl such as repairing and upgrading; even the poorly implemented faction wars was an attempt to give the factions more depth than what little they had in SoC. And even if I personally prefer SoC for its more unique, atmospherically dense locations and more intriguing plot, Call of Pripyat is probably what most people wanted out of a STALKER game from the outset.
