I reached the end of the first area, got to the second and felt nothing so I just decided to close it.
Difficult to talk about I think, if only because I feel some aura of "maybe you should've just modded it" over my head. I don't mean that in that it's buggy, really I came across zero bugs total, but that it's lacking in any of sort of anything interesting that would otherwise fixed by mods that either made its balance matter at all or added things to make it interesting. This combined with the realm of eurojank community's general push to mod it or have a bad time. And maybe I'm the fool for not modding it to start, so I feel like I should explain my thought process.
My experience with Shadow of Chernobyl was really engaging, just constant back to back streak of encounters and sights to see that consistently unnerved me or kept my guard up. I didn't sidequest at all, but the main campaign itself felt like a nonstop barrage of exploring through anomaly filled tunnels and skin-of-your-teeth encounters. Bar a couple bugs, I made it about three hours in before I decided to put it away for a while, to come back to later.
This was all in vanilla, to make that clear. ALL in vanilla, no mods, and somehow I didn't crash more than once (and it wasn't a gamebreaking one. It was actually 2 minutes after a save funnily enough). So my interest was peaked when p much all of the discourse around me is about how Call of Pripyat was so much better.
It wasn't. Instead of vibes and powerful atmosphere and direction from location to location it was extremely isolated and detached plethora of side content. Like playing a bad open world game where I was checking off all the checkmarks where every quest was a less than satisfying venture with not a hint of tension. I raided a bloodsucker lair on my lonesome, took out a huge amount of them with one nade thinking "wow that was surprisingly easy", realized that maybe i should do it with the sidequest for it to be engaging, and then watched that sidequest be even worse. I walked through empty roads leading to marks on the map where encounters capped at a dog fight that caught me off guard with multiple of them only for them to go down just as easily.
I think my mistake is that Call of Pripyat isn't really made to appeal to me as much as it's made to appeal to people who loved SoC to death and found CoP to be a more polished mechanical journey. I did ask a few friends where it seems to be FAR less broken from a rudimentary level. But I don't know, both STALKER games weren't that hard and when I tried to apply the direction friends gave me I ended up breaking the game in half quite quickly which was just as unsatisfying. To me it was just an extremely boring venture, that both lacks the charm, and any appeal that I could've fallen in love with.
If it gets oh so much better, maybe I'll return. Personally I think it's just a complete skip from me and a disavow to anyone interested.
Difficult to talk about I think, if only because I feel some aura of "maybe you should've just modded it" over my head. I don't mean that in that it's buggy, really I came across zero bugs total, but that it's lacking in any of sort of anything interesting that would otherwise fixed by mods that either made its balance matter at all or added things to make it interesting. This combined with the realm of eurojank community's general push to mod it or have a bad time. And maybe I'm the fool for not modding it to start, so I feel like I should explain my thought process.
My experience with Shadow of Chernobyl was really engaging, just constant back to back streak of encounters and sights to see that consistently unnerved me or kept my guard up. I didn't sidequest at all, but the main campaign itself felt like a nonstop barrage of exploring through anomaly filled tunnels and skin-of-your-teeth encounters. Bar a couple bugs, I made it about three hours in before I decided to put it away for a while, to come back to later.
This was all in vanilla, to make that clear. ALL in vanilla, no mods, and somehow I didn't crash more than once (and it wasn't a gamebreaking one. It was actually 2 minutes after a save funnily enough). So my interest was peaked when p much all of the discourse around me is about how Call of Pripyat was so much better.
It wasn't. Instead of vibes and powerful atmosphere and direction from location to location it was extremely isolated and detached plethora of side content. Like playing a bad open world game where I was checking off all the checkmarks where every quest was a less than satisfying venture with not a hint of tension. I raided a bloodsucker lair on my lonesome, took out a huge amount of them with one nade thinking "wow that was surprisingly easy", realized that maybe i should do it with the sidequest for it to be engaging, and then watched that sidequest be even worse. I walked through empty roads leading to marks on the map where encounters capped at a dog fight that caught me off guard with multiple of them only for them to go down just as easily.
I think my mistake is that Call of Pripyat isn't really made to appeal to me as much as it's made to appeal to people who loved SoC to death and found CoP to be a more polished mechanical journey. I did ask a few friends where it seems to be FAR less broken from a rudimentary level. But I don't know, both STALKER games weren't that hard and when I tried to apply the direction friends gave me I ended up breaking the game in half quite quickly which was just as unsatisfying. To me it was just an extremely boring venture, that both lacks the charm, and any appeal that I could've fallen in love with.
If it gets oh so much better, maybe I'll return. Personally I think it's just a complete skip from me and a disavow to anyone interested.