S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

[CCIP]

Originally Posted by tripjack

I should warn you now though to prepare for a disappointing ending. I don't know if any of the big mods like Autumn Aurora rectify this issue or not, but it is obvious that GSC ran out of time or money or motivation when designing CNPP. In the vanilla game it sucks.


lolwhat

Yeah, with the exceptions of the very creepy underground labs, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. doesn't do linear shooter action all that well. It's the same with the more linear parts of the later 2 games, and in my experience Clear Sky was the most guilty of that. Call of Pripyat handles those parts much better and there's some really good ones, but they're still not up to par with classic story-driven shooters. It's just obviously not one of the developers' strengths, and it's also obvious that they're trying to pull off some AAA-shooter-style sequences with only a small fraction of a AAA art budget and a finicky home-made game engine. I actually wish they left the game world open instead of forcing you to that ending.

There's definitely mods that deal with it a bit, mostly by opening up later parts of the game to more free-roaming, but most still leave those linear final levels, because you sort of have to go through them to finish the story.