Gunplay seems very bulletspongy

It is S.T.A.L.K.E.R… you compare it to fallout, is fallout not bulletspongy? This isn’t a PvP game, it is an open world RPG… There is various levels of armor, some of it is pretty strong, and there is also extensive differences between types of bullets and weapons. Without armor, you’re going to be dead in a couple quick shots. With armor, you will bleed to death without bandage or medkit. Some of the bullets will specifically be good for high armor penetration, some more effective for soft targets. If it is like the past S.T.A.L.K.E.R. titles, head shots are a 1 hit kill with any bullet, unless protected by armor. If you think S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is bulletspongy, clearly you’ve never had to try to run by the military base machine gun tower outside the cordon… Or the number of times an NPC gets a good headshot and BOOM game over, time to load from save, in an instant… You can get very far in SoC with the silenced pistol only by going for stealth and headshots to insta-drop enemies. So satisfying.

weapons seem very static and weightless

?? Attachment options, ammunition options, jams and equipment damage, upgrade-tree for every individual weapon… You can set up one AK-74 for sniping and another for close-up bullet spraying.

general atmosphere is dull

AI enemies just run around like imbeciles and spray into the general direction of the player

Have you ever played a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. title? SoC had literally revolutionary AI, where NPCs behaved in ways never before seen in video games prior, such as intelligently grouping, splitting up and flanking, scouring an area in a human-like-way instead of just walking to wherever you were and then giving up when you aren’t there, taking cover, reinforcing and covering each other, and applying grenades in actually useful ways. I mean yes, it was still a 2007 game, it definitely wasn’t perfect, and there was loads of wonkiness and weird NPC behavior that you could exploit, but at the time it was mind-blowing. Clear Skies took this idea even further and applied it faction-wide to the entire map, and suddenly you were dropped into a highly dynamic full scale war with shifting fronts and struggles over strategic objectives. Amazing AI is one thing that the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. titles are known for.

You can hear in the video ~1:24, an AI yells “Cover me, I’ll hide”. I’m guessing they included in this clip to hint and signal that this game will have the same kind of focus on great AI mechanics. In some of the indoor clips, you can see that the AI are actually taking cover during the fire fight instead of moving around. Even if they took the NPC AI code from Call of Pripyat and just directly shoved it into this game, it would 1) be nothing like what you just described and 2) be head and shoulders above NPC AI in even recent titles… I’d love to see some significant improvements and iteration still, though.

It just makes it look like this game was made for the sake of having a sequel

Hurray! Exactly what everyone was asking for! We just want more original S.T.A.L.K.E.R., yes, correct.

You can not like the atmosphere and environments, that’s fine, if so this game really is not for you at all. You can’t say it doesn’t look immersive, unless you’re just trolling.

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It just looks like a generic 2015 game or something. Gunplay seems very bulletspongy, weapons seem very static and weightless, general atmosphere is dull, AI enemies just run around like imbeciles and spray into the general direction of the player.

What is really ironic is that ^ describes fallout perfectly, EXCEPT for dull atmosphere…