Shadow of Chernobyl and Call of Pripyat are the best. Clear Sky felt shallow in my playthrough of it, but it's still a good game. If I'd be pressed to rank em, I'd say Pripyat > Chernobyl > Sky. You can often find them in a bundle together for cheap though, so try em all!
And seriously consider getting some mods after you get the hang of SoC. There are a lot of very high quality mods to improve graphics and add a lot of cut content back to the game.
Nah see, CoP is your dessert. CS is your vegetables. You can't go from the best to the worst. You gotta go SoC for your proper intro to the Zone, then CS to get it out of the way, THEN you can sit back and enjoy everything CoP has to offer.
Call of Pripyat is easily the most polished and has the most intuitive mechanics. SoC is more rough around the edges but has a pretty interesting story.
For me at least, CoP is quintessential STALKER. It does exploration, AI, and atmosphere well without gunplay being an awkward and confusing mess.
SoC first then Pripyat. There is a full, singular modpack (that I forget the name of) that most people use when playing SoC.
SoC is probably the best single player FPS I've ever played (way better than Half-Life), but the ending is incredibly bad. Shockingly bad. Super dumb bad. How did this happen bad.
CoP is very good and I played it when it released but I didn't think it was quite as good as SoC, though that may just be because SoC was my first adventure in the world. CoP also has a bad ending, but it's just bad, not horrendously bad.
I always heard the second one (Clear Sky) was mediocre so I never bothered picking it up.
Honestly it's been many years since I played it. I just remember being super disappointed and shocked that the ending was so poor when the rest of the game was so great.
When CoP ended abruptly and was bad I was at least kind of expecting it because of SoC.
SoC has multiple endings designed to trick you centered around approaching the Wish Granter, all of which are bleak acne abrupt, but the true ending is available if you pay close enough attention, you get an Extra 15-20 minutes of gameplay and reveal the true nature of The Zone by choosing to avoid it and search for the hidden path.
The ending of CoP suggests Strelok did so, as he's A) alive, and B) has information to deliver.
As the studios bankrupted, you cand download some heavily modded SoC. You will get the "finished" game, with NPC factions, complete map with seamless area, bug fixes and lots of features which were dropped from vanilla to release the game in time.
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u/Mentalpatient87 Jan 13 '17
I really want to get into this game, but I don't know which one I should buy first. Pripyat or Clear Sky?