


Furthermore, artifact hunting was made far more complicated than it should have been having a detector give you an idea of where an artifact is would be ok, but having them be invisible until you find them by using the detector was time-wasting rubbish. That's not even getting into how the weapon inaccuracy has been upped to insane degrees, apparently to incentivize the player to engage in custom modification of their weapons, which I couldn't be arsed to do on account of it being inconvenient (you can only upgrade when you find the drive with the upgrade data, and we're not telling you where it is) and a waste of money (I was saving up for a good suit, but I got robbed out of nowhere and couldn't get my money back, though I did get my equipment). CS started off with a ridiculously fast paced territory control battle which felt out of place in a STALKER game and was generally poor to play due to the swamp being difficult to navigate (want to wade through instead of hunting for a walkway? Surprise radiation that your Geiger counter can't detect!) and the fact that your allies paradoxically can and do resolve most of the battles without you yet are the biggest liability once you join them, as they have no qualms about walking into you and pushing you out from behind cover and throwing your aim off. SoC had more of an effective atmosphere and clear sense of pacing than CS, allowed for electing between multiple objectives to follow at any given moment, and the weapons, while subject to some stat induced inaccuracy, were otherwise useable once you closed the distance to your target a bit.

Thus far, I prefer SoC over CS have yet to play CoP.
