I tried playing stalker: shadow of chernobyl recently and it has been the first game in a long time that i just flat out quit because it felt so bad to play.
normally I dont mind suffering through some poorly made games as long as the story and atmosphere can carry it but I just couldn't do it. I have a friend who's
very into modding games, which I don't normally do because I prefer the game to be played how it was intended, and he talked me into just modding out the stuff I didn't like.
He kept sending mods and saying "this is basically vannila they changed almost nothing." and then i'd look at the page for it and it would say 300 new guns, 10 billion quest added,
all game dialogue changed, 87 new endings! eventually I was just left wondering why modders are like that and gave up. I read the book the stalker games are based off a year or two ago, A Roadside Picnic, and it was interesting to see what elements they took from it to use in the game. While the game is set so the zone is heavily populated with people and outpost and mutants the book has none of that, leaving the zone to be an empty, desolate kind of hellscape. I know that wouldn't have made for the most interesting game experiance but I still think it would have been cool to see as maybe a short project.