It isn't a survival experience since you don't have to engage with the survival mechanics to survive, you can just as easily buy everything and repair through technicians as you could in the base games. Each of them contributes to the overall strongest thing of what makes Stalker Stalker, which is the athmosphere, and while I do agree that the Anomaly storyline is nowhere near as good as that of SoC, it does have all of the other things creating the athmosphere of Stalker. Artefact hunting is integral to the series, and without it the reason for the stalkers being in the Zone is lost. Is that not Stalker too? CoP even does more to explore the life of Stalker with those excellent sidequests, but I guess it isn't stalker since you're not basically stalker in it.Д®ach of the things you said not being Stalker is also not true. In SoC you do things most of the stalkers could not do, so it is not so much a story of the stalkers as it is the story of Strelok and Marked One.ДЄnd if Stalker is about the story of stalkers, where does that put CoP then? You play as a military man from the get-go, it's clear Degtyarev isn't a stalker and one third of the game you're basically playing as military soldier.

You start as a rookie, do missions and get higher in the feeding chain. Sure, SoC has you going from Rookie to Action Hero, but this is no different from a run in Anomaly. You see them get attacked by the military, and then you help them and go on to fulfill your objective. There are sidequest which expand on top of the stalker characters, but these are mostly only times you get to see the story of stalkers. You meet stalkers and they guide you forward before going on in their Iives. Rest of the stalkers just exist or benefit him in some way.

All the side characters are mostly there to drive his plot forward. If a Stalker game is made on the basis of the stalkers in the world, then why the hell is playing as one of the regular joe stalkers not playing to the story of the stalkers? In SoC, we don't so much follow the story of stalkers, we follow the story of Marked One, the greatest Stalker to ever live once you find out that he's Strelok. That is, quite frankly, just gatekeeping.

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