Am I a bit overstocked for not being past the first zone?
You raided the base by the cordon's edge, didn't you? o3o
He'd have at least one of the better rifles if he had I think. I'm a bit more interested in knowing where he managed to find a gold fish in the cordon though. I also see he got the hidden merc suit from the stalker village.
I played through Clear Sky with arsenal overhaul and maxed out difficulty. Cool mod, but playing it again made me realize why I didnt enjoy clear sky as much. Two things, the first is that the "factions" are pretty poorly fleshed out. Except for the swamp, I never had any of the factions actually fighting with one another. When they do fight, and they call out for assistance, the AI will either lose badly, or do amazingly and finish up whatever it wanted before you can get there. I cleared the swamp without lifting a finger. clear sky basically did everything themselves. The second was that while the map is very open and you can basically go about doing whatever, a lot of times you are pressured to GO GO GO! DO THE THING! STRELOK IS GETTING AWAY!!!! The Limensk area was amazing, but I never really got to experience it much. I wanted to take my time, explore a bit, but time constraints. Not a bad game, just unsatisfying.
Call of pripyat is definitely a step up. It's not as big, which is meh, but overall it's generally a better game in most other respects.