https://x.com/TNOQuoProQuid/status/2015872269482946858
Kudos to the STALKER games (at least the original X-Ray engine ones, haven't played STALKER 2 yet) for actually having wild animals that behave at least somewhat like living creatures and not killbots. Dogs (the regular, not pseudodog variety) will swarm you when in packs, but if you take a few of them out they'll start giving up and running away, and lone dogs encountered in the wild are pretty cowardly. Fleshes, being just mutated pigs, are generally pretty chill unless you get right up in their face. Boars are wilder, but it's kind of the boar stereotype that they're very aggressive.
Even among the more dedicated enemy mutants, like bloodsuckers, you still see them actually take advantage of their cloaking ability to maneuver around you and try to get good angles of attack rather than just charging in, and retreat when wounded (Call of Pripyat added a really nasty attack where if they catch you from the back they'll just latch on and straight up drink you like a vampire for massive damage, potentially instakilling on higher difficulties, so fighting them becomes this really cool dance where you have to somehow make sure you're always facing frontward an opponent that can become invisible).
I also hear good things about Rain World and its NPC AI
I wasnt optimistic about stalker 2, given all the bullshit stalker2 announcements over the past what, decade? But then a friend said it was really good! Aaaaaand it wasnt bad, but it didnt scratch the stalker itch. It didnt have the delicious eurojank feeling, it was too glossy, and the enemies were... Idk just didnt have the same feel as in og stalker. Mutants were just another enemy, and the danger wasnt something to be overcome with tactics, but with bruteforce it felt like. I was never scared playing stalker 2. In ShoC, i was terrified on multiple occassions (agoroprom underground being the first "oh fuck oh no i wanna go home" experience. I went in without enough ammo, didnt have a good savepoint to go back to to try and get ammo, and had to deal with bandits first. Then the bloodsucker came and i was so scared. It was great).
Stalker2 isnt a bad game, it just doesnt scratch the stalker itch for me. Why would i play it when i could play CoC/M, or Anomaly, or Narodnaya Solyanka OP-2?