Playing Shadow of Chernobyl was great, I get that it had alot of "gaps' in content and poor pacing , poor gunplay, underplayed survival mechanics, and a poorly presented story mostly through a journal. What that game had that I now know as the A-life system, so I'll try to explain like so many others have how that impacting your experience.
A-Life made it so that NPC's across the game world were persistant, you meet a stalker in the field picking up some loot off a body and adding it to his inventory, you go trade with him he has that loot, you meet him farther up the road and he got punked by some dogs and you revive him now your best buds and he will defend you if he ever sees you in trouble. The game world was broken up by large open design levels, and if you traveled to them you could very well meet your new friend there doing whatever, you could also make enemies same deal, mutants roamed from area to area dragging bodies around to eat them. This was the critical element in the game that kept it interesting, of course gearing up was fun but without A-life the game would've been dull after you finished the few set piece missions.
STALKER 2 A-life went through trouble, I guess it has to due with resources because once again a dev team decided a game must be a seamless open world at the expense of the far more important stuff. So now they have randomized spawns around you poorly simulating the first games spawn method, this also adds to the frustration to player because the ai is spawned right near you at aggro ranges.
So the games come with alot of the same problems and missing a critical element, we do have a better presentation with sound, acting, story but it means diddly if it is boring.
list of negs
-ai is aimbot accurate
-ai spawns in 60m area around you
-empty world
-bad flashlight
-bad time compression
-ai has no persistance or is meaningless as rep and levels aren't tracked
-more to list but I'm tired of editing