^^^ what the title says

Personally, I consider Call of Pripyat to be the best of the series. Everything fits together so much better, and there seems to be a lot more to The Zone. Lots of hidden secrets, lots of interesting things to see, quests with choices and interesting storylines, AI that roams around freely, and a little more to do than just shooting things ("peaceful" exploration and artifact hunting can both be very rewarding). Also, while Shadow of Chernobyl certainly has the most frightening atmosphere, I think there's something to be said for the uneasy calm of CoP.

I do have fondness for Shadow of Chernobyl, though, just because it's so unfinished and quirky. and I really wish that CoP had made medkits heavier, made bleeding a little more dangerous, and had some randomly-generated quests you could take from NPCs, to give freeplay a little more life.

Shadow Of Chernobyl for me.
It was the first Stalker game I played and was totally blown away on how authentic everything looked, combine that with a lot of mystery and spooky atmosphere and it's easily in my top 10 of best games I've played.
Call Of Pripyat is good but there were things I didn't quite believe, like the first map with ships on dry land, I'm not aware this is an existing situation around the Chernobyl NPP, I know around the Caspian Sea there are derelict ships but that is over 1000 miles away.

Call of Pripyat is definitely the most polished gameplay-wise, but Shadow of Chernobyl has better atmosphere and a more engaging plot, IMO.

I would be really surprised if anybody legitimately likes Clear Sky the most.

My opinion as well.

I could see it maybe, if the "living world" element of STALKER was really important to them.

This.

Clear Sky had the problem, that the Faction War System was totally annoying and Immersive Breaking. Most of the time it was optional, but that ruined the game for me.

Between the 3, Call of Prypriat is probably the best and which I would recommend first for new players to the Stalker franchise. Although, for some reason, Clear Sky is still my favorite for whatever reason.

The faction system was great on paper but it's for the most part half-baked in execution but still somewhat enoyable, for me, at least in the smaller instances (Freedom vs. Duty, just did not work, though you could get credit for soloing one of the respective bases.) I do think the new city Limansk was pretty cool and introduced the upgrade and repair system.

Still worth a look but I will admit it's probably the worst of the 3 haha, but is by no means, Clear Sky a terrible game.

Thus far, I prefer SoC over CS; have yet to play CoP. SoC had more of an effective atmosphere and clear sense of pacing than CS, allowed for electing between multiple objectives to follow at any given moment, and the weapons, while subject to some stat induced inaccuracy, were otherwise useable once you closed the distance to your target a bit. CS started off with a ridiculously fast paced territory control battle which felt out of place in a STALKER game and was generally poor to play due to the swamp being difficult to navigate (want to wade through instead of hunting for a walkway? Surprise radiation that your Geiger counter can't detect!) and the fact that your allies paradoxically can and do resolve most of the battles without you yet are the biggest liability once you join them, as they have no qualms about walking into you and pushing you out from behind cover and throwing your aim off.

That's not even getting into how the weapon inaccuracy has been upped to insane degrees, apparently to incentivize the player to engage in custom modification of their weapons, which I couldn't be arsed to do on account of it being inconvenient (you can only upgrade when you find the drive with the upgrade data, and we're not telling you where it is) and a waste of money (I was saving up for a good suit, but I got robbed out of nowhere and couldn't get my money back, though I did get my equipment). Furthermore, artifact hunting was made far more complicated than it should have been; having a detector give you an idea of where an artifact is would be ok, but having them be invisible until you find them by using the detector was time-wasting rubbish. After all that, it barely seems worth mentioning that the story wasn't exactly doing it for me either.

Old post, I know, but if you look at maps and pictures of the area, there are docks and derelict ships (mostly half-sunken, now), If I remember correctly, Zaton was mostly lake/river, and the appearance of the Zone caused it to dry up.

Funny you bring this up, a while back I saw a documentary about wildlife in the exclusion zone area and indeed it showed that the area went back from mostly cultivated agricultural land to a swamp and that the waterlevel in harbor was mostly dried up.

It still doesn't change my oppionion about the matter though, I still like SoC more. :^)

SoC.
Me and my friend used to play in pair for hours during high school.

That's a tough one. Believe it or not, I played through around 80% of Shadow of Chernobyl on my old Acer laptop. It was hilariously bad; I had everything on the most minimal settings, I ran looking at the ground, and all action made it lag so terribly. But it's also one of my most unique gaming experiences.

Then I built my desktop and...

If I have to choose a favorite, it'd have to be Call of Pripyat. Nevermind the Misery mod of legend, you have upgrading and a more refined system when it comes to weapons and armor as a whole. Sure, CoP has less areas than SoC but they all feel unique and are full of large-scale anomalies and memorable camping spots.