no, no, dont get me wrong its not so much a "bad" game. It is alright and it is a lot of fun.
But it just feels so unreal in many situations for a game that is so gritty and dark. I mean take the player interaction with NPCs or well other Stalkers as example. It feels almost like its just slaped in the game without any real idea of how to create a believable scenario. Its been a long time that I played the game, so maybe I am wrong, forgive me for any errors, but I remember the begining you had this merchant that bought your wounded body and now you have to do ... stuff for him, I think?. This in my opinion feels so uncreative particularly the way how it starts and how it is shown to the player. The moment you step outside of his bunker though where you see all the stalkers around the campfire and one of them playing his guitar is where the game REALLY starts in my opinion. They also wasted a lot of potential with the factions that have been in the game. It seems like all you do is just to follow a rail road with the Tschernobyle plant as the "end". And nothing that you do outside of it really matters. Or only very little of it. I had the most fun exploring those labs (in one mission), hunting down for artifacts and exploring the zone. But what the game lacks is simply memorable characters and personalites. Something that games like Deus Ex always had. The NPCs you interact with in Stalker dont have enough of a personality to be clearly indistinguishable from each other.
Another very good example is call of Pripyat. A decent game, as far as shooters goes. But the start of the game is so ... I dont know ... unimaginative that its mind boggling. A short text. You drop in the zone with a weapon. That's it. Nothing more. You are some kind of military officers with the target to find a lost group of special forces which had the target to find some kind of laboratory or what ever. This is what I mean with presentation. There is no contact for the player that tells him something about the world outside the zone. That he is steping in to this little world, but that you have actually something outside there as well. Military personal that stay in contact with you, giving you sometimes a radio signal, asking how your mission is going or situations where you report in etc. something that you could see as interaction. This alone would have done a lot to improve the story of the game.