Aidan on 25/9/2008 at 17:35
I hate S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky. To think that they released this eagerly anticipated title with all the promise of enhanced graphics and gameplay, and what do I get? A rushed, very raw and buggy title; what a waste of money and time it has been trying to get this game to work.
There’s no point in raving about the game and how it looks and plays if you struggle to even get it to play. It keeps crashing to the desktop all the time, and I even have the 1.5.0.4 patch! You think this would have been the first thing they addressed.
Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl felt raw and unpolished; not the best game and not the worst, but it least it was more stable. I swear it’s been a long time since I’ve come across something so half-baked in a game, and it’s a major title too! It’s got so many damn bugs, it’s unbelievable.
Clear Sky should have spent another few months in the studio so they could play test and work out all these problems before hand. They should rather have released it next year when it was properly done; this is more what I’d expect from a beta version.
If they have any sense they will fix it up quick and proper! And if there’s any hope of a third game in the series it, they had better learn from the mistakes they’ve made, and spend more time on it, too. Clear Sky is more of a shoddy expansion than a true ‘prequel’.
Oh, and by the way, if you were wondering if the world is flat and if you can see the end of it, just go to the swamps and walk all the way to the left.
Disgraceful.
Phatose on 25/9/2008 at 22:36
Sadly, most of the stability problems are script related, and the community is fixing them themselves.
Yeah, it has issues.
Probably, what I'd say was the SoC was a diamond in the rough. CS is kimberlite. Both need some more processing. The latter needs a lot more.
duckman on 26/9/2008 at 05:23
In my personal experience, Shadows of Chernobyl was far more unstable than Clear Skies. It must vary rig to rig.
242 on 26/9/2008 at 11:20
Quote Posted by Aidan
Clear Sky should have spent another few months in the studio so they could play test and work out all these problems before hand. They should rather have released it next year when it was properly done;
I agree.
However I haven't experienced a single crash yet on highest settings under DX9 and I think I spent about 15-20hrs playing it already. There are plenty of gameplay bugs related to faction war, but not stability issues, for me anyway. Actually I'm surprised it's that stable after reading about many crashes people had. 1.5.04 probably fixed majority of them.
To tell the truth, while I LOVE SoC, I don't like CS nearly as much, I think atmosphere of Stalker is lost because of the infamous "faction war" and huge amount of people. However, even in this not quite finished form, I still find the game more interesting and involving than majority of modern AAA games.
Aidan on 26/9/2008 at 17:28
Back to my point of the swamp. When you walk all the way to the end, it's like, "Hey, when did it start snowing in the zone?"
It's all white. I don't know if this just happens on my PC, or maybe they were just too lazy to put up a proper background or something.
All in all, I like the idea of Stalker. I like the story, it's more original, and there's a lot of potential. But I think that a lot more 'polishing' should go into it. Maybe if a more experienced studio took it under it's wing.
I just can't shake that feeling of incompleteness. Perhaps because It's foreign and buggy.
242 on 26/9/2008 at 17:50
Quote:
It's all white. I don't know if this just happens on my PC, or maybe they were just too lazy to put up a proper background or something.
A screenshot maybe? I don't remember seeing anything particularly bad when I went to the edge of the Swamp. There were desolated hills up to the horizon, but at least it looked much more natural than background in TDS f.e. ;)
Quote Posted by Aidan
All in all, I like the idea of Stalker. I like the story, it's more original, and there's a lot of potential. But I think that a lot more 'polishing' should go into it. Maybe if a more experienced studio took it under it's wing.
Experienced studio nowadays = very big money = big risk = product for the masses = no joy for majority of TTLGers.
polytourist97 on 26/9/2008 at 19:24
Sad, but true. It's really too bad to hear all these problems about Clear Sky, because I really liked SoC.
TF on 26/9/2008 at 19:36
It's true, it is chock full of bugs and strange, utterly bewildering design decisions. I just hope the people who made mods like AMK hop on the CS train, those guys can probably fix anything, just AMK for SOC had thousands of new lines of scripting, including interface and everything.
242 on 26/9/2008 at 21:19
Yep, but as soon I recently went for a night airing in Dark Valley in my search for artifacts with gorgeous Radwind theme playing in the background and saw first beams of the rising Sun, I was ready to forgive any and all faults of CS. There still is a magic of the Zone that even faction wars and many bugs can't kill. Graphics and sound are absolutely stunning.
My complaints aren't bugs, I somehow almost don't experience them and game is absolutely stable for me (at least so far), my complaints are 'faction wars' (and too many people in the Zone as result), linear main quest, weak story.
Many aspects of SoC were improved though. Even though I don't like CS nearly as much as I like SoC, I'm grateful to GSC that they continue to experiment and implement complex (and therefore risky) game mechanics. They could leave it as it was in SoC, they could just improve graphics and balance, not critical things like that, but they wanted to risk with potentially quite exposed for many bugs layer of faction wars.
Manwe on 27/9/2008 at 00:52
You people have a really short memory. When SoC was released it was as buggy as clear sky if not more. It was completely broken, the engine wasn't optimised, I remember I spent about 2 hours trying to tweak the game in order to get a good balance between fps and image quality before even trying to play. To this day I still haven't found a way to turn on anti aliasing without getting a 70% drop in fps. Basically the game was utter crap when it was released, and I really hated it. Later on after a few patches I got to like it a bit more, it had a nice atmosphere a slightly different gameplay than other games out there, but at the end of the day it wasn't all that great. It was too repetitive and boring and the story didn't make much sense.
Now clear sky is out and everyone is complaining about how much the game sucks compared to SoC which was soooo much better. Yeah right... It's the same crappy engine so you're bound to have the same issues. Sure they haven't fixed a thing, anti aliasing still doesn't work under DX9 (not properly at least, I still get a 60-70% drop in fps when forcing 2x anti aliasing on...) and all the new graphical features are a joke, they're mostly broken and useless anyway. But seriously what were you expecting from these guys ? They released clear sky in the same state they released SoC. And now they're fixing it with patches, and I'm sure the community will come up with mods to make the game even better. Now like most people I'd rather have a finished product than a beta version when I buy a game but don't go pretending that SoC was any better when it was released.
Quote Posted by 242
my complaints are 'faction wars' (and too many people in the Zone as result), linear main quest, weak story.
I don't understand your complaints, in terms of gameplay or atmosphere CS surpasses SoC in every way. I don't really care for monsters so much, and I'm pretty sure I've met as many monsters in CS as in SoC anyway. Weak storyline and linear main quest ? You've just described SoC. Even though the main storyline in CS isn't much better and the voice acting is really poor, at least it makes a bit more sense and it doesnt feel so linear since you can choose to side with so many different factions (I'm not really sure how much it impacts the main storyline though as I haven't been able to join one yet). Also the characters are more fleshed out, they now have a bigger set of dialogues, so you can actually talk to them and feel like they're actual stalkers in the zone and not just npc's standing around repeating the same line over and over again. The maps are now much bigger, and there's much more to do than just shooting people. All you did in SoC was shoot people, loot, shoot people, loot and so on. Now at least the gameplay feels less shallow, trading, repairing, and modifiying (which were all impossible in vanilla stalker) add a lot of depth to the game, and looking for artifacts is now actually fun.
Also I don't really understand where all the hate towards faction wars comes from, they're nothing more than repeatable quests to earn money and reputation very much like the fetching quests in SoC where you had to go fetch monster parts over and over again. They both feel like they're out of a bad mmo, but at least the faction wars make the world look a bit more dynamic. And it's not like you have to participate in it or anything, you can ignore it if you want.
It probably comes down to personal opinion in the end, but I'm enjoying clear sky far more than SoC (which I never found that great). It's just a shame there are so many bugs and design issues, the game could be so much better if these guys had a good QA team. Or maybe more simply if they had more money.
