242 on 26/9/2008 at 11:59

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Plenty of artifacts can be found in CS, and they're considerably more useful than in SoC. By all means find Mama's Beads and Night Star as soon as possible, I found them in Agroprom - little swamp in the north-east corner of the map. Mama's Beads gives +4 to life regeneration, and this "+4" if far more effective than "+600%" of SoC's Soul. Night Star gives "+20" to blood loss protection. You won't need to drag lots of med kids or bandages with you anymore.

And at last I managed to evict Bandits out of Hangar in Garbage, so they won't respawn there anymore. I found out that while at least one NPC team (or player) stays at some respawn point, respawn there is stopped. So to stop respawn at a faction's base, you need your faction team to take over the base. And they won't do it until in-between outposts in their way are under their control. You may capture the base yourself, but there is no guarantee your comrades will come to occupy the area. First you need to provide their pass by capturing outposts in their way.
So, if f.e. you joined Stalkers, and PDA map shows a group from Agroprom going to attack Bandits base (hangar), but two outposts at Agroprom-Garbage transition point are occupied by either Freedom or Duty, Stalkers will never come without your help. Freedom and Duty are neutrals for Stalkers, so Stalkers won't attack the outposts, and without capturing the outposts they won't attack the hangar.

PS: Instead of Night Star read Kolobok. Night Star increases max weight, it's not as necessary as kolobok.

242 on 27/9/2008 at 08:55

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You'll want to equip appropriate protection artifact when you enter an anomaly field. They are designed specifically for that. The dangers are: psi, fire, chemical vapours. And obviously radiation. I don't wear anti psi, fire, chemical artifacts when they aren't needed. My current set is: 2 x jellyfish (+2 antirad each), +4 antirad artifact (don't remember how it's called in English), mama's beads (+20 bleeding regeneration), kolobok (+4 life regeneration).



I mixed up names. I meant mama's beads and kolobok, not night star.

driver on 5/10/2008 at 14:37

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Did you manage to get both artefacts from that area of twisted ground? (The one with psy and flame amonolies). My detector always shows two artefacts, but I've only ever managed to get one of them to appear.

242 on 12/10/2008 at 13:24

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Finished the game yesterday.
Stats said the in-game time since the beginning was 1 month ;)

After the bridge to Limansk the game became very linear, like CoD. And Limansk in no way can be compared with gorgeous Pripyat in terms of awe and exploration, Limansk was basically a narrow and short corridor, as well as Hospital after it.

In general, I liked Clear Sky. It's better than most of modern games, and it's one of the few PC exclusives nowadays with proper and very nice graphics, interface etc. But if compared with Shadow of Chernobyl it's clearly worse even despite all its nice innovations like hunting for artifacts or weapon/armour upgrade. IMO, the main reason is the "war of factions", which mainly led to nearly all its faults like overcrowding of the maps, thin and underdeveloped story (devs just hadn't time for it), and lack of mystic and dense atmosphere of the original game. As an add-on it's quite nice though, because it presents more new features and length than add-ons usually do.

Anyway, will replay it sooner or later, want to try other factions than Loners or Duty.

Manwe on 13/10/2008 at 14:23

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Wait till you get to limansk, it all goes downhill from there. I thought clear sky was great until that point. Like 242 said it turns into a horrible corridor shooter with trial & error sequences and badly scripted events. And the worst thing is they probably spent most of their time and ressources designing those last levels. I barely spent 2 hours in red forest and 2 hours in limansk and in the hospital (and probably 5 mins in the last map...), while I spent about 15-20 hours in the rest of the game. It's such a waste of time.