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my clear skies are all cloudy and grey

 
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dhex
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Joined: 13 Dec 2004
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Location: brooklyn, Nev Yiork

PostPosted: Tue Sep 30, 2008 11:16 am    Post subject: my clear skies are all cloudy and grey Reply with quote

to expand on the answer i gave cycle in the games you are playing thread: clear sky is both great and terrible, like an egyptian god. ignoring the whole rigamarole of not being able to play the steam version i bought - and getting jack all help from dev, distributor or valve - i don't think i could recommend anyone rush out and buy this without serious caveats, like "you may find the game unplayable" and "you only get five activations."

even the new 1.505 patch seems to have a whole new set of problems for some. i haven't tried to see if the steam version is up to date yet.

with any sandbox game there are going to be bugs. sometimes the bugs are very funny. but for the most part they're annoying. quests don't trigger, guides suddenly forget how to guide you anywhere, or the sky turns pink. it happens. i was one of the lucky few who played through vanilla stalker without a single patch and had maybe one or two crashes after hours of play.

bugs are to be expected. it's the price of supporting a largely independent dev house with unique and ambitious ideas. i basically donated 35 bucks for a work in progress, which isn't a horrible way of rationalizing this. but gsc clearly bit off more than they could chew.

it's not boiling point bad, to be sure; but there are some major issues.

the good:
-weapons/armor upgrades are really neat, involves some hard decisions.
-making it harder to find money and artifacts at the beginning isn't a bad thing at all. in fact, it's a good design choice in terms of immersion. it's also frustrating as hell.
-night is dark (see below)*
-pretty!
-it has the atmosphere of a gold rush boom town - hyperviolent, filled with all manner of entrepreneurs, packs of wild mutant dogs (who are now deadly), corrupt law enforcement and tribalism.

the neutral:
-the voice acting is all over the place, as is to be expected.
-it is again an all-male space. this can be argued either way, frankly; it's probably for the best since stalkers in high heels and bikinis would have been a bit much.

the bad:
-stability. there is none.
-no way to fast forward (sleep, whatever) through the night cycle, where you can't really get a lot done until you have some kind of night vision.
-anti-aliasing is actually useless under dx9 mode. does nothing at all.
-grenades. now, grenades are a great idea. grenade indicators are good too. but damn, you're basically toast if you take too long to kill whomever you're shooting at.
-you die a lot. while it's great to be stalking through the swamps in pitch black and hear the rustling of a boar, freak out and run for your life, having to reload several times in addition to instant and random CTD events is absolutely maddening.

*
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Cycle
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Joined: 08 Sep 2006
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PostPosted: Tue Sep 30, 2008 7:25 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I too suffered from very few major bugs playing through vanilla STALKER. I was hoping this would be the same, but I guess they didn't have a million years of development time like with the previous game. I guess I'll wait a bit, until it's been patched and modded a bit more. Plus it will be cheaper then.
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simplicio
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Joined: 03 May 2005
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PostPosted: Tue Sep 30, 2008 8:08 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I never went back to playing after being machine gunned upon entering the Cordon, but I didn't find it buggy. Playing Far Cry though I've been used to autosave-only (I really like that!) so I've lost a bunch of progress a few times after forgetting to quicksave.
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dhex
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PostPosted: Thu Oct 02, 2008 7:59 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

i actually went back to playing the original stalker - found a new way into strelok's stash that involved skipping most of the fighting and the bloodsucker, too.
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dhex
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Joined: 13 Dec 2004
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Location: brooklyn, Nev Yiork

PostPosted: Sun Oct 05, 2008 7:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

the 1.505 update on steam did nothing to help, even after a total reinstall.

you'd think growing up in the 80s would have taught me to never trust a russian, but obviously the lessons of red dawn were tempered by the lessons of red heat.
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