S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Clear Sky

[Resinence]

As anyone who liked SHOC probably knows, clear sky is due for release in August, they are promising a polished release with the missing maps etc that never made it into shadow of chernobyl.

About a week ago the E3-2007 build was leaked, I recently managed to grab a copy of this and have a play around with it.

I have to say, "X-Ray 1.5" is a far more polished engine even in it's current beta state than the shit that was released with shoc, my relatively mid-range gaming machine had no trouble at all reaching 60fps with everything turned on, and I still have some issues in the original stalker with framerates. The AI is much improved, they take cover and peak/lean around, run from and throw grenades properly. There really isn't much there, just the marsh level with some missions that they showed for the demo. Hopefully it actually gets finished on time.

Some Screenshots:

[Shroom Man 777]

An expansion pack? Or a patch?

[Resinence]

It's a prequel to stalker, and will be standalone.

[CaptHawkeye]

Yeah, from the looks of it its basically the game they wanted to make. Especially with the fixed AI routines. Maybe they'll also stop using RPG nonsense to rate the game's weapons?

Silly me, I'm just being optimistic again.

[DarkSilver]

Kinda looking forward to this myself...

[Zixinus]

I am not sure I am. The first Stalker didn't impress me that much and I had to get mods to play it properly. Even then, I felt the game broken. I am barely 1/10th trough the game and I already have the best gun and armour available from the Bartender. Hell, I could even get the exo-suit if it weren't for the fact that I couldn't run in it and it had shitty night vision.

[Stark]

Still kinda looks like poo. So long as it's easy to convert Oblivion Lost to it, I guess we'll get a better UI, better shaders and better balance right off the bat. The only selling point I care about is proper big levels, not shit mods already fixed.

Calling Stalker 'SHOC' is utterly hilarious. What use is an acronym when it's 3 letters shorter than the regular name?

[DPDarkPrimus]

Even with all its bugs, STALKER was a great game. I hope Clear Sky has a more optimized engine so I can actually run dynamic lighting and have playable framerate.

[Losonti Tokash]

Calling Stalker 'SHOC' is utterly hilarious. What use is an acronym when it's 3 letters shorter than the regular name?

The sort of person who would go through the trouble of writing "S.T.A.L.K.E.R" unironically and yet still forget the last period mark.

[Stark]

Even with all its bugs, STALKER was a great game. I hope Clear Sky has a more optimized engine so I can actually run dynamic lighting and have playable framerate.

With full dynamic and a bit of tweaking (especially Oblivion Lost's proper-dark nights), the game looks awesome. It's just so small, short and easy. Stupid weapon balance.

I has g36 naow i win game headshot-headshot-headshot-headshot-headshot-headshot-headshot-headshot-bored.

[DPDarkPrimus]

Playing without visible crosshairs makes the game so much better.

[Stark]

Are you suggesting the game is only easy when there are visible crosshairs? You don't understand 'conefire' or 'the g36 scope = infinite headshots'? Even with crosshairs on, the aimpoint doesn't move, and the hip-shot conefire is far larger anyway, making headshots a matter of luck. Using the G36/FN2000 scope in vanilla, every shot can be a headshot, and the AI on hardest setting can't match you at range. It's nearly as bad using the addon scopes; JSF is a headshot machine using an Abakan with PSO, and it's one of the worst guns in the game!

The game balance is totally broken. Huge guy with absurd power armour? 1 easy headshot later, he's dead. Squad of guys? Engage from hundreds of meters away and pick them off easily. I shudder to think what it's like on 'normal' - even in OL, which makes the hardest difficulty much harder, it's STILL too easy. It's not a matter of hitpoints or damage ratings, but the whole way the combat works with conefire, NPC 'hit odds' and poor AI.

The game's combat is fucking easy and almost the only way to die once you get going is to be surprised at close range. Clear Skies will suck cock if they don't fix the way the firefights work, because you'll be able to shoot some guy at the start, take their rifle, and laugh through the rest of the game.

[DPDarkPrimus]

No I'm not suggesting the game is easy with visible crosshairs.

I'm saying when you turn them off and force yourself to use the iron sights the game becomes a lot more enjoyable.

[CaptHawkeye]

The game balance is totally broken. Huge guy with absurd power armour? 1 easy headshot later, he's dead. Squad of guys? Engage from hundreds of meters away and pick them off easily. I shudder to think what it's like on 'normal' - even in OL, which makes the hardest difficulty much harder, it's STILL too easy. It's not a matter of hitpoints or damage ratings, but the whole way the combat works with conefire, NPC 'hit odds' and poor AI.

According to some random interviews, they fixed the AI's perception of "lol long range fightin" and now they killed the devs lots of times at a distance. The developers seemed to heavily imply that if you want to kill lots of enemies at once, the only way you're going to do it is by bringing friends or you're fucked. Either that or they're piss poor at their own game.

The game's combat is fucking easy and almost the only way to die once you get going is to be surprised at close range. Clear Skies will suck cock if they don't fix the way the firefights work, because you'll be able to shoot some guy at the start, take their rifle, and laugh through the rest of the game.

Even the short range combat leaves shit to be desired since the AI takes the most predictable paths towards you. It would help if they lobbed some grenades occasionally, and according to the previews, that's going to happen.

[Stark]

No I'm not suggesting the game is easy with visible crosshairs.

I'm saying when you turn them off and force yourself to use the iron sights the game becomes a lot more enjoyable.

The conefire is so bad with hipshooting, it's hardly worth firing without irons at all.

Hawks, if there's one dev team I'm sceptical of, it's these guys. The can call it 'x-ray 1.5' all they want: we all know it's xray 1.0.

[CaptHawkeye]

Hawks, if there's one dev team I'm sceptical of, it's these guys.

Even beating out Bohemia Interactive? Ouch.

The can call it 'x-ray 1.5' all they want: we all know it's xray 1.0.

Hence, what STALKER should have been? It's pretty hilarious that they're trying to market it as an expansion, when it's obvious to everyone who took even a cursory glance at it during development that it was the original path. They just couldn't meet it because they made all sorts of Molyneux-esque promises back in 2002 when shit like "AI routines" and "open worlds" was unheard of for everything except Flashpoint. God knows what other shit they had on the drawing board and never even told us about.

[Resinence]

It still has the retarded "lol 500 shots to the chest and I'm not dead but 1 headshot..." combat, btw. It's quite hilarious that so many people complained about unrealistic combat in a survival game yet they won't change it. The new long range combat AI routine basically consists of them taking cover and taking potshots in semi-auto mode, occasionally they will all stop, and then spray down your position with full-auto fire all at once. They don't seem to throw grenades often, but I'm not sure what difficulty the demo is locked at, seems really easy.

Stark, AMK mod is way better than oblivion lost, it's on the oblivion-lost.de forums at the moment, although the combat is really punishing because of the realistic weapon values, you basically can't win without taking cover or against more than 3 guys.

Even beating out Bohemia Interactive? Ouch.

The hype pre-shadow of chernobyl was great "open worlds, ai can finish the game before you, satellite mapped terrain" and all this other shit, I was so pissed when I finally got to play it and it had pretty much NOTHING they promised

Even with all the stuff fixed, I probably won't really play clear sky until oblivion lost or AMK are ported to it, I just can't stand vanilla stalker combat, it's that fucking terrible.

[DPDarkPrimus]

They took out the AI can beat the game bit for obvious reasons - no one wants to play a game only to find out it's impossible to get resolution.

Certainly a good part of the terrain near the plant was modeled after the real place, and I think the nearby city as well, but the end felt so linear that it probably wouldn't have mattered anyway.

[Stark]

Stark, AMK mod is way better than oblivion lost, it's on the oblivion-lost.de forums at the moment, although the combat is really punishing because of the realistic weapon values, you basically can't win without taking cover or against more than 3 guys.

Hacked difficulty doesn't interest me. Any idiot can turn conefire up, reduce stability and make damage really high. The combat is broken because of the system is fundamentally stupid; the battles are really poorly set up and particularly don't suit the setting. In a regular corridor stroller you wouldn't notice, becuase you'd control the terrain to force the combat you want. In open areas you can't do that, and the AI would have to be really good to work in such environments.

Frankly, anyone who claims 'realistic weapon values' can suck my dick and die. I'll give AMK a go if I can be fucked playing Stalker again, but such meaningless statements don't sell it at all, particularly when the problems are so systemic to Stalker. We've all played hilarous mil-wank mods, and they aren't fun, and making the game harder doesn't magically make problems go away. I was actually stunned when I actually stuck with the boredom long enough to finish the game; it's WAY shorter than I thought it was.

[Resinence]

Actually it's more that getting hit staggers you, and the AI don't miss you by 500meters anymore, but your rant about "realistic weapons" is pretty funny At least the AI isn't as bad as ArmA? And yeah, seriously, stalker is so short for a "free-play" game (lol @ "freeplay" patch that just removes the ending). Stalker turned out decent despite GSC, not because of them , kinda reminds me of a terrible game that retards seem to love humping, starts with an O? Made by bethsoft?

[Stark]

Fuckin modders and 'zomg realistic' bullshit which means 'we love these guns they RULE oh and those other guns are in too i guess'. I was actually stunned when OL made the game more lethal without making 'zomg teh ubbbbergunz' (well, any more than Stalker had already with it's terrible equipment levelling). It's sad that being 'kind of' open-field makes Stalker have all the problems of both types of play and none of the advantages, and includes some of it's own (like the infinite spawning bandits near an area that goes to a military base... hmmm).

Oblivion might have been ass, but at least they pretended there was heaps of content. Most of the missions in Stalker are useless because you don't need guns or money, as the entire economy is broken and the 'levelling' is finished in the first hour or two.

[Commander 598]

OL has the problem where everything is worth absolute shit if you're trying to sell it and worth 10x more if you're trying to buy it, which is just silly frustrating. I went all the way up to fucking Red Forest just to get a Dragunov and weapons that were worth enough to sell and/or use with just some slightly above newb armor. It was not amusing.

On the subject of weapons, you want them to not be just blatantly bullshit (Why does my high powered sniper rifle do nothing unless it's shooting someone in the head? Also note: Helmets aren't very good at protecting against getting shot in the head.) while not being unbelievably good.

Didn't that exoskeleton come with basically no armor or radiation protection? Yeah that was bullshit.

[Resinence]

Interesting discovery, you can use clear sky's shaders in shoc (gsc calls it shoc, so shove it ). Allows you to get Ambient Occlusion, hurts performance a little though, I guess you can take that as "clear sky may run worse at max settings", although cs beta seems to run about the same fps as normal stalker with normal stalker shaders, to me anyway (not going to bother testing). Ambient occlusion seems to make things a lot darker, I haven't messed with the gamma settings to compensate, so the images might be a bit dark. The shots were taken at 3am ingame time, so it actually is supposed to be dark, the normal shaders are quite bright for nighttime.

Order is SHOC/CS



The second set are quite different, look at the colours and the shadow of the ladder, as well as the self shadows on the wall behind him.

[Stark]

OL has the problem where everything is worth absolute shit if you're trying to sell it and worth 10x more if you're trying to buy it, which is just silly frustrating. I went all the way up to fucking Red Forest just to get a Dragunov and weapons that were worth enough to sell and/or use with just some slightly above newb armor. It was not amusing.

On the subject of weapons, you want them to not be just blatantly bullshit (Why does my high powered sniper rifle do nothing unless it's shooting someone in the head? Also note: Helmets aren't very good at protecting against getting shot in the head.) while not being unbelievably good.

Didn't that exoskeleton come with basically no armor or radiation protection? Yeah that was bullshit.

Sadly, given the daft way looting works in Stalker, having the economy like that is pretty much the only way to balance it. It's not like in OL you don't almost immediately have nigh unlimited money or anything. Having everyone drop valuable weapons requires either massive inflation or magically bad resale prices.

I just want to know why Res thinks anyone cares about this trivia for a game that probably won't be out for six months to a year and that we've all already played. I mean, yeah, we know what Stalker looks like. We know what rubbish GSC have said about it. Are you getting paid? I mean, you can use shaders from the engine in the engine? Shock fucking horror! Are you saying it's the same engine? NOBODY KNEW.

[Ohma]

Uhh...I don't see the difference between those two sets of pics.

EDIT: Oh, wait, there's a shadow behind the ladder, do I get a prize?