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

Noone can really blame bit-tech for having troubles with unproperly tested game. If they experienced serious crashes on different PCs, then it's problem of developers. I doubt they have thrown the game away after few crashes without trying to solve it...

 

I think clear sky has everything going for it and if they can clear up the bugs early on it will do well against the compition definitely in the
top ten

 

Oh dear glad i did,nt buy this,sounds about as good as the first one.got it free with my motherboard and still sitting in the box waiting to be played.

 

I think Bit-tech made a fair call on this one. If it is this buggy on MULTIPLE systems after a week of consistent testing, it is a broken product. That's it. If it's not broken for some people, great, but in all likeliness it will be for the majority of users, which a review has to cater for. Also no game review should be held back more than a week imo, especially single player, and the review must go up considering the current state of the game. All the fanboys need to get over themselves and accept the fact that for many this game presents a completely unacceptable experience, thus the 3 is justified.

 

My view exactly. We will revisit this later and we praise the gameplay heavily - I still love how visceral the combat feels in STALKER and Clear Sky very much and will relish a chance to play a stable release. However, we have to bear in mind that people are potentially going to take our review as a reason to spend £30 on this game and given that it just isn't stable at all we can't score it highly. Three systems with different hardware and it still isn't working? That's a broken game.

 

woah, loads of bickering here... from a standpoint of someone who only played the original for a few hours, as it crashed and it didnt really grab me so i didnt persist with it, just sold it on...bit-tech review a game from their experience and unqiue colletive perspective of being more objective than the fanboys that are appearing on here. The game was unstable for them, not just Joe, but Rich and Tim who are very experienced reviewers so i think you should concede your point of your version being flawless, or start your own website and right about it there. you could have simply mentioned it here and they could have acknowledged it, but you appear to have a real thorn in your side(i cant remember who you are, but you all know!!) about what bit-tech has written and whilst this is a forum and is designed to allow people the right to their opinion, my enterpretation on what those flaming the review have written, you simply fail to actually listen to what any of the writers are saying.

peace

fatman

 

I do not agree with this review; the game has had two patches since release and it feels like you are only focusing on its negatives.

You dedicated an entire page to its bugs. It's supposed to be a review, not a QA report.

You felt that it was necessary to update the comment about Stamina but decidedly ignored the fact that the recent patches bring the game to an acceptably playable state.

 

What part of THE NEW PATCH fixes this didn't you understand?

 

my freind is a STALKER junkie, and lent me it breifly so I could see why it was crashing so much.


conclusion: It likes ATI cards of a generation ago (early HD-series)


I have no idea why that is, but the number of crashes dropped 50% on ATI cards. I did still encounter problems, but these are easily isolated as badly written sections of code as they are repeatable.

 

Great review, and it's refreshing to see the game scored both as a game AND a product which a consumer may spend money on.

I think Lepermessiah's points are pretty much irrelevant, because it's about damn time games were released in a playable state instead of pathetically unplayable until patch 2 or 3, regardless of how quickly those patches come.

If those problems could have been so easily fixed by a patch and so soon, then the game shouldn't have gone gold for another week, and should have had those problems fixed before a master disc was sent to the publisher.
Perhaps the publisher rushed the developers, as is often the case, but it's no excuse in my eyes and I don't think it really matters where the blame lies - The end result is still an unfinished, unplayable product sitting on the shelves, and this review reflects that.

A game should not need that many patches so soon after release, never mind patches released before release.
Sure, it shows dedication on the part of the developers that they want to get the game fixed, but these problems should have been fixed long before the game went gold.

Problems in the LUACode for scripting of major plot characters? That's just laughable.

The fact that Bit-Tech have dedicated an entire page of the review to highlighting the game's bugs is a testament to the poor state of the game on release, not an indication of bad reviewing.
If the game weren't so bugged, it wouldn't be such an issue - Seems logical enough to me.

I think the review shows integrity, and I'm genuinely glad to see a game judged on all of it's merits and failings, not just the graphics and "omglollookattehshadowsandlights" that the other reviews seem to focus on.

 

A review is just that and saying that QA shouldn't be a part of the review when we're having so many problems is incredibly short-sighted. Think of a review as more of a lab report and you'll see why there's a page on bugs. Because there are so many.

I did the same with Quad SLI if you remember. It's not normal practice for sure, because normally the bugs don't get in the way of the experience in quite the same way they have here (or with Quad SLI for that matter).

 

There is no need for all the BiT flaming. They can only test what they are given, and lots of reviews have mentioned the huge problems this game has been having. I still need to try the original again, as I had about 3 serious errors with that game, one due to sound (the game wouldnt start), one due to a bug in a conversation (the convo continued on a loop for ever) and the last time I played it the game just ignored my saves, so i had to start from the beginnning every time.

So, frankly, GSC have got plenty of history with this kind of thing. What is most disappointing is they have not changed their ways since last time. That said, I will still buy Clear Sky when I get a new graphics card, assuming the worst of the problems are solved in patches.

 

There's a difference there. We dedicated an entire page to bugs, not out of spite, but because our experience showed us that it was an important issue that needed to be shown to potential buyers. Nor are we only focusing on the negatives as the first few pages show a lot of the stuff we like, like the weapons upgrade system and level design and graphics. The conclusions section is also full of likes and dislikes.

In the end, a game which goes on sale should not have this many bugs and should at least be stable. A few issues and bugs are natural and acceptable - one needs only look at the number of bug fixes in a 10/10 game like Baldur's Gate to see that even great games have problems in that department. This isn't like that however as these aren't spelling mistakes and AI problems, these are system-crashing, widespread issues.

As for the update, well we used the newest versions that were available to us at the time and we waited until the game had been released in the UK for a week. That means it's been released in Russia for about 3 weeks, and went Gold about a month ago. If we've waited that long, I think we're justified in publishing now as otherwise we would be forever waiting for the next patch and LeperMessiah would be here complaining that we weren't waiting for the patch that could be coming a month or a week after that. A game review should not be about waiting for patches and getting the best possibile experience at the cost of waiting eternally, it should be about reviewing the perfomance and playability of a game to the limit of your ability at a time. Which we did, even after we waited a week (from just the UK release as the game has been in the office for a time before that) for more patches to come.

As for the stamina update, we corrected that as it involved a specific and direct complaint we had made in the review and which had been unequivocally corrected. Performance and playability however is something we cannot test at this point without rewriting a completely new and fresh review...which we have already pledged to do in six months!

We could wait for the next patch, and the one after that - in the end there has to be a cut-off point and this was ours. In fact, if you look at the timeline then you'll see we spent far longer with the game than most publications and also gave it much more time to improve support and stability.

A game should be stable and playable for the majority when it is first released as a retail product. This isn't and that's why it was rated down.

 

How can they review a game properly if the game itself has some massive issues? I thought the review was spot on, it's not Bit-Tech's fault Clear Sky/GSC Gameworld have gone backwards. Bit-Tech are review the product as a whole. The game is, as it stands not fit for sale, I knew that with or without Bit-Tech's intervention.

If Joe ignored the bugs and told people to go out and by the game, it's amazing and a great addition to the series then he'd be misinforming them. They'd come back, moaning and shouting obscenities at him for not warning them of how badly done this game is.

I love SHoC, and I hope I can love Clear Sky. I'm going to look past all the bugs as frankly I haven't had any crashes or witnessed any bugs mentioned in the review. However, I'm annoyed at how the performance of the game is in it's current state (before patches) and I'm really pissed they dicked about with inventory system and HUD to the point it becomes useless.

The story, it's nowhere near as engrossing as SHoC, but as I'm a fan I'll hold out and I'll continue with it as I've waited a long time for this game only to be initially disappointed.

Just be thankful this isn't a console game where it can't be updated via patches.

 

I gave up on STALKER after being hit in the face with a steel girder at the end of the last game. I mean seriously, a freaking girder to the pie hole man! Hours of dodging radioactive crap storms and guys with big freaking guns only to be brained by the ceiling? ... ..... .. .. .

 

Don't even get me started on how monumentally lame that ending was. I play through the entire game and then I actually get punished for making too much money and deciding not to run through the now-completely hostile Duty camp? FTS.

 

LOL

Yeah the endings in stalker were harsh, i got a bum ending for hording too much money! Lame!

However while stalker was insanely buggy for me (had a new 8800 and vista at the time sure that amplified the problems) it was a insanely playable game, i could sit down at it for hours and that isnt somthing ive done with a single player game for a few years if im honest.

Id rather have a game that is released with a ton of bugs which will get sorted in the space of a month which I love playing, than a game with no bugs that is dull as ditchwater like most single player games these days

 

it looks like they did not even test this thing before it went gold....

 

I am sure that in Bitech this bug has been the cause of most crashes . The game is completely unplayable if it appears this bug, crashes occur every 5 seconds at the place where it appears. A Russian modder fixed the bug day 26 or August 27. Only fixed officially in the second patch / 5 september in russian , and 11 of September for the multilenguage version

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=1773500&postcount=374

The bug appears scored in the log file \ Stalker-STCS \ logs after happen.

The game for my , in a updated version , is great in the first part of the faction's wars and the artifact's quest, and very mediocre and lineal in the main missions , especially the last 3 maps. The game was not finished, nor the code, neither party playable. 80% of the game and things are assets that were in STALKER, activated or deactivated, is quite disappointing to see very few new or updated models, and only 4 new maps, 2 of them very linears and in outdoors.

 

heh, bugs aside this game is fun and the lighting effects really are awesome
im running it at 1920x1200 close to maxed out, (no AA, dropped one or 2 non-lighting effects down a step) on a 4870 and 3.5ghz q9450
in some places the framerate drops to around 30fps but its just about playable there, however most of the time its more like 50fps
the lighting effects really are quite pretty though

also, it managed to bsod you bindi? lolz, worst its done for me is crash to desktops
<3 ATi

score of 3 is a little harsh though imo