Factions, Bugs And Patches
Clear Sky puts players in the role of Scar, a Stalker that was found unconscious by scientists studying The Zone. Scar was subjected to a lot of emissions from The Zone but managed to survive. You begin the game by helping out these scientists of the Clear Sky faction, but as the game world opens up, you’ll encounter several other factions, some of them familiar like the Duty and Mercs, that you can join up with.
Factions are perhaps the biggest change to Clear Sky from SoC. When a player joins a faction, he can partake in various types of missions including search and destroy, turf wars with fellow AI, and defensive duties. Sometimes these missions don’t work out right due some bugs with the game, but I haven’t had too much trouble out of this yet. The same problem actually occurred a handful of times during SoC for me as well, and the fix tended to be reloading a save game some amount of time before running into the bug and trying things again.
I remember one instance in particular with SoC, when I chose to help Skrull and his group of fighters from The Duty. This will take a moment to explain, so bear with me. The task was to assault and take over a base held by a rival group known as Freedom. The start of the fight required my ally NPCs to blow down a wall, but only after I moved close to the wall and took out a sniper in the tower, which was fine. However, after that, it took a handful of quick loads to get them to get up there and blow the wall down, somehow triggering that event wasn’t happening until it suddenly did after one reload. Anyway, not very long after the wall came down my allies all fell to the massive numbers and firepower of the Freedom (and I did too, having to desperately quick save and reload many times before I finished off the base). Once the base was clear, a new objective came up to talk to Skrull and get my reward, but he had died in the battle, making it impossible to complete that objective or trigger the removal of that objective.
That same time of buggy activity still occurs in Clear Sky, unfortunately; events that require some kind of trigger are sometimes difficult to initiate because the trigger can’t be found, and you may find yourself quitting out of the game or quick loading to try to make things work, which when they do it almost seems random. As another example, take an objective or task that requires you to defend an area from an invading faction. That’s all fine and good, but if the faction never comes, how can you complete the task/objective? These mishaps are something that are being addressed with patches, but considering the amount of patches Chernobyl had, it’s a shame to see the expansion go through some of the same troubles.
Now, that said — at the time of this writing, GSC Game World has already released three patches for Clear Sky that addresses some, if not most, of these problems, so things are improving but it’s a shame things weren’t better out of the box.
Another aspect of the faction warfare that is new and interesting is radio calls. When you join a faction, you will have access to their radio frequency and you can hear calls for assistance and so forth, prompting you to reroute and get over to where the action is in a hurry. As with SoC, there is a lot of walking to do to get across the massive Zone, but your chance encounters along the way and the added immersion this creates makes this a positive feature in my opinion. Anyway, several times now have I arrived to help out, only to find I missed the battle. This isn’t entirely unrealistic, and the AI is ‘good’ about killing themselves off or getting overrun by mutants, but the long haul players might make only to miss out on a battle can be frustrating. Even if you do make it on time, watch out for the deadly AI – they can now throw grenades unlike in SoC, and man are they good at throwing them – thankfully you can quicksave, but the unrealistic accuracy of AI grenade throws and sniper-like long range shooting abilities can be discouraging. That said, helping your faction has its obvious rewards in the forms of satisfaction and money and items, which are as necessary as ever to get by in the harsh and dangerous Zone.
Factions in Clear Sky also have established bases and key characters, similar to what SoC had. The more complete faction warfare system in Clear Sky is more along the lines of what SoC was originally supposed to have, but either implementation works for me, I think they’re both cool.
Other Changes
Anomalies in SoC were one of the many awesome things about The Zone that made it so atmospheric and interesting. Anomalies, as veterans of the game will know, can sometimes spawn artifacts that when worn by the player, can change his abilities regarding health points, stamina, radiation, electric, and burn damage, and so forth. However, as with the original, I personally never found the artifacts, despite their variety and intriguing appearances, to be all that terribly useful, or at least not for extended periods of time. So Clear Sky’s new method of finding and retrieving artifacts doesn’t affect me too badly, but I still think it’s a half step forward, and two steps back.
In Clear Sky, you can still spot the Anomalies in the same way, although they are much more ‘aggressive;’ in other words, it sure seems a whole lot easier to get killed by them than in SoC. However, whereas before you could see artifacts near anomalies in plain site, Clear Sky requires you to use a new device to locate them with directional arrows and increasing sound prompts. This is an okay change it itself, but the artifacts seem to all be placed in the heart of some nasty Anomalies and radioactive areas, and just finding and retrieving the darn things and it back to a safe place is a significant challenge in itself. Still, the reward for getting them is considerable, as you can enhance your stats or sell them.
Money was an important part of SoC, although after a dozen hours or so of play, I soon had more money than I knew what to do with. In Clear Sky, you can purchase upgrades to your weapons to really enhance them for long range or more assault style ability, and you can also repair weapons this time around, too. Repairing weapons is a nice new feature, because even though every Viper 5 looks the same, there’s no denying that sentimental attachment formed between that one particular weapon and you after it’s been with you through hell and back.
The PDA in Clear Sky has received an overhaul and now provides even more markers and information. Tasks that you’ve taken on are marked on the map, as well as a new screen that provides tactical details on the status of the faction relations and territories.
A new multiplayer mode, bringing the total number of modes to four, is included as well, although I wasn’t able to test this feature out. The new mode is Capture the Flag.
Graphically, Clear Sky may not compare well to today’s high end games, but it still looks great. It’s not without a few technical miscues, but nothing serious. What is serious, and in a cool way, is the smooth lighting and various visual effects like the swirling leaves and heat waves you see around certain anomalies, as well as gritty details of objects and structures. I love the change in weather in Clear Sky too, as it was with SoC, and how the change in time affects the ambient light and overall nature of The Zone itself (experiences in The Zone vary with time of day to a degree). So while not technically in the upper echelon of today’s FP games, Clear Sky still looks great and noticeably better than the already good-looking SoC. As far as sounds, Clear Sky does a great job. The voice overs are plentiful and fine, weapon and mutant sound effects are satisfying and do a lot to set the mood.
Explore The Zone All Over Again
SoC was a large, addictive, and highly immersive game. If you’re like me, you went after every single job (aka secondary objective) you could, and still made time to engage in the random battles and other curiosities that popped up in areas from one visit to the next. SoC took a lot of time, and while it wasn’t perfect, it was a ton of fun and very rewarding. Clear Sky is a very welcome expansion that gives gamers a chance to look at The Zone in a new light, one year before SoC. Much of the experience is the same, as you will cross over a lot of the same terrain, but that isn’t a bad thing when it was so enjoyable the first time around. However, several potentially show stopping bugs and questionable difficulty spikes (the AI’s uncanny aiming ability and the new ultra dangerous method of getting artifacts) are drawbacks. However, as mentioned previously, patches have come out for download now that address some of these errors.
That aside, if you’re like me and were able to forgive a few bugs in the final version of SoC, and had a hell of a time exploring The Zone, Clear Sky is a must have. The mystery of The Zone, the dreary, addictive, immersive atmosphere is back and in spades, and I sincerely hope GSC Game World continues to expand on this wonderful world they’ve created.
