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S.T.A.L.K.E.R Clear Sky vs Call of Pripyat

the_shadow

Arcane
Joined
Dec 30, 2011
Messages
1,179
I recently finished both of these games, and enjoyed both. I know that Call of Pripyat was better received than Clear Sky, and I can see why, as it's clearly more polished and mechanically sound. However, I actually enjoyed Clear Sky much more, partly because it *isn't* as polished. With Call of Pripyat there are three clearly defined areas with a preset guide and static sub-quests and anomalies. Clear Sky just feels more organic, particularly with the (somewhat broken) faction system, random quests, and the race towards the centre of the zone.

I didn't particularly like the ending sequence for CoP either. Having to
babysit Strelok
to get the best ending is ridiculous when the AI is horrendous. When the mission objective changed to requiring me to defend the evacuation point,
Strelok and the military goons
were still hundreds of meters away out in the open, getting sniped at by literally dozens of Monolith soldiers. It's impossible to defend
Strelok
and the evac. point at the same time, since if you move away from the point you lose the game. I'm assuming my version is bugged, and that your allies should all be at the chopper instead of out in the streets.

I really enjoyed the portion near the end of the game where you and your squad were fighting towards the centre of the zone. The final fight with
Strelok
was a bit of a letdown.

Note: Edited to clarify 'end of the game' vs. 'near the end of the game'.
 
Last edited:

Ivan

Arcane
Joined
Jun 22, 2013
Messages
7,474
Location
California
Clear Sky does get a bad wrap, but its egregious grenade spam, horribad turret section when entering Cordon, the fucking chopper bossfight, are valid points of criticism and retardation.
 
Last edited:

the_shadow

Arcane
Joined
Dec 30, 2011
Messages
1,179
Clear Sky does get a bad wrap, but it's egregious grenade spam,

You mean the A.I spams grenades? Now that you mention it, I did notice that the A.I was notoriously liberal and accurate with their grenades, although I thought that was because I was playing on a harder difficulty.

horribad turret section when entering Cordon,

Yeah, the military outpost is touch-and-go. However, you can backtrack to the swamp and find a second entrance to the Cordon.

the fucking chopper bossfight.

That chopper came out of nowhere. It must be a throwback to Half-Life.

In regards to weapon balancing, shotguns were completely useless in Clear Sky (to the point I could unload a sawn-off into an unarmored bandit without phasing him), but really good in Pripyat. And you get the good guns quite early in Call of Pripyat. I had an SPSA-14 in the first hour, and purchased the Tunder from the starting trader in the first 30 minutes.
 

the_shadow

Arcane
Joined
Dec 30, 2011
Messages
1,179
The push towards Pripyat with the Clear Sky squad is awesome. Yeah, the final 'battle' once you get there is pretty mediocre (all 2 minutes of it), but it's only two minutes. And at least you're not required to babysit AI who stand in the middle of a hail of gunfire instead of getting to the choppa.
 

ortucis

Prophet
Joined
Apr 22, 2009
Messages
2,015
I remember playing Clear Sky for an hour and then uninstalling it.

There is no comparison. COP is actually fun.
 

Icewater

Artisanal Shitposting™
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Location
Freedomland
Project: Eternity Wasteland 2
I've never been able to finish Clear Sky despite having played it through 2-3 times because the final fight would bug out every single time.
 

Baron Dupek

Arcane
Joined
Jul 23, 2013
Messages
1,870,765
I had an SPSA-14 in the first hour
lol scrub, that shotgun is in the nearby building nearby stalker base so you can get it even faster.
Once you find a bunch of stashes in the game and remember their location (shotguns, rifles, ammo, grenades and even best detector in the game) you start new game (with mods or not) and run at them to not be poor scrub (not run with garbage equipment) then burn out fast because there less and less challenge and everything feels the same.

Clear Sky? With mods, especially when they fix faction system, I made few playthroughs but dropped after reaching Hospital (after Limanks) because fuck the ending (finished only once).
Same thing with Shadow of Chernobyl - play dozen of times but always drop near the end (finished only once)
Which remind me my jam with Arcanum - played numerous times but finished fully only once because last part of the game fucking sux.
 

Lazing Dirk

Arcane
Joined
Dec 12, 2016
Messages
1,865,452
Location
Shooting up your ride
I generally only play the Stalker games with mods, or even modded mods. For instance, I quite liked playing CoP with Misery, but I toned down the actual misery; I liked a lot of the mechanics and things it added, but not the degree to which it fucked you. I'm sure all the Russians love it. The ones that add a ton of new stashes in hard to reach places are always fun, like having one on top of the BAGGER-288 BAGGER-288. Usually the biggest problem is getting the damage and stealth right. Some of them mean you need to shoot a bandit 5 times in the head to kill them, or that unloading both barrels of your shotgun into a cat at point blank doesn't kill it (?!), so that shit gets changed instantly. Regarding stealth, they're usually either totally blind or they can spot you crouching down in the dark with your light off 500m away, so I usually end up fiddling with that too. Oh, and I generally remove their grenades as well, because fuck grenades in these games. Sometimes it feels like they're lobbing them directly down the front of your coat, regardless of range. It's bad enough being pinned down without having RNG instant death looming over you.

Once modded properly though, I think I prefer Clear Sky. It's got some cool sequences and a nice variety of locations. Once you mod it enough, that's the only thing that really matters anyway, since the rest can be changed to your liking. Sadly I've yet to find a mod that stops the AI pushing you out of cover. Fuckers.
 

Baron Dupek

Arcane
Joined
Jul 23, 2013
Messages
1,870,765
The ones that add a ton of new stashes in hard to reach places are always fun
nah I disagree
I mean - sure I like finding stashes but tested some that focus on finding them and they're often insanely hard to find.
Like - climb to the tallest building on the map and jump to the invisible teleport (not even humming) and load after hitting the ground (aka dead).
Most of them have even edited player height and crough_height and jump power to reach them through way designed by modders. Then you got Joint Pack 2 where you have whole quest line dedicated for it, I watched videos with jaw dropped. Madness.

And boy, Golden Wagon prologue with only one map (Zaton) still give me nightmare. On the other hand sequel Golden Wagon 2 have better stashes + hunting for safe keys/codes.

But yeah I agree about unfucking Misery 1/2, especially stamina drop when hungry (get hungry? forget about runnning) or else.
 

Lazing Dirk

Arcane
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Dec 12, 2016
Messages
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Location
Shooting up your ride
I mean - sure I like finding stashes but tested some that focus on finding them and they're often insanely hard to find.
Like - climb to the tallest building on the map and jump to the invisible teleport (not even humming) and load after hitting the ground (aka dead).
Most of them have even edited player height and crough_height and jump power to reach them through way designed by modders.

I haven't tried any that go that far. That does sound pretty shitty. In the ones I played the hidden caches were just a nice bonus.
 

Gerrard

Arcane
Joined
Nov 5, 2007
Messages
11,927
People who complain about the ending part in Clear Sky apparently either never got the true ending in SoC, or they wiped the part where you singlehandedly kill like 150-200 Monolith dudes while trudging through the power plant and the portals afterwards from their memory.
 

the_shadow

Arcane
Joined
Dec 30, 2011
Messages
1,179
People who complain about the ending part in Clear Sky apparently either never got the true ending in SoC, or they wiped the part where you singlehandedly kill like 150-200 Monolith dudes while trudging through the power plant and the portals afterwards from their memory.



OK, it wasn't *that* bad, but talk about a grind. I lost count of the number of times I was sniped by the Gauss rifle. The scenery after the emission at the end of S.o.C is beautiful though.
 
Self-Ejected

Drog Black Tooth

Self-Ejected
Joined
Feb 20, 2008
Messages
2,636
Don't be a faggot and just play Metro 2033. It's like Stalker, except better in every single way because Russians > Ukrainians.

There, I've said it.

Actually, Metro 2033's developers are also Ukrainians, haha, got you.
 

DraQ

Arcane
Joined
Oct 24, 2007
Messages
32,828
Location
Chrząszczyżewoszyce, powiat Łękołody
The push towards Pripyat with the Clear Sky squad is awesome. Yeah, the final 'battle' once you get there is pretty mediocre (all 2 minutes of it), but it's only two minutes. And at least you're not required to babysit AI who stand in the middle of a hail of gunfire instead of getting to the choppa.

Limansk is ok-ish - atmospheric and some good sections (I liked teleporter street for being quite zone-like), but linear as fuck. Then it becomes disjoint pile of tiny and constrained, highly scripted setpieces of decreasing quality.
People who complain about the ending part in Clear Sky apparently either never got the true ending in SoC, or they wiped the part where you singlehandedly kill like 150-200 Monolith dudes while trudging through the power plant and the portals afterwards from their memory.
It's bad but still had nothing on raw sewage that is post-Limansk CS.

Apart from several nice new areas (and some interestingly shuffled SoC areas) and overall difficulty (mainly economy and artifact hunting, also poltergeists) CS had nothing going for it.
SoC is a much better game in its raw, unpolished but atmospheric glory, so is CoP (especially in regards to writing and questlines, but also a lot of mechanics), even though it's much easier than both of its prequels.

And grenade spam in CS was retarded - the 'nades were thrown, often in groups, even from sniper distances, effectively homed on your position and glued themselves to the ground after landing - I was once sitting high on the tip of a wrecked crane in Garbage, sniping at bandits in a distant camp, when suddenly several grenades fell from the sky with pinpoint accuracy, landing on the exact tip of the crane without anything like bouncing or rolling off. Then they exploded. This was doubly insulting because AoE of grenades was so limited in CS that they were effectively useless to the player.

The best grenades were in SoC as they had great AoE and could sometimes mow down an entire squad (F1s scattered their shrapnel far enough that throwing them without cover was borderline suicidal even at maximum range). Shame that the AI never used them.
 

Carrion

Arcane
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Jun 30, 2011
Messages
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Location
Lost in Necropolis
CS is completely broken, unfinished and the weakest of the bunch, but I do like some aspects of it. There are some nice new locations and genuine mechanical improvements over SoC, mostly regarding artifacts and survival in general. It's too bad that the latter kind of clashes with the heavy focus on different factions, as the game's a lot lighter on the horror side of things than its predecessor, not to mention that the faction system was so broken it could barely be called a system at all. I think it's definitely worth playing if you're into Stalker, but if there's one entry in the series that you can skip pretty safely, it's this one.

CoP is probably the definitive Stalker game in the sense that it's more coherent and polished than either of the first two games, and it manages to incorporate the best elements of both. It does feel a bit too "safe" overall, lacking some of the crazy ambition of SoC and generally not being quite as memorable, but considering how raw the previous games were, it's probably not a bad thing.

I actually really liked the endgame sequence of SoC, even if the true ending itself was in some ways worse than all the false ones.
 

sullynathan

Arcane
Joined
Dec 22, 2015
Messages
6,473
Location
Not Europe
Pripyat is the best in the series.

I remember playing Clear Sky for an hour and then uninstalling it.
Same shit. I was excited for the faction system, seemed like there was more thought out into it than the original stalker until I was bombarded with quest after quest and annoying stalkers so I Uninstalled.

Don't be a faggot and just play Metro 2033. It's like Stalker, except better in every single way because Russians > Ukrainians.

There, I've said it.

Actually, Metro 2033's developers are also Ukrainians, haha, got you.
First you make the shitty half life 2 thread, then this comment?
 

Hoplopfheil

Literate
Joined
Jan 12, 2017
Messages
27
Location
Deimos
Clear Sky has some neat ideas, but the execution was very poor. Even by STALKER standards, very poor.

Call of Pripyat is the most commercial of the series for sure, but as a result it feels so gamified and artificial. It's even got the "two big square maps" thing from Mercenaries or Far Cry 2, with every point of interest evenly spaced out.
 

the_shadow

Arcane
Joined
Dec 30, 2011
Messages
1,179
I know I'll get a few facepalms for this, but I decided to replay Clear Sky, since I realized I'd missed quite a bit of content on the first playthrough (I also missed quite a bit for CoP, so I'll replay it as well). I'm using the Sky Reclamation Project mod, which irons out a lot of bugs without altering gameplay balance. It's made a noticeable improvement so far, as I haven't had any broken side-quests, and the faction war is more dynamic, with each faction initiating assaults instead of standing around twiddling their thumbs while the PC does all the work.

The first time I played Clear Sky, I was bothered by the apparent lack of artifacts. It was only after playing Call of Pripyat that I learnt I wasn't searching for them properly. It isn't enough to be in the approximate area, you need to be virtually on top of them before they become visible. After nabbing the best detector in the hidden area of the swamps, my character is weighed down with all sorts of artifacts, and they haven't even reached the Red Forest yet. I've also managed to double my carrying weight thanks to weight-boosting artifacts.

I've also found it's pretty easy and LOL to get good gear and loads of cash by remaining neutral and scavenging from the front lines of two warring factions. In my current game the Loners and Bandits are deadlocked at Agroprom, and I'm making a mint selling Vintar rifles dropped by experienced Loners.
 

Parabalus

Arcane
Joined
Mar 23, 2015
Messages
17,432
One thing to note is that CoP player movement feels clunky compared to SoC and CS, they "upgraded" the engine. I'd advise anyone planning on playing the games back to back to start with CoP because it's really noticeable how smoother the first two games were.

CoP is easily the best I'd say, all the others kinda start trailing off when you near the ending. I played with this for CoP and this for CS, never found any mod I liked for SoC.
 

Maggot

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 31, 2016
Messages
1,243
Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire
Clear Sky was garbage. I bought it when it came out and it was unplayably buggy and every patch broke save progress. The game wasn't very good fully patched either and things like faction wars were a total disappointment. I also remember you losing all your money at various points in the story with no way of getting it back.
 

Baron Dupek

Arcane
Joined
Jul 23, 2013
Messages
1,870,765
Yeah the loose money thing was not cool, it was fixed in Arsenal Overhaul where you turn rubles into banknotes.
Or have metaknowledge and not sell shit before going Garbage
 

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