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

Bugs For Sale

Here is where everything falls down for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky though because the game is unfortunately in a largely unplayable state. In fact, we've only gone this far without really mentioning it because we're fairly certain that a lot of these issues are going to be cleared up in later patches.

Or at least, they'd better be - at least one member of the bit-tech staff went out and pre-ordered this game as soon as it was announced and to see that it's been released in such a state is more than disappointing, it's insulting.

There are two different things wrong with Clear Sky - there are things that are broken because the game hasn't been designed correctly and then there are things that are broken because the game has been coded incompetently and not tested at all. We don't say that lightly.

Let's start with the former and look at the places where the game hasn't been designed very well, such as with the HUD which anybody who's played the game for more than a few hours will quickly recognise as being massively useless. At first it isn't clear what exactly is wrong with it - it shows you everything you need, right? There's your health, your armour and a little symbol that flashes when you're bleeding to death too.


What it doesn't show you though is some fairly crucial detail - like stamina or your stance. Without peeking into the inventory menu you're left without any idea of how far you can run or how fast your stamina is running out (Update: apparently this is fixed in the latest patch). Oh, and we'd love to see a button that we could map to drinking an energy drink too - we guzzle those things faster than Tim get's through graphics cards.

Unfortunately there are dozens of examples like this - places where the game design apparently steps away from logic and leaves you coping with long, rambling dialogues with poor lip-sync and zero player interaction. It's like whenever the game gets into dialogue it starts trying to be Planescape: Torment. Unfortunately, the writing just isn't up to the task.

Then there's the bugs. Let's be quite honest and up front here too - this game went on sale in beta. In fact, we've seen beta builds of games that don't crash this much. It crashed repeatedly on our standard games machine, throwing up errors of all sorts and repeated blue screens and so forth. We thought it was just a driver conflict, so Rich took it home over the weekend only to find that it crashed repeatedly there too.


In fact, about five hours in to the story, Rich reached a point where he had to talk to a particular character in order to progress but was unable to do so. While the Father may be a man of God in the game, he consistently decided to give Richard the finger and his game crashed to the desktop citing an error in the XRay engine core.dll.

Not every PC we used got that error, though all of them got BSODs if we turned around too fast or, like Rich, tried to quickload or quicksave, but every system we used had regular crashes with the game. Once we even made the mistake of pressing the Submit Bug option on the bug reporter (which doesn't always pop-up). What we thought would be a quick and automatic process however quickly turned out to be something else - email clients opened and we were forced to manually send off these bug reports.

What's worse, all we ever got out of this exercise was emails bouncing back at us with delivery failures attached to them. It's never a good sign when bug reports are getting bounced back because the inbox is full. There must be many, many problems with the game and we can only determine that the game was not tested at all. This isn't like the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and the optimization problems it had, this is far, far worse and these bugs are constantly popping up, unavoidable and game wrecking.

We even went so far as to create an entirely new system - fresh Windows install, blank hard drive, no other programs at all. That actually worked. For a little while. We were jubilant at first that we'd managed to create a system we could actually play the game on...that is until Clear Sky rebelled and we started getting entirely new crashes and bugs showing up, ranging from more graphical glitches to full on crashes-to-desktop. When even our utterly fresh system had to be rebooted five times in one hour we decided it was time to give up.