I still have vivid memories of this godforsaken game! Those memories mostly consist of the game crashing near constantly about three quaters into the game. Typical gameplay revolved around starting, loading last save, walking, quicksaving after LITERALLY - EVERY - SINGLE - STEP, the game crashing after about 10 seconds of actual gameplay. Rinse and repeat.

I never had the willpower to play a patched version of Clear Sky, since savegames made with the terminally buggy retail version were incompatible with the patched version. As I found the actual gameplay to be no fun at all, I never bothered to replay this.

Fast forward a few years. I finally get myself the gog version. First thing on my list is giving Clear Sky a second chance. Hey, after all, buying the gog version means good riddance to Tages (the shitware that prevents you from playing your legally bought retail version, unless you download the actual disc checking program from Tages' website - since they didn't even bother to put this on the DVD Clear Sky came with).

I have to say, not having to jump through the Tages hoop improves the gameplay experience a great deal. Unfortunately, the game itself is still a sorry, broken mess. It took me less then 40 minutes of gameplay until the game first crashed on me (idiotically enough, the error message read something to the extent of: "Critical error: No disc in drive!" You gotta be kidding!

This doesn't bode well, if I get crashes like this so early on into the game, I dread what lies ahead...

Have you try this community patch ? :

http://www.moddb.com/games/stalker-clear-sky/downloads/clear-sky-community-patch

I had some crashes because of scripts errors,so I installed this patch and my game became very stable then.

Such is the tragedy of Clear Sky :P

One little thing that helped me with constant crashes was to turn off DX10 lighting. There's not much of a visual difference (if any). With DX10 lighting on, Clear Sky CTDs every few seconds. With it off, it seems pretty stable.

Crashing regularly is a feature of all the Stalker games, isn't it? I've only played part-way through the first, and the regular crashes were one reason I gave up on it.

You must be referring the Limansk area. That section was brutal for constant crashing. What's worse is that you had to pretty much do the entire level in one go, because the chance of your save game getting corrupted in there was very high as well.

Not necessarily. I don't recall encountering any crashes while playing the SOC retail version (there may have been crashes, but they were negligible in my case). "Call Of Pripyat" on the other hand I don't remember any crashes or significant bugs at all. Yeah, I don't remember the name of the place, that must've been it! Nice that you mentioned corrupted savegames, as those prevented me from finishing the game: After forcing myself through the level in the way I mentioned above, the next level simply wouldn't load. The game would just crash once it hit the loading screen.


Thanks for the link stardust_79, I'll give it a try.

I hadn't played SoC in years until I bought the three-game pack here today, but the only unmodded game I remember crashing anywhere near as much was Saints Row 2, which is why I'd save in SoC every couple of minutes (except, quite often, the game would crash again on reloading the save, presumably because it had saved whatever state caused it to crash). The only game I remember crashing more was Oblivion, but I'd heavily modded that one and was probably running into memory limits on the engine.

The Sky Reclamation Project is also supposed to be a pretty good unofficial patch of sorts. Haven't tried it myself though:

http://stalker.filefront.com/file/Sky_Reclamation_Project;122002

The community patch recommended by stardust_79 was designed for version 1.5.04 of Clear Sky. I would not recommend anyone to use it -- it will likely break your game in some way or other given how heavily some of the scripts were altered in the later patches. Instead, new players should use the Sky Reclamation Project (v1.0.3a), as suggested by DrearierSpider.

There's a v1.0.4 coming out soon which will also correct those f*cking "hold the position until help arrives" and it never does bugs.