By Jim Rossignol on July 11th, 2008 at 7:18 pm.
What. Okay, I think that this Clear Sky preview (new footage intermixed with the 1UP team waffling about what they’ve seen) shows that the incidental voice acting for Clear Sky is in atmosphere-shattering English, rather than Russian. There’s also some deeply shit music. GSC, noooo!
The new inventory looks good though.
I wish the shooting feels more, eh, SATISFACTORY than what it looks like in the video. The gun/hands models seem pretty out of place too, along with the UI design as a whole.
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Disappointing. Not surprising, but disappointing nevertheless. Ah, well. Hopefully they’ll let you choose the language you want (given how big a hit it was in Eastern Europe) but I suspect not.
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Hmmm… the voices don’t bother me too much, but that music!! What the deus! That has got to go. Was there “combat” music in the original Stalker too? I need to go back and replay it now.
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Mods to the rescue, as ever…
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Awesome!
Of course i will turn off the music in the first second. Looking at the video carefully, you can see the new inventory system, the faction points in the map (red, blue, green points?), trading with some stalker who has a good amount of equipment (at last), and a new faction power relationship menu in the pda.
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“let’s not have wood look like it was shit out of the vaseline monster”
I love it..
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Aw, man! Some of that english dialogue was just plain awful. Not that the english in the original STALKER was always great, either. But this is worse.
And the music! What the hell. Again, in the original STALKER the music was generally excellent and tended to fit each environment. But this sounded quite horrible.
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The first one had quite a bit of voiced english dialogue, it was just the background banter that was in Russian, which seems to be the case here too.
The music though is terrible. I saw that in another video demonstration and was hoping it was added in by whoever was presenting the video. So, the “sequel to 2007′s most atmoshperic game” has a techno score? Why?
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I really hope the english in that clip was just the same kind of random english as in Shadow of Chernobyl. If it’s english all the way through I really hope for a mod/alternative. Russian with subtitles would be awesome.. you can always dream.
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Just download the fan made russian voice over patch and you’ll be fine.
Speaking of russians..
I’m wondering, just how many people who ordered Pathologic after it’s write-up in RPS have (a) actually played the game and (b) how many have played it for more than an hour.
Completely off topic, I know. But still would be interesting to know..
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(nitpick) If I were being shot at, I would not be reloading my gun so slowly/calmly.
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That music really was atrocious…
As for the dialogue, story/mission dialogue was always in English, but the taunts/random banter was all in Russian, making the game much more atmospheric.
I didn’t hear a word of Russian at all. :(
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Step one: Turn off music or replace it with STALKER 1 music.
Step two: Choose in installation/download as a mod the Ukranian localization.
Have fun.
I see no major issues in this video. I have supreme confidence in Clear Sky. This is why we have mods, people. This is why we game on the PC.
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Didn’t order the game, but I downloaded the demo just to have a look. Started it up, sat through the opening bit ran around the town for a bit, felt sick, closed the program and uninstalled it.
I’m sure I could’ve gotten into the game given some time (and starting from the beginning), and I’m sure the story is something special, but I also had the feeling I would have suffered and felt bad while playing it, which didn’t feel like a good idea.
Back to topic a bit, Shadow of Chernobyl made me feel bad as well quite a few times. Something about it just sucked me in, despite all the quirks and broken pieces. I couldn’t go back to Yantar after going through the lab mission there. I know I’m a sissy coward, but that “dungeon crawl” really made me feel sick. In a good way, mind you, I just never want to do it again.
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I did hear some Russian, but it was indeed overwhelmingly English. Sad. I’m also annoyed by the music – it’s probably possible to switch it off, but does that mean that there are no radios etc, as the guys in the video mused?
I also noticed that zooming with the pistol didn’t use the iron sights. If that is so, then I will be EXTREMELY pissed. One of the most wonderful ways to play SOC was to turn the crosshair off. If you haven’t done that yet, do it.
I wonder if “Take this, you nazi!” is a reference to all the Russians who call everyone who is anti-soviet “Fascist”?
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Also worryingly, what’s with the ‘throw metre’ for the Grenades? I fear maybe they are trying a tad too hard to make the game more accesible to the common herd.
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Gah. This is what happens when all the [people I disagree with - self censorship ed] scream “inaccessibility”. Rar. I was hoping it would ALL be in Russian, with english subtitles where needed. I love hearing Russian :(
edit: Or Ukranian. I think the first game had both? Who knows.
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Actually the throw meter is present in the orignal STALKER. Right click, my friend.
You all are making way too much of this.
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They need to get rid of those cut-scenes before they release. You know, the ones with the three retards on the street talking bollocks.
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All the Mission talk was in english in the first one as well, as well as the dialogue with the important NPCs. Given that you’ll apparently be doing a lot more with a party of sorts, it makes sense to have more english dialogue. I mean, I love the russian talking in the first part, but there’s no point in an NPC explaining an important objective to me in russian.
Looked fine, I thought. Well, except for the atrocious music.
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Yeah 1Up always adds on the stupid.
The beginning was too harsh?!? What the hell, that’s a GOOD thing! I loved the beginning. It makes getting a good weapon all the better.
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I’ll second that. They need to quit giving exclusives to 1up’s friggin’ TV program. Worse than English in my STALKER is banal commentary on top of my preview.
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why are those guys outside? that’s kinda odd.
and yeah to the obviously shitty music et al. what gives, gsc?
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Most of the time, I disable music in games.
Stalker was one of the few games I played with the music on. Grmlb! >:(
Also, why is Our Hero now using (heavy) big screws (is that how you call them ?) instead of (quite light) cork stoppers ?
Of course it wasn’t quite believable that Our Hero was walking around with a large bag of corks, but those screws are even worse.
Aside from that, yay \:D/
>>Okami
Well I just got it like 2 weeks ago, and I must have played like exactly 1 hour (I died beaten up by villagers). But I plan to play more, it looks like really interesting. I love those russian games.
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They were always metal bolts, even in the original. Dunno why you thought they were corks? Also, the hands, etc. all still look the same, for those of you who might think they look different now.
And about the 1UP guys saying STALKER was too hard at the beginning, I agree with the rest of you. That was what made STALKER a more enjoyable experience, not less. Why does every single frickin’ game, need to be dumbed down for the clueless? Leave those of us, who enjoy immersive sims, the hell alone. Keep your focus groups far, far away from my STALKER! :p
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What I disliked about the original game was the lack of Russian voice over. Plus what they did decide to leave in Russian had no subtitles, so I couldn’t understand a damn thing. I really felt left out around those damn campfires.
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FYI everybody: GSC is a Ukranian company. Chernobyl is in Ukraine. STALKER is a Ukranian game. The voiceovers were Ukranian.
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I always took that as Marked One being a foreigner. It’s not like you would ever join in on the jokes you heard. It’s a lonely game, even with people around.
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Mh.. okay.. I have no idea then.. my bad ^^
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I also think the harsh beginning in Stalker was a good thing. Because thanks to that i had to repeat two more times the first firefight (the one with the bandits and three allied stalkers) so i saw how every time the enemy and allied AI (and my own actions) made a different and interesting fight.
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Not true. Yes, GSC is Ukrainian and the game is set in Ukraine, but the voices were in Russian. They had originally wanted Ukrainian (of course) but that didn’t work out for some reason.
I don’t remember why though.
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Russian is also spoken in the Ukraine. It’s a political topic, as some may consider it an “imperialist” language, but it’s spoken widely and not entirely rare to find Ukrainians that don’t speak much Ukrainian.
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Well after watching the video I feel relieved. Yes the combat music sucks balls. Get that shit out of there. The ambient music from what I was able to make out sounded ok. Are they still using MooZe? Otherwise the graphics, combat mechanics, everything look awesome.
I hope GSC still has some time to redo the music. I’d say 50% of the Stalker experience was the amazing, amazing dark ambient music.
As for the Ukrainian thing, yes, I know a couple Ukes, and they mostly speak Russian. It’s like the Irish speaking English, sortof.
Steam says:
Available: August 29th, 2008
This game will unlock in approximately 1 month, 2 weeks, 6 days and 9 hours
I can’t wait.
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The English VO wasn’t that bad at all, the music was the only thing that irked me in anyway, and that’s only because it doesn’t match the theme of the game at all.
IMO
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That actually didn’t look too bad, besides the terrible music everyone else mentioned. The wetlands/swamps looked like fun, as long as the AI’s vision is as obscured as mine by the brush. Being shot at without being able to see the other guy isn’t much fun.
Slightly unrelated, but were there any good mods to the original STALKER that expanded the A-Life/AI activities (picking up dropped items, wandering around more) without terribly breaking the game or changing anything else? I’ve been scanning the mods available, and they all seem to be more difficulty tweaks or sweeping gameplay changes.
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“FYI everybody: GSC is a Ukranian company. Chernobyl is in Ukraine. STALKER is a Ukranian game. The voiceovers were Ukranian.”
true, but wasn’t the Ukraine part of Russia in 1986 when Chernoyble happened? Also in the manual the 2006 meltdown is reported by moscow public tv and they describe the “zone” covering the ukraine, belarus and russia, so i don’t think its too far fetched that russians would be the domant faction/government/language in the zone. also the game’s manual is made to look like a miltary document and the language on the manual appears to be russian (mind you i don’t speak russian nor have i ever seen ukranian in type).
correct me if im wrong, but isn’t the “army” faction of the game the russian army? ie Spetsnaz, ect.
“the Ukraine is not weak!” *SMASH*
sorry i just couldn’t resist that :D
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Yhancik: those screws and corks are actually one of the few/only things that made it from Tarkovsky’s movie into the game.
Also, the blokes in the video really need to keep their hands out of their pockets.
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dhex: that’s the main thought I took away from the video too. Those men should not be outside, they’re growing tumorous lesions as we watch.
Hopefully they’ll have non-English versions of the incidental voicework and some mod will enable them, but I was hoping someone would do the same for Crysis and it never happened.
Clear Skies could succeed regardless of presentation, but there’s the open question of whether they can make a polished game without spending 6 – 10 years or so on it. Hopefully the devs know what they got right on the first game and it wasn’t just luck of the draw.
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Stromko, Crysis on the hardest difficulty the dialogue is all in korean.
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What an utterly shit post, Jim. Don’t like the music? Turn it off.
And the bad accents… durrr! Did you play the original Stalker at all? it was brimming with shit Russian accents.
Besides, as rubbish as these are, it doesn’t essentially ruin what will likely be a great game. Stalker was up to it’s tits in bugs on release and it turned out alright eventually.
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eh, I turned off the faster tunes in System Shock 2 back in the day as well. Trouble was I had to keep remembering to turn it back on for the atmospheric stuff.
For all the griping about the techno stuff, 1up did manage to slap their own shitty generic nu-metal over things as well so they’re in no position to throw stones. I hope you can stick to the atmos track and just turn off the action music though. That’d be great (but I suspect not easy to impliment if the music is all contextual now)
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MetalCircus: A better solution to the player turning the music off would be for the developers to use good music in the first place. Music can make a huge difference in terms of atmosphere.
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I still wish for a mod to Shadow of Chernobyl that makes the whole game as difficult and resource-sparse as the beginning was. It’s so sad to me when people (especially game journalist types) actually complain about having to struggle and conserve in such situations.
Another example is Etrian Odyssey; my favorite part of that game will always be the beginning, when party members get knocked out so regularly that you actually become worried about whether you’ll make enough money on a run to afford having everyone revived, to say nothing of staying at the inn or, goodness forbid, upgrading equipment.
I want that tight sense of a struggle to survive in my Stalker. Like I said, I’m still waiting for the definitive mod to appear, or at least a more comprehensive list of what’s available. How about a feature, RPS?
On a different subject, I think all of the music in Clear Sky should come from eery singing pipes in underground labs. =(
Hat tip to Mythrilfan: I disable crosshairs in any game (Stalker, CoD4, etc.) where aiming with the physical gun sight is possible. Shooting from the hip should be a guessing game, after all. I haven’t even tried Stalker with HUD sights, but I imagine it would belittle the game. Wouldn’t it be nice if we got to a point where FPS games were so focused on immersion that crosshairs were not actually implemented at all in the shipped product?
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I’m still very much excited about this, I heard russian banter chatter in the first gameplay bit on the above video. So I’m guessing its going to be similar to Stalker in that main mission points = english, banter and everything else = russian/ukranian. How I longed for the ability to mute the guys speaking in the video though, espcially the “how to make your balding spot look good” Guy.
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Internisus,
While once you got the good guns the game became a lot easier, I mean, it never got REALLY easy on the hardest difficulty level. The NPP in particular I found to be an incredibly taut experience with the radiation and hordes of Monolith soldiers. The only way I got through that was stockpiling rifle grenades. That was fun. Oh yes it was fun.
I also played without crosshairs. Crosshairs are just lame.
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Metalcircus, would you expect Jim not to comment if an insanely atmospheric standout fps experience suddenly received a techno soundtrack completely inappropriately? And what about the numerous incidents of actual russian throughout the original game, greatly lending to the immersion, which it is now feared will be removed? I don’t believe he was referring to “shit accents” at any point. What an utterly shit comment. ;)
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I have zero worries about the sound issues because the original did a great job at building a healthy modding community.
If they indeed decide to release it like it’s presented, it’ll probably take less than a week before every silly voice and music is replaced by russian/original game material.
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Ukraine wasn’t a part of Russia, but part of the Soviet Union, along with many other countries. It was a political entity like the EU or something except much stronger and Russia dominated the other nations. But the other nations WERE still nations, for example Ukraine was the Ukrainian SSR (Soviet Socialist Republic).
Russian and Ukranian share the cyrillic alphabet so they look very similar (if not identical) when written. They also sound very close. They are seperate languages though. I’d compare their relationship to Portugese and Spanish.
Also somewhere (could be in the manual, but probably in the game somewhere) it’s explicitly stated that the military faction in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is the Ukranian army. I’m not going to load the game to confirm but I’m 99% sure the Ukranian flag is on all downed helicopters.
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I didn’t realise Kevin Smith had a video games website.
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Thank heavens for the modders; the way the Eno-ish ambience snuck in when you were trudging around a now-emptied field looting the bodies was beautiful; brilliant incidental music. I hope they’re using the same file format and so on, that’ll make reuse of the oldies (and elimination of the doofs) a lot easier.
Of course, I think it’s a shame that they’re employing such spectacularly inapt music in the first place, but in STALKER-land, that doesn’t make a huge difference. Nice to see the TOZ-34 hunting shottie in the game properly this time too — that thing rocks.
Incidentally, ‘Clear Skies’ has a different protagonist, and the ‘Nazis’ remark was probably directed at the Duty faction, who are routinely described as ‘Nazis’ by the Freedom faction in the original.
I dunno why other STALKER fans are so gaga about ‘blowouts’; I don’t know what they’re actually meant to do, apart from allegedly kill you if you don’t find cover (that sounds fun for a game set in the great outdoors). I’ll be interested to see how GSC employ them now that they’re back in the game.
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Best part of that was Matt Chadronait’s (sp) hair. Whoosh!
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Wow this game looks beautiful. So atmospheric!
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Nice music.
Bleh.
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“You all are making way too much of this.”
², and 1Up needs to stop showing their editors in real-life, show us the games, not yourself.
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That action music certainly is a shocking stylistic failure. :/
It’s nice to see them called out on it. Here’s hoping that it gets the axe some time in the next month before release.
Otherwise, still massively excited here. :D
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Looks neat. Personally I like 1ups approach, sure they could just show the footage, or have one talking head recount their take on things but they describe/discuss the experience/feel of playing the game as a player and that’s always a good thing.
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Poor little ruskies – can’t make a decent gun fire and recoil animation even if their life depended on it :D
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Well if Clear Sky is as moddable as the original then you don’t need to worry about these issues – i’m sure there are hundreds of people out there with the same worries who’ll be clever enough to mod in the russian/ukranian banter and take the wank music out instead of wingeing.
Oh, and guess what? I like 1-up. About 99% of you will not like that will you?
:edit: Kadayi put it better than me and pretty much summed up why I like 1up.
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Don’t you know you could just watch the same gameplay video those muppets did instead of second guessing their opinions?
It’s available here: http://www.gamevideos.com/video/id/19902
Separate download available but its about 450mb so… in case you didnt feel like showing up a summary of changes that i can see are:
Mission and direct friendly NPC speech is in English and very comprehensive from the looks of things..
Ambient speech is in Russian. (Horray)
NPC’s loot bodies too and it looks like they also sell armor.
Inventory is improved.
You need a detector to find artifacts which are invisible untill you are on top of them.
Anomalys are invisible.
The map actually appears to work. (wow)
Combat music… Oh my, the horror is real. ear bleach is needed.
Blow-outs are in the game but may be scripted.
The guy playing it is rubbish.
Personally my spidy senses say the music will last all of a second before being removed and there is already a petition on GSC’s forums to that effect.
Also I’d guess that some of the better modders like Bac9 will be rather quickly making blowouts a real time ‘oh my god, run away!!’ type thing within a few days of release.
So… All good then.
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Within a couple of days of release someone will have uploaded the Russian voice files to download and replace the English ones.
Also, chances are, someone’ll have the original game’s music available to replace the new crap.
Here’s hoping the modding possibilities for Clear Sky outstrip the original. I hated the bright nightimes of the original, a well as the loss of some features such as sleeping – hopefully they’ll be easily added to clear sky.
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Thanks for the link Steve.
Watching the video myself, I have to say the english voice acting isn’t half bad.
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oh christ it looks awesome!
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The music…
I think I just died a little on the inside.
Glad to hear there is a petition on GSC’s forums to get it removed, though. The original game was perfect with its atmospheric soundtrack.
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While the music was bad, I think I’d want to do one or two fights with it on, so I could feel like I was an extra in a Timur Bekmambetov remake of a Tarkovsky film, which is basically what purgatory looks like for me.
Also, “wood shouldn’t look like it’s been shit on by the Vaseline demon” are words of profound wisdom. Thank you, Shawn Elliot.
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TAKE THIS YOU NAZI
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I speeeeell my dreenk.
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I shall be looking forward to this game, no matter what if it’s english or russian talking (perfer russian due to isolation in the area)
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Half of the things these guys tell you arent even in the game :( You can see all the enemies on your PDA map and monsters/enemies only spawn and move to or between few fixed locations.Almost nothing unpredictable in there.They also closed down too many areas , rooftops and places that i could explore in original game.And mostly when you finish main quests in maps (often you are rushed trough them) there is nothing left to do in these maps.This game is linear game disguised to look like sandbox game.
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Really? I’m constantly going back and forth. I think what people are seeing/feeling is that they (in the first game) only had a main questline, and everything else was up to the player. Now you’re given more quests to do that aren’t related to the main quest, and it feels ‘less sandbox.’ What was in the first one that isn’t in this one?
There are many problems with this game (as with the first one), but I’d say I like them equally. I love helping expand whatever my group is, I like modding my stuff, I like listening to (particularly in Freedoms base) guys talk about the zone, their experiences, etc.
This game is as linear as you want. I’ve been playing for 11 in game days and I just hit Red Forest.
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