Clear Sky – The Cordon
STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl fell apart in its last act when it started throwing up roadblocks that required thorough foreknowledge to pass. If three guys sporting Gauss rifles just teleport right in front of you when you enter a room, they are going to kill you unless you already know where and when they will show up. I got through the end of the game by saving and reloading with every step.
When I arrived at the Cordon in Clear Sky, I realized that the same problems persist in the prequel. You emerge from a tunnel that connects back to the Swamps, and you receive a warning that you just came out near the army guardpost. I knew the location well from the first game, and figured it would be no problem to sneak past.
After going thirty meters down the ridge toward the outpost, a siren keened and then someone on a loudspeaker snapped, “Stalker detected!” I wondered how the hell they had seen me (motion sensors on the perimeter?) and ducked down behind a large tree. That helped, but not as much as I hoped it would: a heavy machine gun opened up in front of me and started blowing through the tree trunk. My mercenary crumpled to the ground, torn to pieces.
On the next run I hid in the tunnel until the alarm stopped. Then I headed back downhill. I reached the tree, and the machine gun got me again. The next time I tried to sprint my way to safety. Killed in the gulch at the foot of the hill. And the next three attempts saw me get killed before I even got that far.
I tried bouncing from cover to cover. Didn’t work. Hiding amidst some boulders sheltered me from the machine gun, but the moment I tried moving again it blew me to hell. It always knew exactly where I was. It tracked perfectly, as if I were tagged by a laser. If it didn’t get me, soldiers did. So I tried to stay in cover and deal with the soldiers first.
That failed miserably: heavily armed and armored, they soaked up rounds from my Kalashnikov until it ran dry, at which point I had nothing but small-caliber weapons at my disposal. Even if I was making progress at mowing them down as they approached, one or three of them would hurl grenades at me from fifty meters away, all of them arcing perfectly until they landed at my feet. If I left cover, the machine gun got me. If I stayed, the grenades exploded and killed me. Little known fact about the Ukrainian army: all their soldiers have their right arms replaced with mortars.
After twenty or thirty attempts, I alt-tabbed and went to Youtube and looked up some walkthroughs. Turns out that there’s a bunch of hits for “clear sky cordon machine gun”. Half the internet thinks this is bullshit. I watched a video walkthrough (which helpfully told me to stop whining and go do it) that showed the character race down the hill, through the gulch, under a tree branch, and clear through to safety. Spamming the medkit hotkey the whole way. I tried to match the guy in the video about twelve more times. Never made it.
At least two hours had passed since I first encountered the machine gun. So I went to plan B: go back through the swamps to the other entry point to the Cordon, this time farther north. However, this breaks the game’s scripting. I came into the Cordon on the other side of the railroad embankment, and when I tried to move through a checkpoint stationed by friendly stalkers, they attacked me. So I ended up having to use a maintenance tunnel farther west, where I massacred a half-dozen neutrals. Then I could finally walk to the bunker where my contact waited. He gave me a mission to go through the railroad embankment and said he would put out the word to let me through. Which they did, forgiving my bad manners twenty minutes earlier when I killed a squad of their friends.
It’s crap like this that dooms STALKER to cult status. When journeying within the Zone, observing its ecosystem and battling through random encounters and side-quests, it’s one of the finest games I have ever played. But when GSC attempt to funnel the player into scripted encounters, the results are usually disastrous.
I think the Ukranian soldier comment doesn’t make any sense. They’re trained soldiers and I think its plausible for them to be that accurate and deadly (especially with their grenades). Also how far away were you from the MG?
The path you travel past the MG describes an “L” You have to walk directly toward the MG for about 60 or 70 meters, then you turn sharply left and run maybe another 50. At that turn, you are at the closest point to the MG. I would estimate that it’s over 150 meters away. It can start hitting you with perfect accuracy at 200 meters or so. It absolutely does not miss despite its high rate of fire, but it also always knows exactly where you are. Even when you are silent and concealed from it.
And I can accept that soldiers can be accurate with their grenades, or they can throw their grenades very far. But being able to heave a grenade several dozen meters and strike the target perfectly seems very much impossible. A hand grenade is closer to a shot put than a softball. They are surprisingly heavy, even with the charge removed, and quite awkward to throw. Yet the Ukrainian troops in Clear Sky are able to toss them about like horseshoes or beanbags.
So I think it is fair to object to this from a realism standpoint. The soldiers here are too deadly to be convincing, especially because every common soldier you meet in the game (excluding commandos) is a demoralized conscript.
But my main objection is that this huge roadblock demands nothing but repetitive attempts to get past it, and it comes very early in the game. It takes away a lot of momentum and excitement that you have when you leave the Swamps. Even if we say, “Yes, the army should be difficult to get past,” Clear Sky is still a game meant to entertain. I would estimate that I died over 60 times trying to get past this one part (I was playing on hard). Nothing before or after has been nearly as punishing. It’s a bad sequence, I think.
The reason why I thought that the comment didn’t make sense is becuase I thought this game had a priority system in the A.I. I found this system in OpFlash CWC. When you fire upon an enemy in that game with a MG they’ll consider you a high priority target. So the whole time I was reading your blog entry I was thinking that you were firing your weapon too much and the MG managed to get a bead on you. Though I can see what you mean by this sequence being horrible and frustrating.
Ah, okay, I see where you were coming from. Yeah, it’s not a question of exposure. The MG knows where you are whether or not you ever fire your weapons. For as long as you are in its arc, it’s got a bead on you.