The problem is simply a string of design and balancing issues. In practice, after I received my first artifact in the training sequence, I didn't get a second for at least ten hours of play. That's "get", not "find", by the way. In some cases I was in the right spot - or, at least as close as I was when I managed to get hold of one - but completely failed to make the thing appear. In most cases, however, the area I was lead to was toxic above what I could survive for long enough to locate the tricky blighter without burning medkits. So I mostly just ignored it and carried on...Read more.

The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. community, reacting to advance word that Clear Sky isn’t the hoped-for triumph, are already saying post-release patches and mods will make it glorious. Yes, it’s possible, and maybe even probable -– bugs can fixed, balance can be altered. It’d be foolish to rely on it, however, let alone use it to vindicate the game’s reactorful of misfires. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was made so much more of by patches and mods because it was such an impressive skeleton of a game. Clear Sky, though, has so much decaying flesh attached to it that cutting through to the admittedly very healthy bone below may prove too tall an order...Read more.