What you need to know
- STALKER 2 launched on November 20, 2024, in a bit of a rough state.
- The immersive first-person open-world shooter is one of the most spectacular games of 2024, but its complexity has led to a lack of polish in some corners.
- However, developers GSC Game World are hard at work to update the game, with the first patch dropping next week.
STALKER 2 has been live for a few days, and intrepid adventures have been discovering all sorts of horrors in the Zone.
Set in an alternative timeline, STALKER 2 takes place in a world where the Chornobyl nuclear disaster of the 80s led to further catastrophes, blighting the entire region with physics-breaking anomalies. Radioactive creatures, mutated monsters, and gravitational warps make the Chornobyl exclusion zone one of the most dangerous places on earth — but that hasn’t stopped people looking to profit from the fallout. New types of energy and artifacts has led to a black market of sorts, guiding mercenaries and bandits to sneak into the military-cordoned region looking to extract big profits. Many of them simply find death, however, given that life in The Zone is absolutely unforgivingly brutal.
STALKER 2 and its predecessors captured the imagination of its fans, who have given the franchise millions of lifetime sales. The latest instalment also hit 1 million in STALKER 2 boxed copy sales already, with “even more” players on Xbox and PC Game Pass, according to the company.
While there’s plenty to celebrate, STALKER 2 is incredibly rough around the edges, with bugs and balance issues preventing STALKER 2 from hitting a higher Metacritic score. Thankfully, the fixes are already on the way.
In a blog post on Steam, GSC Game World confirmed the first STALKER 2 patch will go live next week. The first patch will repair a variety of things, but a fix for STALKER 2’s awful deadzone issue that is plaguing players on the Xbox version of the game won’t be around until later.
(UPDATE: I previously wrote that the deadzone fix would be in this patch, but I misread the patch notes in a flurry of insomniac writing. Sorry about that.)
The full patch notes are as follows:
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl is getting a first patch during the week to come — both on PC and Xbox.
The game has been out for several days now (it’s still surreal to say that), and we’ve been following your feedback in all possible forms carefully. To the more than one million stalkers in the Zone, thanks for playing — that means the world to us.We are sure you have things to handle in the Zone, but so do we.
Crash Fixes, including:
Issues and memory allocation failures, which previously caused the game to exit unexpectedly, particularly around rendering, skeletal meshes, and quest-related cutscenes.
Main Quest Progression Fixes, including:
Several bugs blocking the main quest progression, NPCs getting stuck in objects, incorrect quest markers, and issues with quest cutscenes.
Revision of the main quests (like Visions of Truth or A Minor Incident) to ensure smooth transitions, avoiding rare cases of players not being able to proceed further.
Gameplay & Balance Adjustments, including:
Fixing the price of the weapons with upgrades installed compared to their value without attachments.
NPCs behavior, including the way they act when lacking a shelter during the Emissions.
Cutscenes & Visual Fixes, including:
Rarely missing facial animations, misplaced NPCs, and visual inconsistencies like detached heads and clothes clipping.
Quality and stability improvements of the visual effects.
Softlock Fixes, including:
Issue where players were unable to close the trade screen after putting ammo in a wrong slot while playing on a gamepad.
User Interface Improvements, including:
Quest notifications now showed correctly during dialogues.
Corrected texts and missing interaction prompts.
Noted to be addressed in future updates:
Analogue sticks dead zones bugfixes.
A-Life system bugfixes.
We want to reassure you once more that we will make every effort to constantly improve your S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl experience. We are truly grateful for your feedback and suggestions for improvement.
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Stalking in the right direction
STALKER 2 is a fantastic game even with its rough edges, and is one of the best new titles in 2024 in my view. But yes, it has issues, as to be expected given the game’s extreme developmental circumstances. Putin’s unfathomable war didn’t prevent the game from launching in a playable state, which is a testament to the tenacity of GSC and the team.
This update won’t contain the fix for the deadzone issue hitting users on gamepads and Xbox controllers, and will instead arrive “in the coming weeks.” The game currently has deadzones set to zero, so any analog gamepad with even the slightest stick drift will see phantom movements. Hall Effect gamepads like the Razer Wolverine V3 Pro and GameSir G7 are immune to stick drift, but you can also play STALKER 2 on Xbox with mouse and keyboard if you have some standard USB options handy.
RELATED: 5 things rookie stalkers need to know for STALKER 2
One of the biggest criticisms of STALKER 2 right now pertains to its “A-Life” system, which tries to add dynamism to the game’s events and NPC characters. Right now, it seems to have quite a finnicky range, spawning enemies on top of players randomly in some circumstances. It sounds from the blog post that GSC has heard the feedback here thankfully. I do hope they hear this feedback too though: please nerf Bloodsucker hit points! Or perhaps at least give them some loot to make them worth killing …
But hey, crash fixes and optimizations to performance are going in, and are likely the highest priority for the team right now. The game is set to have a long tail and a bright future, and will likely enjoy a high-player count for many months to come. See you all in The Zone.
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