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 updating the game, with the first patch releasing next week.
STALKER 2 has been live for a few days now and intrepid adventures have uncovered all kinds of horrors in the Zone.
Set in an alternate timeline, STALKER 2 takes place in a world where the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the 1980s led to further catastrophes, devastating the entire region with physics-breaking anomalies. Radioactive creatures, mutated monsters and gravitational anomalies make the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone one of the most dangerous places on Earth – but that doesn’t stop people from taking advantage of the consequences. New types of energy and artifacts have created a black market of sorts, allowing mercenaries and bandits to sneak into the military-cordoned region in search of big profits. However, many of them simply end up dead, as life in The Zone is absolutely brutally cruel.
STALKER 2 and its predecessors captured the imagination of its fans, earning the franchise millions of lifetime sales. The final episode also reached 1 million in STALKER 2 copy sales, with “even more” players on Xbox and PC Game Pass, the company said.
While there’s plenty to celebrate, STALKER 2 is incredibly rough around the edges, with bugs and balancing issues that prevent STALKER 2 from achieving a higher Metacritic score. Fortunately, solutions are already on their way.
In a blog post on Steam, GSC Game World confirmed that the first STALKER 2 patch will go live next week. The first patch will fix a few things, but a fix for STALKER 2’s horrible deadzone issue that plagues players on the Xbox version of the game won’t be available until later.
(UPDATE: I previously wrote that the deadzone fix would be in this patch, but I misread the patch notes in a fit of insomniac writing. Sorry about that.)
The full patch notes are as follows:
STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl will receive its first patch in the coming week – on both PC and Xbox.
The game has been out for several days now (it’s still surreal to say that) and we’ve been closely monitoring your feedback in all forms. To the over one million stalkers in the Zone: thanks for playing. That means a lot to us. We’re sure you’re dealing with stuff in the Zone, but so are we.
Crash fixes, including:
Memory allocation issues and errors that caused the game to quit unexpectedly earlier, especially around rendering, skeletal meshes, and quest-related cutscenes.
Progression fixes for Main Quest, including:
Various bugs blocking main mission progress, NPCs getting stuck in objects, incorrect mission markers, and issues with mission cutscenes.
Overhaul of key quests (such as Visions of Truth or A Minor Incident) to ensure smooth transitions, avoiding rare cases where players are unable to proceed.
Gameplay and balance adjustments including:
Determining the price of the weapons with upgrades installed compared to their value without attachments.
The behavior of NPCs, including how they behave when they have no shelter during the emissions.
Cutscenes and visual adjustments including:
Rarely missing facial animations, misplaced NPCs, and visual inconsistencies like loose heads and clothing clipping.
Quality and stability improvements to the visual effects.
Softlock solutions including:
Fixed an issue where players were unable to close the trading screen after placing ammo in the wrong slot while playing on a gamepad.
User interface improvements including:
Quest notifications are now displayed correctly during dialogues.
Corrected texts and missing interaction instructions.
Please note that this should be addressed in future updates:
Analog sticks dead zones bug fixes.
Bug fixes in the A-Life system.
We want to assure you once again that we will do everything we can to continually improve your STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl experience. We are very 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 the rough edges, and in my opinion is one of the best new titles in 2024. But yes, there are problems, as to be expected given the game’s extreme development conditions. Putin’s unfathomable war didn’t prevent the game from being playably launched, which is a testament to the tenacity of GSC and the team.
This update will not include the fix for the deadzone issue affecting users on gamepads and Xbox controllers, but will instead arrive “in the coming weeks.” The game currently has dead zones set to zero, so any analog gamepad with even the slightest stick drift will see phantom movement. 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 on hand.
RELATED: 5 things aspiring stalkers need to know for STALKER 2
One of the biggest criticisms of STALKER 2 right now concerns its “A-Life” system, which attempts to add dynamism to the game’s events and NPC characters. Right now it seems to have quite limited range, randomly spawning enemies on top of players in some circumstances. The blog post shows that GSC has happily heard the feedback here. I hope they also hear this feedback: please nerf Bloodsucker hit points! Or maybe at least give them some loot to make them worth killing…
Anyway, crash fixes and performance optimizations are coming in and are probably the highest priority for the team at the moment. The game has a long tail and a bright future, and will likely enjoy high player counts for many months to come. See you in De Zone.
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