It’s no secret that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl launched in rough shape. Despite its fun and mechanically dense highs, special moments that made it one of the year’s best releases were often brought down by visual kinks, progression-halting bugs, and questionable AI behavior not in line with what the developer originally planned.
GSC Game World has promised to bring the game up to snuff with future updates and expansions. And it seems that some of the game’s most substantial faults are already being addressed ahead of the holidays. Update 1.1 will rectify over 1,800 issues, the biggest among them being the first big fix for “A-Life 2.0,” the game’s advanced AI technology.
A-Life 2.0 was supposed to be one of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2’s biggest improvements over the 2007 original. It was meant to give NPCs a significant upgrade that lets them continue their lives and actions long after the player encounters them in the open world. These independent behaviors would make the world feel more immersive. Unfortunately, implementing the tech on time without breaking other crucial parts of the game proved difficult. The Ukranian developer ultimately decided to scale back A-Life 2.0 so they could hit their release date.
With an extra month of work, GSC Game World has begun re-implementing those systems. Issues like enemies spawning behind players, a frequent frustration for those who played the game at launch, will be a thing of the past. Players will also encounter roaming NPCs across the Zone more often. The game will track those NPCs' actions at a much greater distance from the player’s position than before.
NPCs who are making their way to certain locations will do so in real-time and more reliably thanks to an overhaul in AI pathing. All of these fixes combined will help emergent scenarios in the wasteland and meaningful NPC encounters occur more naturally.
A few other balance changes like reducing enemies' ability to detect players in seconds despite being crouched behind cover, reducing spawn times for enemy reinforcements, and enemies getting stuck or glitching through doorways, are all top-line fixes for Update 1.1. Each will help enemy encounters feel more fair and less immersion-breaking, a crucial part of maintaining the game’s immaculate sense of place.
Outside of AI, the patch is also adding a way for players to account for analog stick drift. This feature has become a standard quality-of-life feature in most first-person shooters and was a commonly reported omission from S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2. Update 1.1 applies “further improvements to dead zones and curves for gamepad movement, aiming and camera controls for a more smooth and controllable experience using sticks on controller.”
The game’s opening level, which is notoriously difficult thanks to its lack of a comprehensible tutorial, has been reworked to help onboard new players. Adjustments have been made to also help the game perform better in more populated and graphically intensive areas.
Players who’ve encountered inaccessible saves will be happy to know that this issue has been addressed as well. After reviewing the game, I encountered an issue where a save refused to load, which lost me 30 minutes of campaign progress. Patch 1.1 fixes “when the player was unable to load existing saves after the title and steam process was terminated unexpectedly,” and an issue where save files would go missing after a “hard reboot.”
All in all, more than 500 visual blemishes, 250 progress-stopping bugs, 200 crash triggers, 100 open-world issues, and 80 cutscenes, were fixed. The patch comes in at a hefty 110 gigabytes, something GSC Game World also says they’re working on for future updates.
“We understand that the size of the patch is huge and the process of downloading will take some time,” a note from the developer reads. “We will work on this aspect.”
Despite its rocky launch (and even rockier development under the duress of being in a nation at war), S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 has already been a major success for GSC Game World. It sold over a million copies in less than a week. And it still has a healthy number of concurrent players on Steam despite being launched into Xbox and PC Game Pass. It’s a positive outcome in an era where troubled launches can spell certain doom for games and their developers.
It’s good to see players look past some of the game’s more glaring problems in support of what makes it special. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is a game unlike most other new releases in 2024 and deserves to be discovered by as many players as possible, even as its developer works hard to correct its well-documented issues.
