If you’ve been waiting for patches to dive back into the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, rejoice: Stalker 2’s hotly anticipated 1.3 update has arrived with well over 1,200 changes, addressing just about every corner of the game.
If you’ve got a few hours to kill, the full patch notes are available on the Stalker 2 website, but the highlights were shown off in a Steam community post. These range from pretty broad general improvements, like mutant AI tweaks to make stealth and combat smoother, to a balance pass on a host of artifacts. The Weird Pot now doles out specific debuffs depending on what food the player consumes with it rather than random ones, for instance. There’s small helping of miscellaneous buffs and improvements, too, with explosive props dealing more damage and increased durability for unique weapons. There have also been general improvements to the A-Life system, which has admittedly been a bit wonky since its implementation.
The bulk of the patch, though, is an absolute mountain of bug fixes and performance tweaks. According to the Steam post, nearly 100 crashes have been addressed, and it’s easy to believe looking at the breadth of fixes. Potential memory leaks have been plugged, texture stretching bugs and broken flashlight VFX have been addressed, and players can no longer exploit a bug letting them permanently stack the effects of artifacts they’ve unequipped. If it’s in Stalker 2, chances are it’s had a bit of polish applied, which is certainly welcome in a game PC Gamer news writer Joshua Wolens called "busted but brilliant."
GSC Game World reiterated that this is still just the beginning of a long journey of support for the game, saying that "comments are helping us identify areas to work on" and that any "unexpected anomalies" in the Zone should be sent in for analysis and annihilation. The game was an instant hit despite its technical hitches, but GSC Game World has remained steadfast since launch that patches are necessary and on the way.
Stalker 2’s continued development is a show of immense resiliency for GSC Game World, which has clawed its way through office fires, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and more setbacks than most studios ever have to deal with. With this newest round of fixes and a potential TV show on the way, it seems like things are as bright as they’ve been in a while for the post-apocalyptic FPS series.
If you’ve been holding off on revisiting a broken save, it may be the time; and if you haven’t yet taken a visit to the Zone, the game is currently 15% off on Steam.
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