Every Stalker Game Has Launched Broken, Stalker 2 Is No Different

Key Takeaways

• It’s hard to fully place the blame for Stalker 2’s buggy launch on the invasion of Ukraine.
• GSC doesn’t have a good track record with problem-free game launches.
• Despite everything, I’m still loving Stalker 2.

There isn’t any other series quite like Stalker. Each game offers a big, gritty sandbox filled with bandits, mutants, radiation, and anomalies. Every step you take could be deadly, and gunfights often end in just a few shots. The original, Stalker: Shadow of Chornobyl, was the first game I bought for my gaming PC in 2010, and a few months later I sunk into Call of Pripyat at launch.

It’s taken 14 agonising years, but now we finally have Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl. A true, bona-fide sequel to Call of Pripyat, with the same rock-hard firefights and perils that made me fall in love with the series all those years ago. It’s also an absolute mess of bugs, missing features, and poor performance. But let’s be real, that’s hardly a surprise.

Stalker 2 really is rough to play. Even on my good gaming rig, running off an SSD, loading can take minutes, with texture pop-in, framerate dips, and memory leaks all plaguing my time in the Zone. Even the AI, one of the defining features of Stalker allowing its various species and factions to vie for control, is broken, with A-Life 2.0 currently being out of action until a date in the hopefully not-too-distant future.

It’s tempting to look at the state Stalker 2 launched in, and then at developer GSC Game World, and give it a pass. As one of the best-known Ukrainian game studios, GSC was hit hard by the Russian invasion, with half the team later relocating to Prague and other developers losing their lives in the conflict. The fact this game still came out under such horrific circumstances is commendable, but I’m not convinced it would’ve launched in much better of a state otherwise.

Stalker 2’s Development Has Been A Long, Messy Road

Stalker 2 was first announced shortly after the launch of Call of Pripyat in 2010. I remember that following its release, there was a competition to write a mission for Stalker 2, and the prize would be inclusion in the final game. Whoever won wouldn’t see their mission come to fruition, though, as GSC ran out of money and shut down just a year later in December 2011. This was just the first of many setbacks for the game.

Fast-forward three years, and GSC reopened to launch Cossacks 3 – the strategy series that originally put GSC on the map – to middling reviews. It would be another four, arduous years before a new crack at Stalker 2 would be announced, with the new subtitle Heart of Chornobyl.

There were almost four years between GSC announcing Stalker 2 and the invasion of Ukraine, and in that time we saw very little of the game. The invasion added problems on top of an already difficult development cycle; GSC’s new offices in Prague suffered a fire in 2023, which destroyed servers containing backups of Stalker 2, and don’t forget the cyberattack and leak that hit the game mere months before launch.

All of this provides valuable context for how Stalker 2 launched in the state it did. GSC was fighting an uphill battle the entire time, and to deny the invasion had any impact on development would be idiotic. However, to argue Stalker 2’s launch is somehow caused by the war in Ukraine is ignoring the state every single prior Stalker game arrived in.

GSC Game World Has Always Launched Buggy Games

Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl is one of the best FPS games ever released, but it’s still, nearly 20 years later, a rat’s nest of bugs, glitches, and half-baked ideas. You only need to look at it for a few seconds to see the egregious camera bobbing and ‘magic road’ texture pop-ins, and it doesn’t take much longer than that to uncover quirks in the AI and easily breakable quests.

To this day, Shadow of Chernobyl is so buggy that you’re all but required to run it with a mod like Stalker Complete 2009 for the optimal experience. I don’t think I’ve ever beaten the game without a fan-made patch, and that level of sheer jankiness is what put me off playing the console ports released earlier this year.

Clear Sky was somehow worse, with it being a smaller, less inspired game that also ran horribly and broke more often. It’s the only game in the original trilogy I haven’t beaten, and it took fan-made patches like the Sky Restoration Project to bring it up to a playable state. Fans do a lot of the work when it comes to the Stalker series, and the very same community isn’t surprised by the state of its sequel.

Call of Pripyat was a step in the right direction, with a much more stable release than Clear Sky, and an overall better game to boot. It still had its moments where the polish slipped and performance tanked, but slap Arsenal Overhaul on it and you’re golden.

How Was Anyone Surprised?

All of this may seem like I am ragging on GSC, and to an extent I am. There are reasonable explanations as to why it launched the way it did, and, at the end of the day, the safety of the team is paramount. On the other hand, I’m not willing to hand-wave away the fact that every GSC game has been released in a similar state.

I went into Stalker 2 knowing exactly what it’d be, and I am loving every bug-infested second. When you already fully expect something to be a buggy mess, you can’t really be disappointed when it is. For better or worse, this is the Stalker 2 I’ve been waiting for for 14 years, and I can’t wait for the fans to come along and fix everything like they always do.