Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl was in a bit of a state when it launched earlier this month, as developer GSC Game World was all too aware. It took less than a day for the studio to acknowledge the post-apocalyptic shooter’s “rough edges”, and it’s been flinging out fixes since then. And today brings a third patch, this one weighing in at around 20GB on PC.
Patch 1.0.3 (which totals a rather more svelt 7.91 GB on Xbox Series X/S) isn’t, perhaps, as sexy as GSC’s first, which came with the eye-catching promise of over 650 fixes. Improvements are still improvements, though, and this time around the studio has set its sights on crashes, memory leaks, control adjustments, mission and side missions, plus balance and AI.
The studio notes update 1.0.3 also addresses a potentially heart-stopping issue that was causing player saves to vanish after a hard reboot of their PC or Xbox. “Thanks again for your support,” it concludes in its release notes on Steam. “We will continue working on future updates, reading your comments and feedback, and fixing ‘anomalies’ if they occur.”
Stalker 2’s significant technical issues were highlighted repeatedly at launch, despite an otherwise solid critical reception. “It all hurts the game’s natural playability quite badly, even if it is often funny”, we said in our three star review – so hopefully GSC can get its shooter to a point the underlying experience is giving a better opportunity to shine.
Those bugs haven’t stemmed the enthusiasm for GSC’s long-awaited sequel, however; the studio announced Stalker 2 had sold over 1m copies just days after release. Its massive popularity does, however, appear to have made the Ukrainian-developed game the target of a new Russian disinformation campaign, falsely claiming it scans players’ computers in order to help the Ukranian government “locate citizens suitable for mobilisation”.
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