It has been a phenomenal week for STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl. GSC Game World owner Maxim Krippa announced yesterday that the game had already turned a profit despite costing tens of millions to develop, and now it is the players' turn to be happy.

After a month of playing a watered-down version of the Zone with enemies that spawn 10 meters away from your rear end, stalkers finally got the legendary A-Life patch that brings STALKER 2 that much closer to feeling like a STALKER game.

The update consists of 1,800 fixes, give or take, and it comes packaged as a 110.6 GB download on Steam. If this is not enough to grasp the scale of this update, here is a breakdown of the most important features.

NPCs Feel Alive
Instead of spawning right behind you, NPCs now roam the Zone freely and have taskings that dictate their movements independently of the player.

NPCs are now persistent even if outside the render radius, allowing you the chance to meet the same group of stalkers in different places.

Having active goals also means other stalkers are more aggressive towards mutants and hostile people, so expect more colorful encounters in the wild.

Stalkers get some semblance of survival instincts at last, running to cover during emissions instead of fighting, and retaliating if you melee them in the face.

Smarter Mutants
The psydog spawns fewer phantoms now and has a longer cooldown between summons. This will make them a lot easier to kill reliably.

Controllers can no longer zombify story NPCs, which could lock out the game in rare situations.

If you go out of reach, mutants now chase size-appropriate cover, and they will relocate upon receiving damage.

The chimera in particular will no longer try to squeeze through narrow doors and passageways, so say goodbye to cheesing it while it's stuck.

Balancing Changes
Following the trends from previous patches, quest rewards got another boost. This should help you earn an honest living, since GSC also patched out infinite money exploits with consumables and splitting weapon stacks.

One of the final bosses got a difficulty boost, but this is offset by higher Gauss rifle damage. Keep in mind that this goes both ways, so you better start running once you hear it charging.

Optimization, At Last
STALKER 2 suffered from severe performance problems on release, so it is nice to see it moving in the right direction.

Populated areas of the map now run smoother, especially Zalissya and the Slag Heap.

Visual artifacts and flickering buildings when using DLSS are largely fixed, though some problems remain.

Last but certainly not least, the developers fixed crashes in A Light in the End of the Tunnel quest, plus scores of EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION and Fatal Error instances.

Posted: 5 hours, 42 minutes ago
Related Forum: Xbox Forum

Source: https://www.dualshockers.com/stalker-2-releases-major-patch-with-over-1800-fixes/