STALKER

15 years in development, the highly anticipated game STALKER 2 made a splash for GSC Game World when it launched towards the end of 2024. It quickly became a smash hit, selling over one million copies within just two days and turning profitable for the studio in under a month. In early March 2025, the total number of players reached six million, marking another significant achievement. Remarkably, despite this immense success, GSC Game World has continued to refine and enhance STALKER 2 , demonstrating that they are not content to rest on their laurels.

On Steam, GSC Game World outlined some of the key adjustments included in the latest update, addressing various aspects such as AI behavior, balance, story elements, audio effects, and progression through the story. In terms of AI and combat, the movement of mutants during battle has been made more fluid, while NPCs will now respond more effectively to the sound of footsteps.

STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl Patch 1.3 notes

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.

Also, almost 100 crashes and EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION errors were fixed.

Available to download now, this new Stalker 2 update is said to bring over 1,200 different changes to the title. Specifically, GSC Game World says it has looked to improve on the AI and balance of Stalker 2 while also improving its performance across Xbox and PC. As expected with an update of this scale, a ton of bugs have also now been squashed which means that players should find far fewer oddities when exploring the world of Stalker 2.