Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl has just released its Patch 1.1, which fixes over 1,800 problems and includes the first bit of A-Life fixes.
A-Life references how NPCs interact with the world without the player’s interactions. There were quite a few fixes here:
- Fixed spawning NPCs behind the player
- More roaming NPCs in the Zone
- A-Life NPCs can be seen from further away
- Fixed it so that A-Life NPCs will continue working towards their goal even when they’re not in the player’s field of range
- Players can meet the same A-Life NPCs they’ve previously encountered
- A-Life groups exploring the Zone are more diverse
There were plenty of other A-Life fixes too, which players can check out most of in the patch notes here. However, because of the sheer number of changes, not every fix was written out in the patch notes.
Other AI improvements were also made, including the following:
- Decreased how many Pseudodog phantoms summons happen and how frequently they spawn
- Fixed visual issues, like big monsters hiding behind small cover and zombies appearing twisted
- Fixed problems with NPCs detecting the player and entering doors without opening them
- Fixes issues where NPCs were wrongly teleporting to areas they shouldn’t
- Fixed several visual issues with Burer
- Adjusted combat experience when players were fighting in large fights with many corpses
- Plus over 60 more changes
There were several balance adjustments also made to weapons, coupons, a boss, and more:
- Increased rewards for multiple missions
- Changed “Goldfish” artifact value to 14,000 coupons
- Fixed infinite coupon workaround where players were buying and selling stacked items
- Increased Snork’s ability cooldown time
- Made the Korchunov fight more difficult
- Plus over 20 more changes
Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl looked at over 200 crashing problems and addressed them all. Other performance and optimization changes include:
- Improved controller stick input movements
- Fixed performance drops with Nvidia RTX 3000 series GPUs with FSR frame generation
- Fixed problems with Razer Kishi Ultra, MSI Force Pro Wireless, and Xbox X|S controllers
- Plus several others addressed in the patch notes
Developers are looked at issues in cutscenes. There were nearly 100 problems fixed, including:
- Facial animations and voice-overs not matching in certain languages
- Missing frames and NPCs
- Missing subtitles
- Cutscenes not playing correctly
- Players dying in the middle of certain cutscenes
- Plus more that are addressed in the patch notes
When it comes to story and side missions, there were over 350 bugs fixed. To avoid spoilers, we won’t list them out here. However, the patch notes have them listed with individual spoiler covers, so players can look at their own risk.
There were hundreds of other very specific fixes and adjustments made to things like the open world, visual problems, player exploits, UI, and even save data issues.
The Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl Patch 1.1 is pretty large. Developers addressed this, thanking players for their patience and saying that they’ll work on optimizing this in the future as well.
Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl was extremely successful, selling 1 million copies (excluding Game Pass players) in its first two days. Developers have been working on the game ever since, releasing Patch 1.01 last month that also fixed hundreds of issues.