Today, GSC Game World finally unveiled the remaining 2025 roadmap plans for its hit survival FPS, Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl. The changes will focus on game engine enhancements, night vision devices, A-Life updates, and plenty of quality-of-life improvements.
For the game engine, GSC Game World has revealed that they’ll be updating Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl to Unreal Engine 5.5.4, which will lead to improved stability and performance. Alongside this, the engine enables developers to introduce new features and tools, making the Zone even more engaging, including:
- Immersive display mode
- Extended day and night cycles
- Loads of gameplay balance tweaks
- Loot rework
- New ‘master’ difficulty
- New exploration-based equipment
- New missions
- New open world events
- New type of weather
- Stamina and energy rework
- UI updates
So far in 2025, Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl has already achieved a number of its goals, including implementing critical A-Life fixes, improving stabilization and visuals, removing blockers, and adding new controller abilities (and, of course, introducing squirrels). The Q2 portion of development also added a bunch of new features, including Mutant Loot, Shader Compilation Skip, Beta Mod SKD Kit, and two new weapons.
Since its initial release on Xbox Series X|S and PC on November 20, 2024, the survival horror title has achieved resounding success, surpassing the 1 million copies sold mark just two days into release. Thanks to this success, it doesn’t look like the developers will be abandoning the title any time soon.
Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl is available now on Xbox Series X|S and PC (including Game Pass), starting at $59.99. The game was announced for PS5 last month, but no exact release date or window has been provided. The original Stalker Trilogy is also set to get a next-gen update at some point, so be sure to keep your eye out for more news on that.