Is your Zone richer in Anomalies than it should be? Does your corpse eerily float in the air? Do your companions have suspicious teeth, and not in a good way? Do parts of the HUD keep disappearing? Stay positive, as GSC Game World has released the first proper update for STALKER 2: Heart Of Chornbyl, which patches over 650 different bugs and issues. These range from more significant issues such as crashes and progress locks in certain missions, to relatively minor issues such as unstable NPC voice volume during storms.
The update brings several changes to the game’s NPC AI, but the developers note that they are still “working to fix A-Life bugs, which will be addressed in future patches.” “A-Life” refers to the game’s enormous NPC life simulation, in which factions of wasteland survivors and herds of mutants move around and destroy living space without player intervention. That’s the idea anyway. As Brendy wrote earlier this week, A-Life is not currently performing as expected, to the point where some players believe this is all a huge mistake.
The developers also improved the balance a bit, reducing the HP of some enemies while increasing limb shot damage and melee swing distance. This is in addition to changes in weapon and armor prices and repair costs.
A partial list of the many, many changes can be found at this post on Steam. In the newly invented RPS tradition, I’m going to pluck the weirder highlights from the ink-shard-riddled changelog and present them below as my own greatest hits. It’s not quite the eccentric level of Baldur’s Gate 3, but I like the idea of having several of the following events happen at once:
– Fixed stretched or missing limbs on humanoid corpses.
– Fixed physical issues with destructible and movable objects, including those floating in the air.
– Added missing footage to the TV in the final cutscene.
– Fixed an issue where battle music continued to play after a fight ended.
– Fixed an issue where NPCs would move to A position or start flying after dying.
– Fixed an issue where NPCs couldn’t track if a target behind cover was obscured by arrows, causing them to shoot into cover.
– Fixed a bug that allowed items to be sold to a merchant for more money than they actually cost.
– Fixed an issue where Burer could drop any mission items from the player’s hands.
