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The Zone might always be a place where stepping a few feet in the wrong direction will leave you compressed into a wet mess by a gravitational anomaly, but you can’t say it’s not improving. After completing months of major patches that smoothed out some of the rougher jank in the Stalker 2 experience since its November release, developer GSC Game World just released its Q2 2025 update roadmap to sketch out its plans for post-release support as it moves from fixes to new additions.
“The Zone is evolving and will continue to,” GSC Game World said in an accompanying news post on Steam. “Throughout the year, we will be delivering updates and hotfixes dedicated to making the game better in every aspect. With proper planning, double testing (internal and closed beta for big updates) of all features and fixes, and your feedback, Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl will become the game we imagined—and you deserve.”
First on the Q2 docket is an initial beta deployment of an official Stalker 2 modding SDK. GSC Game World says it will be inviting modders to a closed modkit beta before eventually releasing the SDK with an accompanying mod guide. The studio also intends to support Mod.io and Steam Workshop integration.
Next, work will continue on polishing Stalker 2’s “A-Life” system. At Stalker 2’s launch, the A-Life system—which produced all kinds of emergent fun and/or anguish in previous Stalker games by simulating NPC behavior and events independently of the player’s actions throughout the Zone—was pretty busted.
Stalker 2’s early patches did some major work to get A-Life’s basic functionality up and running, and now GSC Game World will be adding “persistent A-Life improvements” to bring additional depth to those simulated behaviors. Likewise, the studio says it’s adding combat AI updates, giving human NPCs “better cover/flanking use” and limited grenades.
The Zone’s gnarlier inhabitants will enjoy some tune-ups, too. In addition to an ominous roadmap line that just reads “mutants react to threats,” the studio says mutants will soon be able to eat corpses. Lovely. But they’ll also be dropping loot eventually, so it’s not all horrific.
Rounding out the roadmap is the planned addition of two new, unspecified weapons, an option to skip shader compilation at startup (which I’m surprised to hear is a thing that you can skip, frankly), a size increase for the stash window, and—as is obligatory for even hypothetical update notes—further stability and optimization improvements. Some things never change.
After a reminder that work is continuing on the “next-gen update” for the original Stalker trilogy, GSC Game World added one last note to the roadmap that “mission targets may be moved from Q2 to later dates in case of Zone instability.” After all, game development has its own reality-warping anomalies to contend with.
Thankfully, if the studio’s plans change, we should find out before too long. GSC Game world says that it will “keep things clear and on track” by offering additional quarterly roadmap updates every three months.
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Kurt Indovina
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