S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2’s first big patch is out with 650 fixes for crashes, progress blocks, physics and AI bugs

Is your Zone more Anomaly-rich than it should be? Are your corpses uncannily airborne? Do your comrades have dodgy teeth, and not in a good way? Do bits of your HUD keep disappearing? Be of good cheer, for GSC Game World have released the first proper S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart Of Chornbyl update, which patches out over 650 different bugs and issues. These range from more significant problems such as crashing and progression-blockers in certain missions, to relatively negligible stuff like wonky NPC voice volume during storms.

The update makes a few changes to the game’s NPC AI, but the developers note that they’re still “working on fixing the A-Life bugs, which will be addressed in future patches”. “A-Life” refers to the game’s sprawling NPC life simulation, whereby factions of wasteland survivors and packs of mutants move around and scrap over living space without the player’s intervention. That’s the idea, anyway. As Brendy wrote earlier in the week, A-Life isn’t working as desired right now, to the point that some players think it’s all a massive wind-up.

The developers have also tweaked the balance somewhat, reducing the HP of certain enemies while pumping up limbshot damage and melee swinging distance. That’s on top of tweaks to weapon and armour pricing and repair costs.

You can find a partial list of the many, many changes in this Steam post. In keeping with recently invented RPS tradition, I’m going to pluck the stranger bullet points from the changelog‘s shrapnel-riddled carcass and display them below as my very own Greatest Hits. It’s not quite Baldur’s Gate 3 levels of eccentricity, but I enjoy the idea of several of the below happening simultaneously:

– Fixed stretched or missing limbs on humanoid corpses.

– Fixed physics issues with destructible and movable objects, including those floating in the air.

– Added missing footage to TV displays in the final cutscene.

– Fixed issue when combat music was still playing while combat was finished.

– Fixed issue when NPCs would move to A-pose or start flying after death.

– Fixed issue when NPCs could not track whether a target in cover was covered from shots, which caused them to shoot into cover.

– Fixed a bug that allows to sell items to the trader for more money that they actually cost.

– Fixed issue when Burer could drop any mission items out of the player’s hands.