An Ambitious But Flawed Open-World Shooter Gets Another Chance With A Huge New Update

After a 15-year wait, Stalker 2 launched in late 2024, but all was not well in the Zone. Despite pulling off much of what it set out to do, the massively ambitious open-world shooter was held back somewhat by a slew of bugs and performance issues. After addressing many of those problems over the past few months, developer GSC Game World just launched one of the game’s biggest updates yet, which includes mod tools to help players shape their own version of its irradiated wasteland.

Dubbed the Zone Kit, Stalker 2’s PC-only modding toolset could be the most consequential part of the update in the long run. With the Zone Kit, modders can create or modify visual elements like character models, textures, and animations, as well as add new content like weapons and anomalies or tweak gameplay features. The Zone Kit currently doesn’t include features to add or change audio in the game, but GSC Game World says that functionality is coming later, as the current release is just phase one of the toolkit.

Despite not being complete, though, the Zone Kit has already spawned plenty of creations on Mod.io, a mod database that the toolset works with. Those include predictably ridiculous texture replacements like changing the in-game ‘90s era PDA handheld into a Steam Deck, and inserting Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas’ CJ as an enemy, along with more substantial overhauls to combat, weather, and enemy AI. While these obviously run the gamut from useful to silly, the toolkit also enables the creation of mods that could become all but essential for Stalker 2’s popularity in the long term. Part of the lasting appeal of games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is how creatively players can reinterpret them even years after release, and for a game with as much potential but as many problems as Stalker 2, mods seem especially important.

While mods are possible without a toolset like the Zone Kit, its release does make modding significantly easier and more approachable. That was the case for The Witcher 3 last year, when developer CD Projekt Red released the Redkit tool to open up modding to a bigger audience than before. The Zone Kit isn’t quite as fully featured as Redkit just yet, but it could get there in time.

One particularly remarkable part of the Zone Kit is its size. Clocking in at 600GB, it may be daunting for anyone just trying modding out, but that gargantuan download isn’t all bad news. The reason it’s so large is that the toolset included uncompressed versions of all the game’s assets. That will give modders the ability to more easily create mods that are up to the same standard as anything in the base game.

Stalker 2’s Patch 1.5 also has updates for players who don’t plan to go tinkering around in the game’s files as well. A new feature will let players harvest parts from mutants which can then be traded to merchants, and two new guns are being added as well. Plenty of smaller tweaks fill out the update, but the most important is an overhaul of A-Life, the artificial intelligence that controls NPCs in the game’s world. A-Life is a big part of what makes the world of Stalker 2 feel alive — at least in theory. Since launch, though, the system hasn’t been working as intended, and with plenty of other bugs to squash, fixing it has been on the back burner. Now, GSC Game World says players should stop seeing NPCs pop into existence within their field of vision, for a start. The bigger changes are that A-Life now continues to simulate NPCs even when the player isn’t interacting with them, which should help set up some wild encounters to stumble across as you play. Evidently, players can even cross paths with the same NPCs multiple times now, assuming neither party has wandered face-first into an exploding anomaly in the meantime.

Stalker 2 launched in rough shape, and every step it can take toward realizing its potential is sure to be a welcome one for players. The Zone Kit in particular could help breathe new life into the world, or at least make it a much stranger place to be.

Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl is available on Xbox Series X/S and PC. The Zone Kit is only available on PC.