Stalker 2, which launched for Xbox Series and PC, has been announced for PlayStation 5 later this year. This was announced by developer GSC Game World, along with a trailer for the upcoming PlayStation 5 release, which is just listed as late 2025 currently. While the trailer doesn’t show much, GSC has confirmed the title will take full advantage of the DualSense controller with haptic feedback and adaptive triggers. In addition, PS5 Pro enhancements are in development, though if this means they will release later or are being worked on for release has not been stated.
Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl was released in November of 2024 with positive reviews across Steam and Xbox, quickly hitting the 1 million sales mark after release. While the game was released with a myriad of bugs and technical issues, most gamers (myself included) chose to overlook much of this, given that the developer, GSC Game World, is a Ukrainian-based studio. Developed amid the Ukrainian war, several issues such as a large number of developers needing to leave the studio, a fire in the studio, as well as constant air raids, hampered the studio in its pursuit to finish the title. It was stated upon release that GSC had very little room to delay the game yet another time, instead willing to weather the storm of issues, working to fix them after release, which they have already set out to do.
Among the many issues that were documented on the game’s release, one of the biggest was A-Life 2.0. A-Life is a key feature of the Stalker series, being used in the first game to govern AI behaviour across the survival games world. At its absolute highest level, it is a system to simulate life in the zone, in a way that is often unseen and independent of the player, allowing the zone where the game is set to feel lived in. While this improved version of A-Life was held as a strong selling point with many players, even setting it was a selling point to them, upon release, the feature was barely functioning. This led to questions of whether the feature was in the finished game.
GSC did later clarify that certain things did go wrong with the system, vowing to fix A-Life through future updates. The team has been hard at work on doing so, with the PlayStation 5 version most likely reaping the benefits of the updates and patches released for Xbox and Steam since release last year.
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