If GSC Game World has a motto, I think it should be ‘the mad lads are actually doing it.’ Not only did the Ukrainian studio release a killer (albeit, admittedly, somewhat on fire) game with Stalker 2 under some of the grimmest imaginable conditions last year, it’s now decided to go ahead and just upgrade the entire Unreal Engine 5 basis the whole damn thing runs on.
So says Stalker 2’s roadmap for Q3 and Q4 2025, released yesterday. Right now, Stalker 2 uses Unreal Engine 5.1, but top of GSC’s list of bulletpoints for the year to come is “Engine update to Unreal Engine 5.5.4 (for optimisation).” That’s not the bleeding-edge version of Epic’s engine—that would be UE5.6—but it is a recent one: it only hit last March.
Our Stalker 2 performance testing encountered a fair bit of hitches and stuttering back when the game came out, and even many patches in it’s still relatively common to see players lamenting performance issues online. With any luck, a big ol’ engine update will see a marked decrease in those complaints. “This will bring new features and tools to make the Zone an even better place,” says GSC, “but more importantly—bringing the latest Unreal Engine 5 optimizations will lead to better stability and performance.”
Fans are pretty stoked about this one. “This is crazy, if they manage to pull it off it will be huge,” remarks FishySardines99 (a trusted name if ever I heard one) on Reddit. “That is so unexpected,” concurs TramplexReal. “As a game dev myself, engine updates are always so painful in any project. Glad that they will be doing it, maybe I will finally be able to play the game with proper frames.”
Meanwhile, over on the Stalker Discord, a GSC dev even suggests “there is a chance we can have even [Unreal Engine] 5.6,” but that “all will depend on testing.” After all, “the engine update is a very serious and tricky task.” I wouldn’t hold my breath for that one, but it’s kind of wild GSC is even considering it.
Updating UE5 isn’t Stalker 2’s only goal for the rest of the year, though it’s definitely the biggest. On top of that, the studio also promises to introduce a bunch of night vision devices, binoculars, more updates to A-Life, new anomalies, a rework to stash loot (hopefully it’ll be worth it to go out your way for them now), and UI fixes, on top of other things. It all sounds amazing to me. I really liked Stalker 2 even when it was a bit of a smoking wreck. Once GSC puts down its tools? I’m definitely heading in for another playthrough.
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