One of the most wanted games on Steam, STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl, launched on November 20, 2024 with serious flaws. Still, it enjoys high player numbers and great reviews – what’s going on?
What’s going on with Stalker right now? STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl was released on November 20, 2024 after years of waiting. But despite several postponements, the developers have apparently not managed to eliminate all the bugs.
The survival shooter is in such bad condition that our Webedia colleagues from GamePro have issued a purchase warning.
Despite everything, Stalker 2 is currently one of the most played titles on Steam with more than 100,000 simultaneous players and plays in the same league as GTA 5 and Throne and Liberty. In addition, there are players who play via Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.
Even more impressive is the 80% positive rating that Stalker 2 has with more than 13,000 reviews on Steam. How can that be?
STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl: “Come to Me”, the official trailer
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Stalker fans defy Bugs and Jank
Why is this interesting? Gamers are usually not so generous when it comes to bugs. On the contrary: A common criticism of today’s games industry is that expensive AAA titles are launched unfinished. At launch, these games are often punished with mediocre ratings, which eventually recover as time and patches have passed.
The prime example of this is probably No Man’s Sky. The survival game got off to a very bad start at the time and is still fighting to win the trust and favor of the players 8 years later – with success.
With Stalker 2, the bugs and performance problems seem to have little impact on the rating.
What’s going on there? On the one hand, this could be because Stalker players are used to grief. Bugs and jank are basically part of the gaming experience. Hardly anyone in the community expected an error-free release. Some people even get very nostalgic when they see the well-known bugs again – like an author at the English website PC Gamer.
Another possible explanation is that many players haven’t played enough to encounter the game’s more serious problems, such as those described by our colleagues at GameStar.
So it’s quite possible that we’ll see a drastic drop in reviews by the weekend at the latest, when more people have time to delve deeper into the game. Unless the developers can keep their word and deliver one or two fixes by then.
By the way, the developers are aware of the problems and promise improvement. The official X account says: “STALKER 2 is a massive game. We understand that there are still rough edges with a game like this: we have literally not released anything on this scale before.”
Accordingly, there should be a number of hotfixes in the first few days after the release, and later they want to move on to larger updates. In December, GSC Game World also plans to publish a roadmap that provides information about the future of the game and upcoming content.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, which was released just a day earlier, also had a difficult start on Steam, but the players weren’t nearly as gracious here. You can find out more about this on MeinMMO: The rush of players is said to be to blame for the failure of a new game from Microsoft on Steam