We’re now less than a month away from the launch of STALKER 2, which in itself seems impossible to process. The game has had so many delays (some forced on the developers by the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, for example) that even the most attached fans were skeptical at some point.
STALKER 2 is almost here, though. GSC Game World recently hosted a final press event in Prague where they shared a few extra details about their game. In a video interview published by Radio Times Gaming, for example, Technical Producer Yevhenii Kulyk talked about optimization after the interviewer mentioned the many recent Unreal Engine games suffering from stuttering issues on PC.
To meet our expectations for optimization on Xbox and PCs, we made a lot of changes to render threads, some CPU optimizations, and a lot of RAM optimizations. Now we are pretty much close to finishing the whole polishing process. Our aim is to provide a game that is running constantly in stable FPS and with stable performance all the time.
When asked about the Unreal Engine 5 version they’ve been using, Kulyk said:
Our engine is based on Unreal Engine 5.1, but we internally call it 5.1.GSC because to make a world this big, we had to adopt and, let’s say, maybe rewrite and upgrade some tools that were provided by the basic Unreal Engine to fit our needs to create the world of STALKER 2.
Over a year ago, GSC Game World commented on the news of upgrading from UE4 to UE5, stating that Lumen and Nanite were the ‘right bricks’ to finish the game. However, Epic introduced several performance and quality improvements to both technologies in the more recent UE5 versions; let’s hope staying on an older, albeit custom, build won’t jeopardize the performance. After all, the team seems confident in their promise of a smooth frame rate.
Elsewhere in the interview, Kulyk reiterated what we already revealed in our exclusive Gamescom interview: mods are coming, to both PC and consoles.
We are aware that our player base, especially the old fans, is waiting for our game to support mods. We will bring in the mods to consoles, so they will be available on the Xbox as well as the PC We are preparing a very big toolkit that will provide the mod makers with all the necessary tools to create mods, from the smallest one to big total conversions.
STALKER 2 is out on November 20 on PC and Xbox Series S|X, available from day one on Game Pass. A PlayStation 5 release hasn’t been publicly talked about yet, but we know from a previous report that there is a three-month exclusivity window in place, so the game could launch on Sony’s console in early 2025.
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