STALKER 2: THE DOWNLOAD SIMULATOR

Stalker 2: the Download Simulator

Online games news Tedious Retro Gamer, 25-07-2025
Online Games Bay

GSC Game World, the company behind Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl, just introduced a new game in the universum and at the same time they invented a new genre of the games. Or rather, meta games. Introducing Stalker 2: the Download Simulator!

Since its patchy premiere, Stalker 2 was updated few times by GSC Game World and several thousands of bugs were removed (at least according to publishers). The original game has around 150 GB that needs to be downloaded in order to even enter the Zone, but since then each patch or fix to the game required several GB of additional download.

In some cases it is understandable, if there were hundreds of fixes to the game, the patch might need to update a huge chunk of the game files, but with time it is really becoming a burden to keep downloading a lot of data just to fix some minor details.

The recent patch, 1.5.2 was introduced yesterday and the notes read as follows:

"Patch 1.5.2 is ready to be downloaded, here is the full list of changes:
* Fixed an issue when a door to the Shevchenko hub was closed.
* Fixed two crashes that could occur randomly during gameplay.

Thanks a lot for your continuous feedback and support."

And now, take a wild guess how much data you need to download to patch those two (or technically three) things on the list. How about 100kB? How about 5MB? How about 300MB? Nope, 7 frickin GB to fix a fricking door!

Since I installed the game (150GB), there were two major patches (each 9GB) and 3 or 4 smaller ones (still, each between 3 and 7GB), which means I have downloaded more data just to fix the game than some other games would take to download in whole. It is safe to say that patches to Stalker 2 so far were more than the whole Fallout 4 with DLCs (about 37GB Fallout versus about 40GB Stalker 2 patches and fixes).

Will it be enough to save this Godforsaken project that Stalker 2 became? I sincerely doubt being able to open the door to the Shevchenko hub is enough to bring back people that saw the emptiness of Stalker 2 and moved on with their lives. And I begin to wonder if the creators should finally do the same.

25-07-2025