Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl has just released on PlayStation 5 alongside the game’s huge 1.7 update, but developer GSC Game World is far from done. The supernatural survival shooter has come leagues and bounds from its scrappy launch day version with massive A-Life improvements, visual updates, new weapons and more.

However, as GSC Game World works on the game’s first major DLC, which is said to have a more “cinematic” tone, the developer is still hard at work on huge updates for the core experience. The team is continuing to improve its A-Life technology, add more tools for players, and even upgrade the game’s engine to a newer Unreal Engine 5 iteration.

“Over the past year, the game got 7 big updates – and a lot of smaller ones too,” Stalker 2 communications director Zakhar Bocharov told us in a recent interview. “These didn’t just fix bugs and make it run better; they also added tons of new stuff. The game now feels very different from what it was when it first came out.”

However, just because the game is in a “better” place, that doesn’t mean that GSC is finished with the title just yet. In fact, while the team will, one day, stop updating the game at some unknown point in the future, they’re also aware that they could keep improving the game forever.

“Updates are a tricky thing,” Bocharov continued. “In the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. world, you could probably keep adding them forever, just like chasing something perfect that you never quite reach. Still, the work goes on.

“We wrote a lot of custom things (and even systems) ourselves, and now we have to move all of that to the newer version. It’s a big job.”

Stalker 2 technical producer on the game’s upcoming engine update

“What’s really important is that the updates weren’t only about fixing technical problems. They brought a lot of new content: monster loot, night-vision goggles, new guns, different weather, and much more. To us, all these changes made staying in the Zone way more fun. It’s now easier to just get lost in the world, wander around for no reason, explore every corner, or simply enjoy how everything in the game works together.”

Updates like mutant loot and night-vision goggles may have always been in the cards, but deciding when to add new features is always down to how badly fans want them. “We literally looked through every bit of feedback about the game since launch,” the developer continued. “Then we go through the requests, spot the ones players want most, and plan our updates around our own vision plus what you all are asking for.”

However, some updates are far harder than others. Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl was built on a very early, unoptimised version of Unreal Engine 5, and was heavily modified by the team at GSC to get such a massive open world working to the level of fidelity the team wanted. Right now, the team is working on bringing the game to Unreal Engine 5.5.4 instead of its modified 5.1 setup, and that is a lot more complicated than gamers realise.

“The main problem is that our game engine is very heavily modified,” explained Stalker 2 technical producer Ievgen Kulyk. “We wrote a lot of custom things (and even systems) ourselves, and now we have to move all of that to the newer version. It’s a big job. Still, if the new tech helps the game run better and feel nicer, we’re all in.”

GSC Game World believes that fans of the game will “really feel a difference once the full upgrade is ready”. While the team has been able to make some very substantial performance improvements since launch—check out this Digital Foundry video for proof of that—sometimes a major technical overhaul is required.

It’s not something you see very often. In fact, it’s incredibly rare with massive engine overhauls post-release usually only hit blockbuster successes like Fortnite, which is also a testbed for Unreal Engine studio Epic Games. Nevertheless, GSC is still working on the massive engine upgrade for Stalker 2 which should bring better performance and new rendering features to the game in the near future.

With the engine upgrade on the way, GSC has also teased that the game could arrive on new systems. While nothing has been confirmed, the studio is watching both Nintendo Switch 2 and Steam Deck “with great interest” as the new performance overhaul arrives.