New Stalker remaster patch continues to combat ongoing performance woes

After a long wait, Stalker 2 finally arrived late last year, providing a solid follow-up to one of the best apocalypse games ever made. Despite working hard on the sequel, its creator has continued to pay attention to the trilogy that started the series, remastering Stalker: Shadow of Chornobyl, Clear Sky, and Call of Pripyat as three 'Enhanced Editions' that make up the Stalker: Legends of the Zone collection. These remasters haven't exactly been a hit, with players citing significant performance issues. Fortunately, creator GSC Game World has continued to work on addressing these problems, now putting out a new update that provides a wide range of fixes.

Stalker: Shadow of Chornobyl originally launched all the way back in 2007, which makes the prospect of a version with new visuals, design tweaks, and gamepad and modern hardware support more than welcome. Properly implementing all of these changes, though, has been tougher than expected.

Today's Patch 1.3 introduces, per its Steam description, "numerous bug fixes, a major font overhaul for a more familiar look, and a new quality-of-life feature" for the games that make up Legends of the Zone. The latter feature brings the quick slot system from Call of Pripyat into the earlier entries to the trilogy, Shadow of Chornobyl and Clear Sky. The font change brings text closer to its original style while increasing its size on Steam Deck, and the bug fixes adjust everything from sky blurriness and stash information glitches to fixing hand animations while wearing the SEVA suit and general issues with crashing.

GSC Game World has also added in a number of community-made fixes, which have been noted in an updated credits sequence.

If you want to pick up a copy of Stalker: Shadow of Chornobyl Enhanced Edition and check out its new update, you can grab it on Steam right here.

Or, you can find other games like Stalker to play with our picks for the best FPS games and best survival games on PC. There are also lots of Stalker fans to chat with over at our community Discord server, so head on over to strike up a conversation.