S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2’s first patch is coming next week, though my favourite parts are still the imperfections

Stalker 2: Heart Of Chornobyl has been in the wild for almost a week now, and it’s a great, if predictably somewhat shonky time, is the word on the street. Literally, that’s what the streets are saying. “It’s good! A bit shonky, though!” opined my postman this morning, enunciating each syllable by yanking the package further from my grasp. “Don’t worry!” I said. “A patch for the FPS is coming next week”. “That’s cheered me right up, that has! Thank god for games journalists!” he replied. Then the whole street started cheering and bringing me various baked goods. It was a delicious time, and here’s the notes from the delicious patch:

Crash Fixes, including:

• Issues and memory allocation failures, which previously caused the game to exit unexpectedly, particularly around rendering, skeletal meshes, and quest-related cutscenes.

Main Quest Progression Fixes, including:

• Several bugs blocking the main quest progression, NPCs getting stuck in objects, incorrect quest markers, and issues with quest cutscenes.
• Revision of the main quests (like Visions of Truth or A Minor Incident) to ensure smooth transitions, avoiding rare cases of players not being able to proceed further.

Gameplay & Balance Adjustments, including:

• Fixing the price of the weapons with upgrades installed compared to their value without attachments.
• NPCs behavior, including the way they act when lacking a shelter during the Emissions.

Cutscenes & Visual Fixes, including:

• Rarely missing facial animations, misplaced NPCs, and visual inconsistencies like detached heads and clothes clipping.
• Quality and stability improvements of the visual effects.

Softlock Fixes, including:

• Issue where players were unable to close the trade screen after putting ammo in a wrong slot while playing on a gamepad.

User Interface Improvements, including:

• Quest notifications now showed correctly during dialogues.
• Corrected texts and missing interaction prompts.

Noted to be addressed in future updates:

• Analogue sticks dead zones bugfixes.
• A-Life system bugfixes.

That’s a fair few key issues targeted, which is reassuring, although I do get the sense the series’ history with bugs has primed the audience to be a little more forgiving this time around - understandable given the extraordinary circumstances that GSC Game World faced during development. Personally, I only have one request: please do not patch out this guy’s dodgy teeth:

I’m not sure if the screenshot fully conveys what I’m talking about here, so do have a look at the Gameranx video where I found the footage. And, yes, I admit this is a strange thing to get excited about, but I’m genuinely happy to see such imperfect, yellowing (even if it’s partially the flashlight) teeth in a game. It’s the sort of realistic touch that feels incredibly minor until you realise just how few games actually do it. Like, I say 'dodgy', but they're not even dodgy, really. They're just a normal bloke's normal, imperfect teeth.

I haven’t spent enough time with the game yet to tour its full menagerie of miscoloured mouths, although after reviewing the game, James tells me that dodgy teeth aren’t too rare, if not exactly common. I may have honed in on this lad’s gnashers specifically because I’d so recently been blinded by Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s pearly whiteout, even though its far from the first game to be populated by bizarrely blemish-free inhabitants. It’s the sort of manicured unreality that’s so common I don’t even tend to notice it until something like Heart of Chornobyl comes along with characters that look well and truly worn out. More bad teeth, I say. More scars in uncool places, more stretch marks. I’m serious!