Stalker 2 is set to launch on PlayStation 5 late 2025 a year after it hit PC and Xbox Series X and S.
GSC Game World’s Xbox Game Studios-backed open world horror shooter launches on PS5 with full support for the DualSense controller’s features, including haptic feedback and adaptive triggers. Further technical enhancements for the PS5 Pro are also in development, the developer said.
Stalker 2 launched in November 2024 to a positive reception on Steam and 1 million sales. It’s a success story for the Ukrainian studio; a miracle, really, considering the harrowing circumstances that followed Russian’s full-scale invasion of the country in 2022.
But Stalker 2 launched with well-documented bugs and issues, chief among them A-Life 2.0. A-Life was a key feature of the first Stalker game that governed AI behavior across the game world. At a high level, it is a system for simulating life in the Zone that works its magic seemingly independently of the player’s actions or whereabouts. It helps to create convincing AI and the emergent gameplay Stalker is famous for.
GSC had said A-Life 2.0 would make the Zone feel alive as never before, that it would fuel emergent gameplay on a scale previously thought impossible. Indeed for some fans, A-Life 2.0 was Stalker 2’s biggest selling point. But when Stalker 2 actually came out players discovered that A-Life 2.0 didn’t work properly, with some questioning whether it was even in the game at all.
In an interview with IGN in December, GSC explained what went wrong with Stalker 2’s A-Life 2.0, and vowed to fix the system. They’ve been working on doing that ever since, and the expectation is that the PS5 version will include all the latest updates and fixes the developer has released for the PC and Xbox versions.
Read more on how Stalker 2 has changed everything for the studio here.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
