// PC GAMER — GAMING
'Can I cry?': Stalker 2 devs say its 2.0 update's engine overhaul was a nightmare—but worth the effort
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Earlier this month, Stalker 2 received a massive version 2.0 update to accompany the launch of its Cost of Hope expansion. Our Joshua Wolens says that—for those of us who've been patiently holding off while Stalker 2 finds a steady footing—it's the update that we've been waiting for, thanks in large part to developer GSC Game World's Herculean undertaking of updating its engine from Unreal 5.1 to Unreal 5.5.4.
That effort, it seems, was well spent. But while they're proud of the results, GSC told PC Gamer in an interview at this year's Gamescom that the process of overhauling the game's engine after launch was a bit of a nightmare.
When asked how that process went, GSC Game world COO and head of creative Maria Grygorovych responded with a question of her own: "Can I cry?"
While an engine overhaul is a massive task for any game project, she said it was particularly involved in Stalker 2's case.
"It was extremely hard because our [implementation of Unreal 5.1] was extremely customized. We had so much of our own code. It cost an enormous amount of time," she said. "If you work closer to the vanilla version, it's much easier. It depends on the process and how you build it."
And the way GSC built it, CEO and head of game direction Ievgen Grygorovych explained, made the process—which he agreed was "insane"—about as complicated as possible.
"When we were starting the game, we started on Unreal Engine 4. Then we transitioned to an early version of 5, but the features for open world support available at the time weren't compatible with the scale of game we were doing. We did a lot of custom changes to make it happen," he said. "Then, in newer versions, Epic introduced their own systems that were doing the same things, but in their own way. To upgrade to those newer versions, we had to remerge everything. For us, it took much more time and effort than it might for other projects."
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While the engine upgrade meant an abundance of growing pains, Ievgen said it brought benefits for earlier versions of the game, too.