Just before the Christmas break, I capped off 2024 with a news piece about GSC's surprise announcement that it would be putting out gleaming "next-gen patches" for the original Stalker trilogy—Shadow of Chernobyl, Clear Sky, and Call of Pripyat—on PC.
The studio was maddeningly vague about what the heck that actually meant, though, so I idly speculated—as a Christmas treat to myself—that it probably meant stuff like "higher-resolution cutscenes, nicer visuals and performance, and controller support" along with garnishes like Steam achievements.
Well, GSC has broken cover to announce that the patches will drop on May 20, and bring with them, um, higher-resolution cutscenes, nicer visuals and performance, and controller support, along with garnishes like Steam achievements. They're calling me the Nostradamus of videogames. Or the Quasimodo. I forget.
The studio is collectively calling these whizzbang new editions the Stalker Legends of the Zone Trilogy Enhanced Edition, a "fully remastered and optimized" collection of the classic games built for our RTX 5 billions and PlayStation 8s and what-have-you. They'll show up in your library as separate entries to the OG games and, yes, you get them for free if you already own the originals.
GSC says that translates to "New lighting, reflections, textures, shaders, and 4K cinematics [that] bring the Zone to life like never before," as well as—for us on PC—"Steam Deck compatibility, mod support, and Xbox & PlayStation controller compatibility."
In other words, it sounds a lot like the console ports of the original trilogy GSC put out last year, with a few extra graphical bells and whistles bolted on too. The games' titles are also being updated to reflect the Ukrainian spelling of Chornobyl and Prypiat, much like Stalker 2's did.
I gotta say, that sounds like exactly what I want. I might get tarred and feathered for saying it, but being able to kick back on my sofa and enjoy classic Stalker on my TV, gamepad in hand sounds like an absolute treat. Being able to boot it on my Steam Deck and go? Even better. I suspect there will be a contingent of people who stick to the original versions and their wide libraries of mods, but with GSC promising robust mod support out the gate I'm hoping a lot of those projects will be able to transition over seamlessly.
All that remains to be seen is how the games run. Pretty much every Stalker game, from SoC to Stalker 2, has come out the gate hot, filled with all manner of bugs and jank that range from the hilarious to the game-breaking (GSC is still fixing up Stalker 2). With any luck, the fact that this is a polish-job on games that have been out for quite some time means we'll get to skip that bit, but the proof will be in the pudding. Or the Tourist's Delight, I guess.
