'Can I cry?': Stalker 2 devs say its 2.0 update's engine overhaul was a nightmare—but worth the effort
That's going to cause some anomalies.
Stalker 2 developers at GSC Game World recently unveiled a substantial version 2.0 update to accompany the release of their Cost of Hope expansion. The update, which saw the engine overhaul from Unreal 5.1 to Unreal 5.5.4, was deemed a major undertaking by the game's creators. However, the developers are proud of the results and have identified several optimization benefits that were backported to earlier versions of the game.
Maria Grygorovych, GSC Game World COO and creative head, had to question herself if she could cry as the engine overhaul process was a nightmare for them. She explained that their implementation of Unreal 5.1 was highly customized, with a substantial amount of their own code, making the process extremely challenging and time-consuming.
If they had worked with a vanilla version of Unreal, it would have been much easier. However, the team had to merge numerous custom changes made during the initial engine transition, which added to the complexity of the upgrade process.
CEO and game direction head Ievgen Grygorovych acknowledged that the process was insane, as they started the game on Unreal Engine 4 and transitioned to an early version of Unreal 5, modifying features to support the game's open world. Later, Epic introduced systems that were similar but not compatible with the custom changes they had made. To upgrade to these newer versions, they had to remerge everything, which took much more time and effort than it might have for other projects.
Despite the headaches introduced by the engine upgrade, the developers still believe Unreal is a better choice than the X-Ray engine that powered previous Stalker titles. They highlighted the difficulty in finding engineers experienced in working with X-Ray, and noted that finding 60 such engineers would be impossible. GSC's developers have significantly benefited from transitioning to Unreal, both in terms of performance and career prospects for the studio's team.
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