Another big Stalker 2 patch just arrived to fix the main mission, side quests, and input lag

pcgamer.com:

That was quick. Just a few days after patch 1.0.2 addressed a bunch of mission bugs, patch 1.0.3 arrived for Stalker 2 this morning to… well, to address a bunch more mission bugs. Look, Stalker 2 is a buggy game, so this is gonna take a while. And it's gonna take a lot of bandwidth: today's patch is about 20GB.

Hopefully it'll result in a better experience for all you artifact hunters. The patch makes «multiple» fixes to crashes and memory leaks, disables mouse smoothing and mouse acceleration to decrease input lag for PC players, and tackles a bunch of problems with the main mission and side missions.

Most of these fixes involve spoilers, so I'll redact them below, but you can see the full 1.0.3 patch notes here if you want specifics. Vaguely put: a dead monster was despawning too quickly and players who needed to recover something from its corpse were unable to, some enemies were chasing players further than they should, a couple of essential characters were dying when they shouldn't, and one dude was becoming insta-hostile if they noticed players using stealth. These are all progress-halting issues, so it's great that they're being resolved, especially so quickly after the last patch.

There are also a couple fixes for AI—no, not the complete repair of A-Life 2.0, unfortunately—such as an issue with NPC stalkers annoyingly blocking doorways and monster bodies acting strangely while being shot. A vendor also wasn't selling certain ammo types so that's been fixed as well.

I haven't gotten back to Stalker 2 yet myself—I played about 8 hours last week but decided to let a few more patches roll in because, surprise, I kept losing progress to bugs. Glad there's progress being made in that department, so maybe I'll head back into the Zone sometime soon.

Here are the patch notes:

Crashes and memory leaks:

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