How two secret Stalker 2 hacks cut my loading time from 5 minutes to 52 seconds and got me in the Zone faster

pcgamer.com:

As soon as I read our official Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl review I knew I needed to play this long-in-the-making sequel. However, like many PC gamers will no doubt have experienced, it's not exactly been smooth sailing at launch, with would-be Stalkers having to fight through a plethora of game-breaking bugs and mega patches to find fun and immersion.

There's another thing that's also been dampening my enjoyment of Stalker 2 as well—just how long I've been having to wait to actually get playing it. Thanks to a smorgasbord of intro videos as well as a forced Unreal Engine 5 shader compilation every single time you boot up the game, it's been a severe trial of patience, and especially so when trying to play on my gaming laptop, which isn't as fast and powerful as my main rig.

But, luckily, there is now something that all Stalker 2 PC gamers can do about it, with two simple Stalker 2 hacks (both take seconds), allowing the complete removal of both the game's forced intro videos and shader compilation. And, let me tell you as someone who has just done this himself, the results are superb. Check out the videos below for conclusive proof, which show me loading Stalker 2 on my gaming laptop both without and with these hacks in play.

Time to load into playable game = 4 minutes, 56 seconds

As you can see from the tortuously long video above, without any hacks in play it takes Stalker 2 almost five whole minutes from me launching the game to get to a playable state. That's just such a downer, knowing that every time I want to jump into the fantastically atmospheric world of the Zone, I'll have to wait for long enough for me to nip to the local shop and back. The intro videos add to the time, but the real killer is the forced Unreal Engine 5 shader compilation, which dumps minutes onto the wait time.

Time to load into playable game = 52 seconds

Now we're talking! With the two hacks in play I'm enjoying Stalker 2 within 52 seconds of launching the game. There's no