STALKER 2 is right around the corner and a few days before its release date on November 20, 2024, Xbox users are granted the convenience of pre-loading the game. It looks like you will want to because STALKER 2 has pulled off a Call of Duty and will occupy nearly 150 GB of storage space. Pretty standard for a big FPS game, but the storage drama here is a tradition for the STALKER franchise.
To be more specific, STALKER 2‘s storage requirement is a whopping 146.58 GB, something you would expect from a Western AAA game. That would likely prompt many PC and Xbox users to purchase an upgrade in light of the numerous 100+ GB games right now.
STALKER 2 convincing you that your gaming device’s storage needs an upgrade is even more poetic if you’ve played the old STALKER games.
STALKER 2 is actually the 4th game in the series (5th if you count the mobile version), and it’s a belated and independent sequel. Likewise, it also follows the FPS/survival horror hybrid structure about a fictionalized Chornobyl Exclusion Zone.
The first three games were the urban legends of the gaming community for being nigh-peerless. No other game was able to capture its atmosphere and Euro-jank ambition. Back then in the late 2000s, however, ambition came hand-in-hand with jank.
The Old STALKER Games Made Me Switch to SSDs
One of the main reasons why the first three STALKER games gained their reputation was due to how the performance and optimization mods were necessary if you wanted to play the game. That’s because the game didn’t run well on modern systems (post-2010).
Meanwhile, the machines from the late 2000s also had trouble running the STALKER games. At times, they were even more demanding than the original Crysis.
Unfortunately for me, I only got a gaming PC in 2011 and had to resort to modding. Back then SSDs (solid state drives) were still expensive and not as commonplace. The bulkier and slower HDDs (hard disk drives) were still the mainstream forms of storage.
So I was hysterically perplexed when STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl— a 2007 game, would run like a slideshow on my 2011 mid-range PC. It also wouldn’t load my modded textures, character models, and general geometry. It was like seeing a Picasso painting in motion. Outside of that, I had to deal with corrupted save files every 30 minutes from too much quicksaving. Life was harsh for us millennials in the Exclusion Zone.
It wasn’t until I upgraded from the HDD to SSD that I was able to play the modded Shadow of Chernobyl and only barely. Such is the instability of the Zone, even the radiation seemingly affected my PC. But I wanted to put up with the jank because the STALKER games were unlike any other.
Fast forward to more than ten years later and here we are now in 2024, with STALKER 2 making us contemplate whether it’s worth it to add another 2-4 terabytes of SSD storage in our online Black Friday carts. Nevertheless, the Zone and all its quirks await. Thankfully, STALKER 2‘s other hardware requirements aren’t as harsh.
