Recently I had the privilege of playing an upcoming Xbox and Windows PC exclusive, one many of you may have heard of.
Stalker 2 (often stylized as S.T.A.L.K.E.R.) is an upcoming open-world shooter at its core, but the franchise represents so, so much more than that. Perhaps now, more so than ever.
Developed primarily in Ukraine with a second studio in Czechia, Stalker captured the imagination of an entire region haunted by the reality and mythos of Chornobyl, and its notorious nuclear disaster that irrevocably changed Europe and the entire world. Just 100 kilometers shy of Kyiv stands the remains of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant, which famously succumbed to a core meltdown that led to the deaths of thousands. To this day, the surrounding towns of Chornobyl and Pripyat remain irradiated. The official Chornobyl nuclear exclusion zone or "The Zone" as it is often referred to recently began opening up to "disaster tourists" as radiation levels along the outskirts became comparatively less dangerous. However, it once again remains off limits due to the hostilities from the Putin regime in Russia, whose infamously failed Kyiv offensive cut straight through the most irradiated parts of the region.
It's against this harrowing backdrop of senseless, nihilistic warmongery that Stalker 2 finished its final years of development. Many of GSC's team ended up on the front lines, battling against the fathomless evil of Russia's Putin and his deranged ilk, in conditions most of us can scarcely imagine.
Stalker 2 in this context represents the peerless grit and determination of a nation and wider region blighted by the ghosts of the past, and the demons of fascism next door. As bleak as Stalker 2's irradiated mutant-infested climbs are, an undercurrent of optimism still cuts through the mire. The fact Stalker 2 even exists at the level of quality I experienced is a huge testament to the team.
Make no mistake, Stalker 2 is a game-of-the-year contender, and I feel immensely privileged to have been able to bring you this glimpse of a rare game that looks set to not only do justice to a legendary predecessor but take its franchise to all-new heights in the process.
Dawn rises on Stalker 2, finally launching on November 20, 2024, for Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and Windows PC.
What is Stalker 2?
The original Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl launched back in 2007, but has since been ported to modern systems such as the Xbox Series X|S, and has reams of upgrade mods on its Windows versions on Steam and the like too.
Inspired in part by the sci-fi 70s novella Roadside Picnic, Stalker blends some of the concepts from the book with a fictional second Chornobyl nuclear disaster, which spewed the exclusion zone with a new blanket of hazardous radiation. Additionally, "The Zone" became further contaminated with warped physics anomalies, aberrant mutants of local fauna, and otherworldly entities of mysterious origin. Stalker spawned a prequel, in Stalker: Cleary Sky, and a sequel in Stalker: Call of Pripyat.
The Stalker games are typified by their "hardcore" FPS realism and immersive systems, which intersect with story-heavy RPG mechanics you might sooner expect of a Bethesda role-playing game than a tactical shooter. Bullet wounds will make you bleed, hunger will drain you of stamina, and death lurks around every corner.
Approaching combat situations with a Call of Duty run n' gun mindset is a surefire way to get you killed, as I would find out quite quickly in my 3-hour preview with the latest build of the game. But the game gives you mountains of tools to get an advantage, following traditions from the immersive sim genre. Horrific space-time anomalies, violently irradiated weather, mutant husks, psychotic mercenaries, and aggressively impatient military personnel will make your life in The Zone a living hell — but you'll make friends along the way too.
Stalker 2 is set to launch fifteen years after its predecessor, and almost fifteen years after its initial announcement. During that time frame, developer GSC Game World has developed, canceled, and relaunched development for Stalker 2, as well as closed and re-opened — all while navigating Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Finally, after over a decade, Stalker 2 is nearly ready for its time in the spotlight.
The following interview was conducted with GSC Game World, with some answers edited for clarity and brevity.
On STALKER 2 difficulty, immersion, map size, and future DLC expansions
I noted in my intro that Stalker 2 is a "hardcore" FPS, but I wasn't exactly prepared for the true essence of what that means.
Stalker 2 begins with our player character and a comrade sneaking into "The Zone." In Stalker, the 30~ km exclusion zone around the Chornobyl plant's remains has become a militarily protected region, with checkpoints and helicopters preventing any access into, or out of, the entire perimeter. However, mercenaries (often known as Stalkers) sneak their way into the zone for a variety of reasons. A sort of black market has emerged for energies and artifacts from the anomalous landscape, whose anomalous properties can fetch a high price to the right shadowy individuals or organizations. It seems that our charge is to help one such individual, committing to a dangerous job to extract physics-defying emissions into a strange machine.
Given the gap in time between Stalker's initial release and today, I wondered if the current-gen landscape of open-world shooters had influenced GSC's design process for Stalker 2. For the most part, Stalker 2 seems to be marching to its own tune.
"We had our core pillars of what Stalker should look like, and we went from there. Some parts may look similar to another game, but it's not because we picked it out from there. We just build aspects that fit into Stalker. I think for us, we're generally not oriented on building the game on the basis of something else.
We didn't look at other games and think 'we need to make a bigger world,' I don't think that's a good approach. We want to make sure our map feels alive, feeling dense with content. The content should be differentiated, it shouldn't repeat. Most other open worlds have some kind of traversal mechanic for moving faster, like cars, fast travel, horses, and so on. In Stalker, you only have your feet. In this way, we can zoom into the map and make it feel bigger."
Indeed, I was taken aback by just how large Stalker 2's map seemed to be from the PDA interface you're given. But as games like Starfield and Far Cry can attest to, there has been a backlash more recently against "large for the sake of large." The original Stalker games also featured vast maps for their time, but leaned heavily on hand-crafted points of interest. Stalker 2 is no different.
"We're not relying on procedural generation. We are handcrafting everything. We have some prefabs of course for buildings, but we renovate them with unique stories and content. 99% of the work is hand-crafted, and you can really feel that."
Over the past ten years, I've been in a ton of preview events for games of all shapes and sizes. Stalker 2 is one of the few I can remember where three hours felt more like three minutes, time giving way to pure enjoyment. I was so utterly transfixed by the world GSC has put together here, backed by a stunning soundtrack of muted post-rock ambiance. Stalker represents an oddly captivating mix of horror and apocalyptic tranquility. A chorus of haunted, unnatural cries will cut through the ghostly nuclear mist, casting apparitions of ray-traced figures from the zone's hulking, irradiated creatures.
Stalker 2 isn't shy about its brutal difficulty curve, either, and it's something long-time fans are sure to expect. For the preview event, press were locked in to normal difficulty, which GSC describes as actually "really difficult."
"At release, we'll have three difficulties, but at "normal" difficulty, the game is already tuned to be really difficult. We have an even higher difficulty mode that doesn't just make the gameplay more difficult, but also strips back HUD and UI elements."
I had to adjust my expectations after a couple of early deaths in Stalker 2, but once you get into the flow, it feels incredibly rewarding. High-stakes combat and realistic vulnerability serve to enhance Stalker 2's immersive design landscape, but there will be a story mode difficulty for those who aren't seeking the challenge.
Indeed, Stalker 2 can perhaps best be described as an immersive sim, with a heavy emphasis on that aforementioned realism. Managing supplies of food, bandages, and bullets forms the basis of play, with your wits perhaps forming your greatest weapon. Sometimes, it might be better to talk your way out of a fight, or perhaps avoid it altogether. There are no "levels" to grind in Stalker 2, but gear stats and RPG-style exploration form the basis of your progression.
"I personally like to play Stalker 2 without the HUD. You start feeling yourself in the game. If you entered a firefight without the HUD and didn't properly check your ammo, and realize you only have three bullets left in the magazine, it can be a very cool experience. You can also optionally turn off the HUD on the lowest difficulty, though. The lowest difficulty is more like a story mode because we know a lot of players aren't "hardcore" who are fans too, because of the atmosphere of the Chornobyl exclusion zone, and how it's known around the world."
"The loneliness there, the remnants of the stories of people living in this world. It's a unique feature of the game. You can spend hours just talking to random stalkers, talking about random topics with them — not narrative-driven topics. They will tell you about the zone, and their lives. I love what we've done, even with the generic NPCs in Stalker."
Stalker's NPCs were legendary in their era, too, giving the blighted land that cutting sense of strange optimism. An entire black market economy has grown around the pursuit of the zone's strange artifacts, and building a positive reputation with the game's various factions will help you out a great deal. Your starting weapons are shaky, prone to jamming, and inaccurate. You can barter for better weapons, hunt them down in quests, and get hints about hidden stalker caches if you help out the right people. I was lucky enough to find a scoped rifle ensconced on top of a water tower near the start, which helped me a great deal in subsequent firefights. Dynamic cover lean mechanics and stealth executions add some tactical flair, while enemies will seek your last known location, making sound another important tool to overcome the odds.
GSC notes that two expansions are already planned for Stalker 2, with some of the team already working on the first, as the development of the base game wraps up. GSC is also planning a variety of free post-launch updates in patches too, with plans for the story expansions requiring new features planned for the base game.
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On GSC's partnership with Xbox, Game Pass, and Xbox Series S optimizations
Xbox isn't a company known for timed exclusives these days, so I was curious how its partnership with GSC came about. Stalker 2 launches as an Xbox Series X|S and Windows PC exclusive, at least for a short while. The partnership, it turns out, was the result of a quick Google search and a cold email to Xbox CEO Phil Spencer.
"We actually started with zero contacts inside Microsoft. We started searching Google for an email for Phil Spencer, and we ended up finding it on some Reddit thread. It was an email that was essentially 'We are GSC Game World, we're interested in bringing Stalker to console players.' We got a near-instant response and a connection to the correct team. We've been working until now with the Xbox team, we love them, we think they are very effective and very empathetic."
The game will also launch into Xbox Game Pass for both console and PC, which some publishers have publicly expressed doubts about. Stalker 2 will share a launch window with the likes of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 which is also set to hit the service soon, as well as Indiana Jones and The Great Circle. GSC isn't phased, though.
"We don't think about Stalker as being just successful in Ukraine, it's successful all over the world too. With Stalker 2, we're hoping to find fans in all new countries, too. It's not just a local story for us, especially if we're talking about global sales. On Xbox Game Pass, we can only talk for ourselves, but we believe that it's helping us a lot. Stalker is new to consoles, so going through Game Pass will help us reach a new audience. If you're unfamiliar, you might not buy "Stalker" if you see it next to a $60 icon, but you can give it a try with Xbox Game Pass, and perhaps become a fan of the franchise.
Then in the future, that person might already know our future games, 'I know these guys', 'I know what experience I can get from that.' So, it really depends on the project and the company. For us, for Stalker 2, Game Pass has been a very good decision."
Continuing with the theme of controversy, I had to ask GSC about the Xbox Series S. Microsoft's Xbox Series X|S platform comes with the requirement of an "S" version, which sports lower-end specs than its PS5-competing Xbox Series X. Some developers have openly complained about the difficulty of porting titles to the Xbox Series S, owing to its reduced RAM and tighter GPU specs. GSC itself thought working with the Xbox Series S would be "impossible" at first, but now, the team believes that any modern game can potentially run on the Xbox Series S with the right optimizations.
"At first, we thought bringing Stalker 2 to the Xbox Series S might be impossible. We have such a big game with so many mechanics, a huge amount of things. It felt like this must be impossible to do. But then we start optimizing, adding new features for streaming information. Unreal Engine has a lot of features for this, but for our game, we really had to squeeze up every megabyte from every piece of system content we could, and now we did it.
After this experience, I believe it's possible for any game to reach the Xbox Series S' memory limits. And yes, not every developer, every studio has the opportunity, or the additional time to optimize for the Xbox Series S. We had to boost our expertise on the optimization side, which also helped the PC build, making it a lot more performant. We have quite low minimum PC requirements for a modern game."
"The game runs at 60 frames per second on Xbox Series X, there are some times when it might dip to 55 or so, but hopefully we can optimize further there before or after release. We allow bigger drops in narrative cutscenes that are full of complexity and VFX and the like, since it won't impact the player's movement experience.
On the Xbox Series S, we stick to 30 FPS. However, in many cases, we have managed to hit 60 FPS, but it's not as consistent as the Series X. But we're looking to get a performance mode for Xbox Series S, to get it to 60 FPS. We think it's possible."
STALKER 2 has the makings of a game of the year contender
I admit, I wasn't sure what I was getting myself in for when I was invited to try Stalker 2. I played the first game back when I was a wide-eyed Unreal Tournament-obsessed youth, and didn't really "get" the game. An obsession with soulslikes re-acquainted me with the joy of challenging gameplay, but even this wasn't enough training for the cold, unforgiving void The Zone represents.
Yet still, life thrives here. Stalkers set up check posts and bars, camp out, and play guitar. The artifacts emerging from the strange physics of The Zone have huge potential to benefit humanity, but also potentially enslave it. For all the efforts made by military powers to prevent excursions into The Zone, they still happen. The mysteries of Stalker 2 get their hooks into you almost immediately and refuse to give you away.
I see a lot of cynicism towards gaming on social media these days. Perhaps it's just my algorithm defaulting to negativity, but every now and then a game like Stalker 2 comes along and cuts through the gloom. This was a game that spoke straight to my core, as a fan of immersive sims, challenging, absorbing gameplay, apocalyptic mythology, and high-concept sci-fi. My time with Stalker 2 reminded me what video games ultimately represent at their best — that singularity of art, music, technology, and interactive storytelling — that whole that no other medium really encapsulates. I had an absolutely fantastic time with the small slice I experienced, and reckon fans will be well-served, if it sticks the full landing.
I'll say it again — if the full game comes anywhere near to what I experienced in my brief time with it, it will make Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl a clear game-of-the-year contender, in a year where so many other greats exist. November 20 can't come fast enough.
Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl launches on November 20, 2024, for Xbox Series X|S and Windows PC. Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl will also launch straight into Xbox and PC Game Pass.
