Stalker 2 Deep Dive Highlights Vast Player Freedom

Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl is due out this fall on PC and Xbox Series X|S, following many years of waiting from the fans, as well as obstacles, including some as non-traditional as real-life war, challenging the Ukrainian team along the way. Today, GSC Game World is ready to provide a lengthy look at the game, particularly as it pertains to its massive open-world setting filled with real-life landmarks, sci-fi oddities, irradiated monsters, and a multitude of secrets to discover.

The 35-minute video showcases plenty of gameplay, often highlighting the freedom bestowed to the player. Many of a game’s traditional upgrades, such as new equipment, weapons, and accessories, are not gifted to the player for simply progressing through the Stalker 2 story. Instead, they will often be tucked away in various corners of the eastern European setting, and require curious players to seek them out.

The team also boasted that some locations returning from previous games in the series are now available to explore for the first time ever, such as a church cellar that was seen from the outside but never accessible. In Stalker 2, however, it and other places like it can be entered and scavenged. This level of detail is owed to the team’s mission to outdo itself. “We constantly had to look back on the success of the first games’ development,” game director Ievgen Grygorovych said, “because we can’t produce anything worse than that. We can only do better.”

To that end, the behavior of AI enemies is also a point of emphasis. In the developer diary, GSC Game World illustrates how enemies won’t easily key in on where a stealthy player may be hiding. Some stealth games script AI behaviors to approach a hiding player and directly challenge them to stay out of sight, but in Stalker 2, a well-hidden player who gives no clues as to their whereabouts can remain hidden. If enemies do get a whiff of a stealthy stalker, they will first hypothesize where they may be hiding, going on to make assumptions that may be right or wrong. These more nuanced behaviors sound as though they’ll still drive emergent moments, and perhaps do so even better than some games like it given the more unpredictable pathing of the enemies.

GSC Game World admits creating a game with a level of freedom that Stalker 2 possesses is, on a technical level, “very difficult” and “time-consuming,” as the team must account for every possible step the player may take in the open world, and then reward them appropriately for doing so, in the form of new challenges or rewards.

That massive world is built, in part, using real-life locations, some of which are presented in the game exactly as they are in real life, while others have been redesigned to suit the world. Due to the branching nature of some story beats, a player can’t actually see every mission, meet every character, or discover every location in one playthrough. Subsequent experiences with the game will be needed for even the most diehard completionists.

“We didn’t want to make the game easy for the player,” a developer said, as it would “kill the grip of reality.” If the player can easily make mistakes, then it’s “not a Stalker experience.”

The lengthy video goes on to showcase the Exclusion Zone’s mutants, the team’s motion-capture studio, and the attention to detail when creating the game’s soundscapes in different languages, such as English and Ukrainian.

In the end, the team acknowledges the unique hardships it’s had to overcome due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine to even make a game of any kind, never mind one that it is especially proud of.

“Even if all the complications never happened, starting and finishing this project still would have been a fantastic achievement. But now, considering all these challenges, I think we are superheroes,” a developer concludes. “You can’t create something like this world, this plot, this game on your own or when there are only a few of you. Teamwork and cooperation of talents and professionals in their respective fields, only under such conditions, after a number of failures and victories, there may come a moment when something new and great, grand and far-reaching is really created and starts its life. I am really proud to be part of that.”

Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl launches on Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Xbox Game Pass on November 20. If you’ve seen enough to jump in for yourself, you can preorder Stalker 2 today.