On another timeline, perhaps, we’d be less than a month away from the long-awaited launch date for Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl. Alas, on this timeline, the release was rescheduled for Nov. 20.
Perhaps mindful of fans’ impatience, the developers at GSC Game World published a deep dive into the gameplay and development of the post-apocalyptic, first-person adventure set in the Exclusion Zone that encompasses the scene of the 1986 Chornobyl nuclear disaster.
It’s the first game in the Stalker series since 2009’s Stalker: Call of Pripyat. Heart of Chornobyl was first announced in 2010. The project has survived the closure of the original GSC Game World in 2011; was resurrected along with GSC’s second incarnation in 2014; returned to full development sometime around 2018, and has gone through several launch delays since then.
Oh, and by the way, GSC Game World is based in Kyiv, the capital of a nation currently at war with Russia. To say this project is a very personal statement for its developers is putting it mildly.
The deep dive video is 35 minutes long. We’ll try to capture the most relevant points here for those who may not have the time to watch all of it. The meatiest portion of the video is the walkthrough of a mission in the game’s Swamp region — one of 20 different regions that “could well be a fully separate game,” said Dzmitry Anoshka, GSC’s level art lead for Stalker.
For those unfamiliar, a Stalker is a bounty hunter who ventures deep into the Exclusion Zone at Chornobyl. Stalker 2 is an open-world game, with great emphasis on the “open” part, said creative director Mariia Grygorovych. “Go where you want, do what you want, feel what you want,” she said. “Anything is possible.”
How open is Stalker 2’s open world, really?
The scale of freedom in Stalker’s open world means the number of potential outcomes that GSC had to design for “grows in geometric progression,” she says later in the video. “It’s an unspoken amount of everything. You must cover each of these options and understand what experience you are giving the player.”
That leads to open-ended solutions for quest objectives, as was shown. In one sequence, the player character — a Stalker named Skif — hides in the balcony of a church about a mutant who mimics the screams and cries for help of other Stalkers, to lure the player into a trap. In this case, hiding demonstrated the enemy AI, according to Ievgen Grygorovych, a GSC studio executive and the game director.
“We don’t give the AI hints where the player is,” he explained. “If it sees you, it knows where you are. But if the player is hiding, the AI starts hypothesizing where they might be. The AI doesn’t know where the player is, but it starts making assumptions. After running through all of the hypotheses, it starts searching for the player.”
Indeed that is what happened, and after taking a few shots at the mutant, the player relocated to the roof to further confuse the AI, before finally dropping to the surface and finishing it off from behind.
What is progression like in Stalker 2?
Players will not encounter a traditional progression system based on levels, with associated perks or skill increases. “Your progress is reflected in better knowledge of the environment, in faster reactions,” Ievgen Grygorovych said. “To my mind, this is exactly what the players would expect from Stalker.”
Players will also progress through the weapons, and their attachments and modifications, that they find. Some of these items will be granted at the end of quests, but a good number are simply available in the open world, both to encourage exploration as well as reward players for whom exploration and open-ended play are more the goal than proceeding along a strict narrative path.
The Swamp may not have featured other hostile Stalkers, but it still had plenty of hazards, not least the irradiated zombies (as well as boss-type zombies, such as the Controller) and mutated wildlife. For example, an upgraded mutant dog, the Pseudodog, has a pack of “phantoms” running with him, all of whom look like him. Killing the real Pseudodog ends the threat.
Weather effects introduce lightning strikes that can either bring a stroke of good luck or completely foul up your plans. Factions inside the exclusion zone will adhere to a characteristic ideology, but when attacked or pressured, they may fracture into smaller groups, change leaders, or completely abandon the traits that set them apart, Mariia Grygorovych said.
Many of the locations shown in the Swamp had been seen before in the original Stalker trilogy (encompassing 2007’s Shadow of Chernobyl, 2008’s Clear Sky, and 2009’s Call of Pripyat). In one such place, the ruined wine cellar of the church, a locked room from the original trilogy is now accessible, it just has a warren of mutated rats on the other side, plus a ton of loot. “In most cases, the player is free to explore any location,” Ievgen Grygorovych said.
How much replay value will a big game like Stalker 2 really have?
This isn’t to say the player is in charge of the story all by themselves. There is a lengthy and complex narrative serving the whole game, comprising some three hours of cutscene footage, said Ingwar Dovgoteles, the game’s cinematic lead. But Mariia Grygorovych said it isn’t possible to see everything the game has to offer in a single playthrough.
“Depending on your choices, you’ll get a little different story, little different quests, encounter someone new,” she said. “But if you walk through again, you will find yourself on the other side of the barricade, so to say, and look at it in a different way.”
Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl will launch Nov. 20 as an Xbox Series X and Windows PC exclusive. It will be available the same day to Xbox Game Pass subscribers. A statement from GSC Game World on Tuesday seemed to acknowledge fans’ impatience with the repeated delays.
“We are always grateful for your ongoing support and understanding – it means the world to usl,” Ievgen Grygorovych said. We are just as eager as you are to finally release the game and for you to experiwence it for yourself.”
Featured image via GSC Game World
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