The new trailer for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.. 2: Heart of Chornobyl is called ‘Zonelife’. It is a 30-minute recording of nature sounds at the Zaton location ‘for relaxation, work and study’
Zaton is a partially dried up mouth of the Prypiat river, which according to the plot of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. universe after the turning off of the ‘Brain Scorcher’ began to be explored by bandits and stalkers. One of the main locations of Zaton — river-going cargo ship ‘Skadovsk’.
‘Listen, rookie: if you don’t see them, it doesn’t mean they don’t see you. They’re maliciously waiting under the water glade, tracking your every move with their bulging eyes. Warming mucous paws for the charge. They are watching… And croaking as hell’, the trailer’s description reads.
What is known about S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl will have a non-linear plot, which will directly depend on the player’s actions. It will be possible to pass the game in different ways, and the decisions of users will affect the state of the world and lead to different endings.
Another key innovation is ‘one of the biggest open worlds’ instead of interconnected separate locations. The action of the game will take place both on new locations and on locations known from previous games.
The game will be the largest and most ambitious project of GSC Game World. It is created on a new engine Unreal Engine 5, the number of words in the script already exceeds 350 thousand, the area of the open world should be 64 square kilometers. Developers expect that users will need more than 100 hours for several passes of the game.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is independent from the other games in the series — this means that players who haven’t played the previous games don’t necessarily need to know their storyline (but the team advises passing all the games of the series ‘for complete immersion’).
The game will be a temporary Microsoft exclusive, it will be released on PC and the new Xbox Series X — it will not be released on current-gen consoles.
In October 2024, GSC Game World and Xbox released the film ‘War Game: The Making Of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2’ about the impact of a full-scale invasion on the game’s development.
The ‘circumstances and challenges’ during which the studio continued development are recounted in the film by team members, particularly Maria Grygorovych, the studio’s creative director. Read more about the documentary here.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl will be released on November 20.
