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STALKER 2 has been in development since 2018. In that time, its developers have told me they have seen the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, they fled to Prague, they’ve had fires, and they’ve also been hacked by Russia. At Gamescom, I played the first hour of the game; my first steps into Chornobyl were frightening, visceral, and unforgettable. How did the developers pull this off?
GSC Game World’s Zakhar Bocharov joked that “it was a really bad business idea,” Especially considering the game doesn’t have a publisher, so all costs land on the developers and investors. It has been 17 years since the first game was released. Everything has changed since. Single-player games are now buried under the masses of live-service slop, microtransactions and cosmetics are the new economy, and the game industry is perpetually on the brink of self-implosion. I wanted to know what developing a sequel in an ever-changing environment like this was like.
“It’s more a passion project than anything else. I think staying authentic to the experience was the biggest challenge. Because STALKER is an old-fashioned experience right now. I think we refined it to a certain degree, like revising the shooting, adding compasses, the yellow leathers everyone is talking about after the deep dive video… We made certain changes here and there to make it a ‘modern game’, still, it’s not the experience everyone usually plays.”
Zakhar Bocharov
When I first loaded up STALKER 2, I noticed exactly that. It wasn’t a game plastered with a glittery UI or a hand-holding companion to usher you through the tutorial. I started alone, afraid. The score was intentionally quiet. Instead, the soundtrack was the scraping of rusted gates in the wind, strange metallic hums, and water dripping through cracked pipes.
A quick primer on STALKER 2: you have been tasked with exploring the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. As a stalker, your job is to investigate anomalies and report back to the hand that feeds you. After a frantic and blockbuster cutscene, the game’s protagonist Skif is left to his own devices and to fend for himself.
There was a building ahead. Inside, it was dark and dilapidated. Unreal Engine 5 breathed fidelity and intense realism into the textures that plastered the cobbled floor and the shimmering water that reflected the incandescence of the telekinetic Electro. It fizzed across the room in a telegraphed pattern and, if you had played any of the other games, it was obvious to avoid it at all costs.
I found a box at some point. I went to rummage through it before I realised I hadn’t even looked at my inventory. In all of STALKER 2’s visual glory, I hadn’t stolen a single glance at its UI, checked what items were in my pack, looked at the minimap, or even the mini-quest log in the corner. The moment you start playing this game, you are Skif. Survival is the only thing that matters, and everything else disappears.
Bocharov touched on elements of modern game design that don’t typically fit into the STALKER design philosophy: “Survival elements, really hard difficulty, and a lot of things that are not considered friendly: no levelling system, you just need to get better, constant difficulties in terms of managing resources and conditions, the main character is super expendable. He’s basically no-one. He’s no Master Chief. He’s no Doom guy. It’s just like he will die and The Zone will not notice that. And just to keep that feeling, it means making a challenging experience that is not for everyone.”
There’s a sense of this in the gunplay. It doesn’t feel like your average modern shooter with weightless guns and slick bullets. Firing a gun in STALKER feels old. Mechanisms churn, bullets go astray, and each firearm has its own unique quality and oddity. The same goes for the healing mechanics. Without a med pack, your health isn’t going up any time soon. The developers are truly working against you with this game, and it works.
My allotted time with the game was just under an hour. I probably spent a little too much time deciding between an assault rifle I had found, or a submachine gun. One of those ‘unfriendly’ design choices included a diegetic menu (a staple of the STALKER franchise). If you pick up a big item, it will take up as much menu space as you’d expect it to in real life. It made that decision between weapons feel much grander than the typical RPG cliché of being able to fit an entire caravan in your pouch.
It made Skif feel real, too. You could try to sympathise, but it’s impossible. It’s hopeless. So, I wanted to understand the decision to have the main character be a ‘nobody’. Bocharov told me that Chornobyl is only a few hundred kilometres away from Kyiv. “For a lot of people in Ukraine, you can just hop on the bus and see it for yourself. STALKER is something similar to that experience, and you want the player to feel like they can go to that place easily, like you can literally be there. Because the Zone itself is much bigger, more powerful, stronger than you – to sustain that feeling you have to be almost no-one and endure everything while you figure out how it works.”
My first encounter with an enemy proved that. I’d found a new gun, forgot to equip it, and continued trawling through overgrown bogs and marshes. A quiet scuttling sound later and a four-legged radiation freak jumped out at me. It hit me twice, not before I unloaded a full pistol magazine into its gross little body, and we both died together. The Zone and its radiation mutants taught me that Skif’s starting gear was useless, and that I’d need to think hard about surviving.
“The Zone is an enormous ocean, and the ocean is stronger than you. It will break you. But on the ship, you probably can make it if you know how to get along with it. Being really weak, no matter how hard it sounds, is part of the experience.”
In my conversation with GSC Game World, there was a real sense that ‘being really weak is part of the experience’ was far beyond STALKER. The war in Ukraine had a devastating impact on its people, and I wanted to know if it had had an effect on the game’s narrative, story, and message, too.
Bocharov said that he wasn’t aware if a decision has been made on this yet, but “they were deciding in the studio if [they] need to keep the sound of the siren in the game; it’s a PTSD thing for all Ukrainians.” He explained that they cut out the Russian voice acting too, and if you’ve been following the game closely, you’ll have noticed that it’s now using the Ukrainian spelling for Chornobyl rather than the Russian Chernobyl.
“There are certain story beats that actually feel quite different. We probably didn’t mean that context at the start of development, but thanks to the war, it now reads like a message. It’s not usually a message we wanted to convey, it’s just the world changed.” He told me about a faction from the original trilogy, once containing only Ukrainian soldiers. In the upcoming title, it’s now a global faction with the lore explaining that international interest in the Zone has grown. “But at the same time, it’s about not letting the player kill Ukrainian soldiers. So things like that happen throughout the whole experience.”
To round off my time in STALKER 2, I was tasked with looking for a strange radioactive artefact. Shortly after I found it, an invisible creature zipped out from behind a bush and killed me. The first time I saw it, I shrieked a little, embarrassing myself in front of the room of cool game developers. This sums up my experience with the game. Mired in exhaustion, frustration, fear, this game is going to transport you away from your comfort zone and into a harrowing yet enchanting rendering of Chornobyl. GSC Game World says it’s the “best Chornobyl digital museum” available and I believe them.
3D Designer Mykyta Balnov said that “we had our 3D team go there for photogrammetry. We used a lot of references; we wanted to make this game as realistic visually as possible.” In exploring The Zone, you will see that acute attention to detail. The Zone has a sense of beauty in its own way. Fauna is subtly saturated with resistant yellows, while sunlight is dappled through dense trees of leaves. But it’s not beautiful, it’s devastating. Step through the idealistic landscapes and you will trample on the rotten corpses of the dead.
The original STALKER is still being played to this date. I asked GSC Game World what their plan is to get the sequel into the same position.
“There is only so much we can do on our side. Just let it go and see. Ultimately, it’s up to the players to decide.”
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