Stalker 2 was first announced back in 2018, almost a decade after the last game in the series, Stalker: Call of Pripyat, arrived. While fans of the excellent original games were pleased, there was plenty of outcry last year following news that the game would incorporate NFTs—non-fungible tokens were still seen as the next big (money-making) thing in gaming back then. Thankfully, the backlash led to a U-turn by the studio; it later confirmed that Stalker 2 wouldn’t have anything NFT-related. In January, GSC Game World announced that Stalker 2 would need another seven months of work to get it ready. That was before Russia invaded Ukraine, which further delayed the game into 2023.
Like the originals, Stalker 2 is an open-world survival game. It’s set in the Exclusion Zone around the Chornobyl nuclear power plant and is packed with dangers, from anomalies and mutants to bandits. The game’s new trailer, titled Come to Me, was posted to GSC Game World’s YouTube channel a few hours ago. The clip really shows off the gorgeous Unreal Engine 5 graphics and atmospheric environment. There’s also a brief glimpse of the inventory management system. All that prettiness means the developer recommends players have a Radeon RX 5700 XT or Nvidia RTX 2070 Super / GTX 1080 Ti graphics card in their system, though the minimum requirements are a Radeon RX 580 and GTX 1060 6GB. The game will be available on the Epic Game Store and Steam at launch, and, thanks to its inclusion on the service, is another reason for people to sign up for PC Game Pass. GSC Game World has relocated some of its operations to Prague, in Czechia, since the war in Ukraine began. As such, it expects Stalker 2 won’t experience any more delays. In related news, it was recently reported that Volodymyr Yezhov, a former GSC developer who worked on Stalker: Clear Sky, died in a battle near Bakhmut.
