STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl, the beautifully grim sci-fi shooter sequel from Ukrainian studio GSC Game World, has been delayed again. It’s a relatively benevolent delay, though: for one, it’s not This long, with the previously planned September 5th release pushed back just a few weeks to November 20th. There’s also a clever little universe preview cinematic (one that gives the fourth wall a kick in the study on its way out) and an accompanying promise of a meaty “developer deep dive cinematic” that’s set to reveal much more of the game’s radioactive hellscape on August 12th.
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“We know you might be tired of waiting and we really appreciate your patience,” we read in the English-language announcement on the website Explosion“These two extra months will give us a chance to fix more “unexpected anomalies” (or just “bugs” as you call them).”
To satisfy our appetite for tearing through the overgrown Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and shooting rusty AKs at psychotic beasts, the deep dive video will feature “exclusive interviews, tons of new footage, and a full video walkthrough of one of the game’s quests.” Great! When it arrives on August 12th, it’ll be released on “Xbox Media Channels,” which I assume means, like YouTube, and not some terrestrial TV channel I’ve never heard of where Master Chief presents the 6 o’clock news.
Seriously, I’ve been looking forward to STALKER 2 for ages. I love the feel of the older STALKER games, but I’ve always bounced off their hardcore Eurojank, so the idea of creating the same world with updated production values is incredibly compelling. You can’t argue with spending more time polishing it either – even if it means Final Release Date Trailer nomenclature-wise, it hasn’t aged particularly well.
GSC also had to deal with something much worse than a handful of software bugs. The Kiev studio’s employees were relocated to Prague in the wake of the Russian invasion in 2022, and early development materials for STALKER 2 were stolen and leaked by alleged Russian hacker groups. Also in 2022, designer Volodymyr Yezhov, who previously worked on the original STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, STALKER: Clear Sky, and STALKER: Call of Pripyat, was he died while defending the city of Bakhmut as a volunteer soldier.
