It’s been a long time coming, but it looks like STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl will finally be coming out early next year, with developer GSC World hitting gamescom to talk all about their highly anticipated sequel. And GSC has quite the story to tell: after being announced and then canceled in 2011, revived in 2018, and then delayed amid Russia’s unvasion of Ukraine. But now, we’ve finally got more to see of STALKER 2.
Game director and CEO at GSC Game World Evgeniy Grygorovych made the time to stop by IGN’s gamescom studio to answer our questions about how the team is doing, the importance of creating a realistic recreation of Chornobyl, what audiences can expect after more than 10 years after the original, and more.
IGN: I’ve put a call-out on Twitter asking what people want to know about S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2. And right now the team is obviously dealing with the war in Ukraine. It’s had a huge impact on development, not just for the game, but on the people working on it. So everybody wanted to know how is the team, and then how are they feeling now that the game is out here for the public to play?
Evgeniy Grygorovych, GSC Game World CEO: Well, it’s a good question. So the team feels very different. Mostly all of our team are Ukrainians [and] some of the team members left the country before the war started because we realized that it may happen and we want to keep everyone safe. And our main motivation was to save everyone. So we are thinking we are going to move everyone to a safe place and then we’ll decide what to do next.
And we propose everyone to get their bags and travel. We have a plan. We prepared the plan long before this. We had a lot of buses standing by with drivers for 24 hours, seven days per week, who were standing near the office, so in case that at some point everyone knows where to go to sit and to move. But that was the time when we realized that it’s going to happen just before it happens. And we had a chance to move a little bit earlier. So for me, I was already out of the country, and for me it was very different from how it felt with the guys who left there.
It’s frightening. It’s very frightening. But at some point when you are in this, when you’re at work, so you are in country, the bomb can come and blow everything. At some point you become used to it and it become normal. So it’s strange to say, but for many of us, the normal is when bombs fly, it’s okay. Someone died, it’s not okay, and it’s totally different. And doing the game, it helps a lot because we can focus on bringing something to this world, to bring some art, experience, a story, and that’s what drive us and make us feel better and happy at some points. And it’s helped everyone in our team to become stable and move forward.
Some part of our team goes to the Army, to defense. That was their decision. So I would say just goes there day one. They don’t have any fighting experience, but they want to stand there and to protect us. And we honor them. We love them for that, and it’s super cool. But still we are making games, and it’s something that we’re going to do for I guess all the life because it’s the best job ever. I can’t find any job better than that. But the situation is very-
Complicated.
EG: It’s very simple from point of view that there is a bad guys, there is a good guys and there is no way to feel it in some different way. And so for us it’s very simple, but it’s very frightening and not okay about it. It feels like okay already.
Well, I can’t even imagine what the team is going through, what you’re going through, but it does make me feel a little better to hear that you find solace or comfort in developing the game and working on the game as a team. So, everybody just wanted to know how you’re doing, so I really appreciate the candid answer very much.
Talking about the game, it’s been 10 years. So what would you want to tell the audience about S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 and how to set their expectations for what they’re going to be experiencing in this?
EG: Yeah, this is very good question because what we can see now from the players expectations, what do they expect from the game, what kind of the game they think the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is, is very important because they face the real game, what we did and not what a player imagined. And it become frustrating if you are expecting not the right game what we are doing. So it’s happened to everyone I see.
“It’s helped everyone in our team to become stable and move forward.
When players start playing without expectations like players, so they just start and forget about what they think the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is and start to play what they see, they become good. They start investigating, discovering what’s there, what the mechanics, how it plays. This game is totally different from other games. And I know that everyone can say this about their game, but for us it’s very hard to find something close as experience because it’s very different genres. And there is a big open world games with huge maps and different settings, but there is no so big games in Chornobyl, realistic, modern setting with a lot of science fiction, very deep and nonlinear story. So it’s very heavy on plot and nonlinearly.
I am curious, did you end up gameplay mechanic wise leaning more into a military sim style gameplay?
EG: We don’t plan to do it military style. So we don’t think that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is about military. It’s about regular human whose life somehow leads that this person want to go to the zone and find something there from himself. And it’s very different from everyone who goes to the zone, the stalkers who are there and the players who play as the stalker. And we wanted to give the experience and feeling how you could feel in real life, because the Chernobyl zone and stalker map is very close to what you can find actually in real place.
Did you go to the real place actually?
EG: Yeah. We’ve been there a lot, and it’s very important to do this game. And it’s one of the most beautiful places in the world. I don’t think there is somewhere else, the place like this, where it is a town that’s become abandoned in one day, when old one who live there, they just have to be evacuated without taking any clothes, anything. And it looks totally frozen moment. And it’s super, it’s not frightening, it’s amazing, and it’s impossible to make it somewhere else because it would cost just a lot of money just to evacuate whole the city.
And the nature takes its part there, so the trees start to grow through the asphalt, there are trees growing on top of the buildings, like you see the five level building. So it’s high, and there is a tree, and it looks so futuristic and fantastic and amazing. And getting this experience helps a lot to do this game to understand what we want to show.
We want to give a portion of this experience too, and because of this real place, and it’s just 120 kilometers from the Kyiv, so it’s very close. And we want to both give this experience and give a heavy story and also bring very realistic, not realistic, but the game should looks like it’s realistic. So there are a lot of details to the weapons, to the attach upgrades and it’s… Yeah.
I’m curious, one of the locations you’ve shown in a lot of the trailers is the array. For example, the radar array. I think it’s called the Duga array. I don’t know the name specifically.
EG: So it’s an actual construction, what was built by military. It was secret why it’s there, but the most realistic explanation is that it’s a big radar that can find if someone will launch the nuclear missile, ballistic missile on other parts of the planet, the signals will go and bounce through the atmosphere. And this big radar could get this information and inform about this.
What is it in your universe though? Because it’s all electrified and it seems like there’s anomalies there. I’m curious to learn more.
EG: It’s just a location. It’s not a key part. It’s not a character of the game. It’s more like a decoration, big decoration. There is a story around it, but it’s not taken as something very key. There is, I don’t want to make spoilers, but yeah.
For more gamescom interviews, check out our chats with Phil Spencer and Zack and Deborah Snyder. And for everything else, check out our roundup the big announcements from day 1.
Kat Bailey is IGN’s News Director as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.
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