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(Image credit: GSC Game World)
In most game previews, I’d be turning beet-red with every death, equating failure with wasted seconds I could have been Seeing Stuff. But in Stalker 2, I caught myself grinning at respawn screens and victorious shootouts alike. Given how squishy protagonist Skif is, the difference between the two can come down to a single bullet. The result is more of the same unforgiving firefights that defined the original Stalker trilogy, where headshots drop enemies in gratifying crumples and dashing from cover to cover feels like having to run over live wires.
It – sort of – worked. Sometimes they’d catch me before I could duck behind a tree and riddle me with bullets. On one particularly embarrassing occasion, the noise of our shootout drew a pack of feral dogs, who tore me to shreds before I could scramble up the digger I was taking cover behind. But it was all worth it for the intoxicating triumph of finally killing them, moving quietly between trees before peeking out to headshot a bandit and scramble away in pursuit of the next target. I can’t remember the last time a single-player shooter gave such a rush, but it wouldn’t have been half as potent without feeling so hard-earned. It’s how I imagine an action sequence in a movie is filmed – rehearsed, tweaked, and iterated upon, until the final cut makes every second look sleek and effortless.
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Live, die, repeat
(Image credit: GSC Game World)
To die for(Image credit: GSC Game World)Stalker 2’s massive open world is built to explore for “as long as you can survive”, and it may be the secret weapon that wins over Fallout, Metro, and The Last of Us fans
To die for
(Image credit: GSC Game World)Stalker 2’s massive open world is built to explore for “as long as you can survive”, and it may be the secret weapon that wins over Fallout, Metro, and The Last of Us fans
(Image credit: GSC Game World)
Stalker 2’s massive open world is built to explore for “as long as you can survive”, and it may be the secret weapon that wins over Fallout, Metro, and The Last of Us fans
When I catch up with GSC Game World’s PR lead Zakhar Bocharov, I’m keen to learn how the team has made that unrelenting cycle of life and death feel so gripping. He explains that it’s a result of drawing directly from the original trilogy’s tone, in which anything besides brutality would feel alien.
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“It’s about being authentic to itself, to the formula,” says Bocharov. “In some aspects, [Stalker 2 is a] really modern game being released in 2024. But at the same time, it’s old-school to a certain degree. You know – being a difficult game, being a big single-player experience, staying authentic to the DNA of the series […] it’s something that can be done in a way that potential and existing players are used to.”
Something old, something new
(Image credit: GSC Game World)
“The game will constantly punish you for mistakes and challenge you, and that keeps throughout the whole playthrough"Zakhar Bocharov
“The game will constantly punish you for mistakes and challenge you, and that keeps throughout the whole playthrough”
In getting that balance of challenge and broader palatability right, Bocharov says the team had to find “the balance between being realistic and slightly arcade-y for it to be entertaining”. It’s an “ongoing” subject of tweaks and playtests, and a core tenet has been making each of the game’s 30-plus guns “feel” as they should while changing your playstyle. Bocharov also credits the game’s AI for giving shootouts that frantic, knife’s-edge feeling.
“They actually search for the player, and make their own assumptions about where the player is. It can be tricky for the player, because the AI [acts closer] to how a real person would – I constantly got shot from behind while playing this game,” adds Bocharov, laughing. “That’s a challenge on its own, resulting in that experience of actually immersing you in a gunfight where you’re not just taking aim and pushing a button to kill someone, but feeling like you’re battling for your life. It’s a combination of all these elements done right, while being authentic to that original difficulty.”
“If you’re a careful player, there is a point where you’re more or less comfortable with resources,” he continues. “But this is not stable. It can change, and the game will constantly punish you for mistakes and challenge you, and that keeps throughout the whole playthrough.”
Given how much trouble those bandits caused me earlier, this admittedly feels like counting my mutated chickens before they’ve hatched. But it’s hard not to jump ahead. I’ve been waiting over 15 years for a shooter to scratch the same itch that 2009’s Call of Pripyat left me with, and I’m not entirely surprised to find that its long-awaited follow-up is the only game capable of doing so. Yes, these moment-to-moment shootouts are Stalker 2’s standout feature, but The Zone’s broader hostility is to thank (or blame) for its bleakly immersive atmosphere. Ultimately, it’s Bocharov that sums it up best. “You cannot be prepared,” he says, “because you don’t know what will be there”.
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