A whole bunch of new information about Stalker 2 makes it clear: The trip to the zone will be harder and significantly more extensive than ever before!
Next year will Stalker 2 you to the rays
bring. So, after this pun, guaranteed never to be read, we get more specific: A whole bunch of new information makes it clear that the developer GSC Game World has lost none of its penchant for ambitious plans. The only question is: will you get everything implemented this time?
Especially in the survival aspect, Stalker 2 should be significantly harder than its predecessor. But also when it comes to size you are not satisfied with small scales and promise significantly more playing time than in the predecessors if you really want to explore every corner of the game world and do all the activities.
If the stalker has nothing in his stomach, he’ll soon be in the bush
Where does the information come from? The new information on Stalker 2 comes from the January 2022 issue of PC Gamer magazine, which spoke to GSC Game World. So these are not rumors, but official channels.
Survival elements in the gameplay focus: What was once planned for the first Stalker game, but was discarded until the 2007 release, should finally become a reality in Stalker 2. Hard-hitting survival elements force you not to be able to roam continuously through the zone without paying attention to your well-being.
- Hunger: You have to regularly fill your stomach with delicious jerky meat, exquisite canned food, and other foods so that you don’t go hungry. Otherwise, it happens that you have less and less stamina and you can no longer perform many actions. If you wait too long to eat, your stalker will bite the grass. Nice detail: If you delay your meal too long, your stomach will regularly report you with a loud growl.
- Sleep: The breaks also play an important role in Stalker 2. Because only when you are well-rested can you maintain maximum performance. This should even go so far that the optical and acoustic perception of your environment changes when you are overtired. Hallucinations do not occur after moderate overtiredness, but only after you have delayed sleep for a long time.
As in real life, you can at least take short-term measures against hunger and tiredness – such as a small snack or a can of energy drink. This is to prevent you from suddenly having to turn back in the middle of a mission because your tummy grumbles or your eyelids get heavy.
As part of the PC gamer preview, four brand new screenshots have also been published that show that Stalker 2 could become a new graphics highlight.
Planned over 100 hours
There is also solid news in terms of scope: According to the developers, 30 Quest designers are working to fill the world with enough content. The bottom line is that you should need over 100 hours to really complete all of the zone’s activities
.
However, it is still unclear what exactly is meant by these activities. In addition to main quests, most likely side quests and local events that trigger as soon as you’re around. It remains to be seen whether GSC Game World has come up with another type of zone entertainment.
Another detail about which new information was extracted is one of the factions that we inevitably get to do within the course of the plot. This sees itself as a kind of police for the zone and is therefore not very good at talking to us and other stalkers. The leader of these zone law enforcement officers hired highly qualified mercenaries and other ex-military personnel in order to have the appropriate manpower.
The aim of the faction: to remove all dangers in the zone in order to help all humanity through the potential of science. Because of course there are still all sorts of anomalies and other artifacts to be found in the zone, which one would like to investigate in the scientific institute.
The zone is alive
Already in the first stalker, a system called AI Life
ensured that the game world was dynamically populated by other stalkers, animals, and nasty mutants. In the successor, AI Life 2.0
is now used, which basically has the same tasks, but of course, is supposed to do them even better.
So you have to make sure at all times that when looking for artifacts no other stalkers shoot you in the back or a mutated animal sees you a tasty lunch. It is not known how many mutants can be found in Stalker 2. In the trailers shown so far, we have already discovered some old friends, such as the Bloodsucker, who sneaks up on you invisibly.
After this new information, did you feel more interested in Stalker 2, or are you bothered by forced survival elements in games? And what is your opinion on the desired amount of over 100 hours? Write us in the comments!