There’s an air of tentative excitement around next month’s release of STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl. The final batch of previews is now pouring in, and amidst it, some new information straight from the horse’s mouth. For example, we now know that the 2010 build was an entirely different beast.
In more concrete terms, some of you may well remember that Heart of Chornobyl is the second time a STALKER 2 has been announced. Back in 2010, when the three classic STALKER games were still more-or-less the talk of the town, GSC Game World announced an honest-to-goodness STALKER 2 with a targeted launch window of 2012. That didn’t pan out, obviously, but according to GSC CEO Ievgen Grygorovych, “[the team] didn’t take anything from the first attempt” for the new STALKER 2.
The 2010 version of STALKER 2 will be left to the annals of time
In a small interview with Eurogamer posted as part of the publication’s final STALKER 2 preview, Grygorovych said that absolutely none of the development work done on the 2010 build of STALKER 2 has been re-used on Shadow of Chernobyl. “The standard changed, and we couldn’t take that content we had previously,” said Ievgen. He explained that the development ground to a halt in the first place because the original studio head and Ievgen’s brother, Sergiy Grygorovych, found it “exhausting” at the time.
In practice, this means absolutely everything that GSC Game World had created for the 2010 version of STALKER 2 had to be thrown out: technology, gameplay mechanics, story elements, and so on. “We were doing it from scratch based on the STALKER 1 lore,” said Ievgen.
This tidbit is unlikely to be all that interesting to franchise newcomers, but to those of us who have kept a close eye on STALKER over the years, it may bring a sense of closure. I still remember getting excited over the fact that STALKER 2 was being developed back then, only for the hype to deflate as it became clear that nothing would come of it.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think this hypothetical STALKER 2 – which Destructoid covered with a delightfully cheeky little article at the time – would have been a meaningful enough step forward in the grand scheme of things. Both GSC and the broader gaming community are more respectful of gaming legacies today than they might have been back then, and Heart of Chornobyl appears to be an honest-to-goodness love letter to the old titles.
Heck, if nothing else, STALKER‘s most beloved modding developments only came about after GSC Game World dropped the project. Who knows whether that would’ve happened in the first place had modders moved on to a new title so early? Modding is, of course, on thin ice with STALKER 2‘s Unreal Engine 5, but that’s a story for a different article.
