STALKER 2, the latest title in the series of post-apocalyptic survival horror games developed byGSC Game World, will be built using the Unreal Engine.
According to the developer, the choice was made because Epic’s game engine will make modding easy and accessible for players. User-created mods will be important in keeping the game fresh and the community active long after release so that the devs can focus on creating additional games for the series.
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STALKER 2was originally being developed on GSC Game World’s proprietary X-Ray Engine. Confirmation that the game will now be powered by theUnreal Enginecame after Epic Games prematurely made the announcement in a blog post titled “Awesome games coming in 2020 and beyond.” This slip was not missed by alert readers and people immediately began to question GSC Game World, who had to quickly confirm the news despite the intention to keep it under wraps for a while longer.
Given the controversy that has surrounded theEpic Games Store and its exclusivity dealsthis past year, the news thatSTALKER 2will be developed using the Unreal Engine understandably raised concerns for some gamers. However, GSC Game World refrained from discussing exclusivity deals, digital stores, or platforms that the game will be released on, with the promise that “we will talk about this later.”
After first being announced in 2010 and thencancelled twice,STALKER 2was again revealed to be in development just weeks prior to E3 2018. The timing was not coincidental, according to GSC Game World’s CEO Sergiy Grygorovych, because the game needed a publisher and the company hoped to use hype from the announcement to find one. It’s not entirely surprising, then, that GSC Game World might have been tempted byEpic’s deals for developerswho use the Unreal Engine or self-publish their games.
STALKER 2is the long-awaited sequel toSTALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl,STALKER: Clear Sky, and 2009’sSTALKER: Call of Pripyat. The series of first-person shooters takes place in the area surrounding the site of theChernobyl disaster, known in the games as the Zone, and presents an alternative history of events. In the games, radiation from the explosion caused some survivors to develop psychic abilities, and experimentation with these abilities resulted in a second explosion and the appearance of a number of physical and meteorological anomalies.
