After STALKER 2: Heart of Chernobyl took center stage during Xbox's and Bethesda's joint E3 2021 presentation, it would seem fans cannot get enough of the highly acclaimed survival horror series. But now, after the latest news drop, gamers are more excited than ever before.
In the heart of Ukraine, STALKER 2 is set to arrive early next year, and while that is some time away the developers have regularly dropped interesting-hype inducing information to keep gamers entertained. With claims such as hundreds of hours worth of content and huge maps, it has been revealed the environment players will creep through, with handgun and gas mask, will be gloriously rendered in Epic Games' Unreal Engine 5.
The beans were spilt after Epic Games impressively revealed that over 80 Unreal Engine-powered titles are coming soon, with the yet to be official GTA Remastered Trilogy also suspected to be running on the engine. The tweet was later quoted by the Official Twitter account for the STALKER franchise, with a small statement letting out that the impending entry will join the others in being juiced on Unreal Engine 5.
The goal of Unreal Engine 5 is to make it easy for developers to create detailed game worlds without having to spend excessive time on creating new detailed assets, allowing the engine software to handle these factors. This is the main reason why gamers are so overwhelmingly thrilled with the announcement because STALKER 2 has the opportunity to be the most enormous yet exquisitely intricate post-apocalypse world available on the market.
Speaking of which, STALKER 2 may be one of the largest Xbox Series X titles slated to be on Game Pass. The first-person shooter's file size on the Microsoft Store is reported to be a monstrous 150.01 GB. To put this in perspective, the size of the STALKER 2 is the equivalent of combining Grand Theft Auto 5 (95 GB on August 2021) plus The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Complete Edition (28.1GB) and still over 20 gigabytes will be leftover. Based on the size alone, it would seem that GSC Game World has managed to cram a good amount of content into the game.
With that in mind, any PlayStation gamer's intrigued in exploring the vast crumbling Chernobyl streets will have to wait as STALKER 2 is planned to be Microsoft-exclusive, only releasing on Microsoft Windows and the Xbox Series X/S. But this exclusivity, however, is only slated to be for three months following its release as evidenced from leaked documents as a part of Epic Games v. Apple.
STALKER 2: Heart of Chernobyl launches April 28, 2022 for PC and Xbox Series X.