Much bigger this time, STALKER 2’s Exclusion Zone still feels like home for longtime fans

There was never a thought of redoing the Exclusion Zone, said GSC Game World’s Dzimitry Anoshka. STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl’s setting is so essential to the story, according to the game’s lead level artist, that the developers never considered reimagining or “rebooting” the place, even if it was last seen in 2009, even with all of the technology and capabilities that have come to PCs and consoles in the 15 years since. 

“It was always clear to us that the Zone wasn’t even half uncovered in the original [STALKER] trilogy,” Anoshka said, “and there are many more places and stories we’d like to show and tell.”

Even a decade ago, the STALKER games were the kind where the world itself was as much of a main character as anyone encountered within it. The series is a survival adventure set in the abandoned area surrounding the very real 1986 Chornobyl explosion and its aftermath, the worst nuclear disaster in history. In the STALKER timeline, the Soviet Union used this no-man’s land for a variety of experiments, which resulted in the psionic anomalies that give this Exclusion Zone its sci-fi flavor and sense of supernatural danger. Stalkers go into the zone to explore these anomalies and retrieve the valuable artifacts found near them.

For those who played the original games, which launched from 2007 to 2009 and developed a cultish following that sustained interest in the series despite its 15-year dormancy, STALKER 2’s wasteland environments will feel right at home, particularly its hub locations. But over the game’s lengthy development (its origins date to at least a 2018 announcement, if not all the way back to 2010) Anoshka came to realize that continuing to develop the original Exclusion Zone, rather than overhauling it, was an opportunity to deliver a sense of immersion beyond bringing back familiar locations.

“The uniqueness of STALKER lies in the fact that most stalkers (as bounty hunters in the Exclusion Zone are called) enter the Zone having little idea about it—just like the new players,” Anoshka said. The goal, he continued, is for STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl to deliver a map that honors the canon for long-standing fans while still giving them a feeling of experiencing it all for the first time.

“You will remember the moment you first face the Zone,” promised Artem Nor, STALKER 2’s lead level designer. “It’s a dangerous but atmospheric and unique place. The gamers who already have experience with STALKER will face a lot of familiar places and references to the events that have already happened.”

Developer GSC Game World gave a concrete example of this during a developer’s deep-dive video, which first aired during Gamescom 2024 in August. A bombed-out church and its wine cellar are presented as they were in the games 15 years ago, in the same location they were too. This time, however, a door that was permanently locked in the original game opens into a secret area containing a stash of ammo, food, and other useful items.

“Of course, there were a lot of discussions about the canonical locations; ‘should we change them or keep them as is?’” Nor said. “We decided not to change such locations without compelling reasons.”

Those compelling reasons were usually based on gameplay, and often tied to the capabilities that have become available to modern video game hardware and development, particularly in the adoption of Unreal Engine 5. (The original three games used GSC’s proprietary X-Ray Engine.)
 
“The most important thing that we wanted but weren’t able to do in the original trilogy is the size and the seamless world” of Heart of Chornobyl, Anoshka said. “In STALKER 2, we paid special attention to it. Thanks to modern technology and pipelines, we were able to create a really huge, seamless world with unique and hand-crafted locations.”

By “huge,” Anoshka means that regions of the map—he gave its Swamps location as an example—can be as large as the entire map played in the first three games. “In the original STALKER trilogy, the world was fairly large by the standards of the time, but the regions were separated from each other with obvious transition between them,” Anoshka said. The seamlessness afforded by Unreal Engine 5 helped the developers fulfill one of their longest-held aspirations for STALKER’s world, mainly that it would present players with a greater sense of challenge, not just impress them with size alone.

“The locations turned out to be more extensive, and many of the previously inaccessible areas are now opened for exploration,” he said. “Giving a couple of examples, Lab X-18 [a critical setting in the original games] now has a whole new level, and there is a bar above the Arena,” which is a gathering place for the Freedom faction of NPCs.

“Areas from the original trilogy are sort of sacred for both players and us, and we tried to keep them in their initial form, only increasing the overall level of details, showing the influence of time or plot-related changes happening in between the games,” Anoshka said. 

Prypiat, another game area constructed and illustrated from real-life source material, is another major area that showcases the world-building GSC designers can pull off with state-of-the-art tools. “The player has access to administrative buildings, numerous apartments, parks, and alleys, not to mention vast spaces underground,” Anoshka said. ‘We finally were able to blend all of these diverse spaces without sacrificing performance.

“Realizing that this [Prypiat] is a truly unique place with no analogs in the whole world, we focused on making it as close to the real one as possible,” he said. “Of course, we had to make some changes, but Prypiat in STALKER 2 is extremely similar, sustaining impressive size and the attention to details.”

That attention to detail was drawn from source material based on the real-life Exclusion Zone itself as well as other abandoned locations from around the world. GSC Game World designers wanted to understand how unmanaged nature takes over a location given years of neglect.

“Fun fact,” Nor chimed in, “but one of the first scanned concrete plates [in the ‘sarcophagus’ surrounding Chornobyl’s destroyed reactor] got more polygons than Pripyat in STALKER: Call of Prypiat.”

In previews shown at Gamescom and since that expo, one gets the “if you see it, you can walk to it” sense that large open-world games have aspired to capture as technology has advanced to meet developers’ ambitions. It also serves another thematic goal of STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl’s lengthy development, which is to present a unique playthrough experience for each person. Of course, aspiring to that kind of scale increases the game’s complexity, not only in what the world itself offers but how the player can and does interact with it as they pursue the objectives of the story or one of its missions.

In a way, that serves another and even larger ambition of GSC developers, which is to create a world of such limitless, branching choices that a playthrough, particularly the first playthrough, is borderline unique to each player. In the original locations, a ruined church may have had a linear purpose, simply being the scene of a battle or the setting for an important conversation. Now, by opening up its attic and rafters so players can scramble along the rooftop, it offers a tactical solution for defeating a boss-level creature that has trouble tracking you through shadows.

Nor admitted that it may have been easier to just do an Exclusion Zone entirely from scratch, forsaking the layout and fictional locations of the original. “At first, it was hard to combine all separate regions from the previous game series into one seamless map,” he said. “Sometimes we had to move whole regions and locations.”

Furthermore, Nor said, just because GSC designers were working from source material based on the real world or established in the games 15 years ago, didn’t mean there was no room for personal artistic statements. “There should be some space for creativity. Special attention was addressed to the hub locations of the originals, the places players have visited many, many times,” Nor promised. “You will have a ‘right at home’ feeling from both locations and familiar characters. Plenty of them are still there for you.”

STALKER 2 launches on November 20 for Windows PC in the Epic Games Store and is also available for Xbox Series X.