Stalker 2 Won’t Be Delayed, GSC Game World Preparing for a 2023 Launch
It was iXBT GAMES Editor-in-Chief, Vitaly Kazunov that stated that the upcoming survival horror game Stalker 2 won’t be released until at least 2024-2025. The editor cited his own sources in a Youtube video where he claimed that the game is unfortunately at a stage of permanent repair.
So, what happened to the highly anticipated release of Stalker 2, and what bumped up the release date to 2024-2025? Well, it all has to do with the Russian Invasion of Ukraine. Issues started to pop up around six months ago as the Russia-Ukraine War jumpstarted. For the time being, Stalker 2 development was put on hiatus, and development soon resume once the team relocated to Prague. Unfortunately, Kazunov stated that most of the key staff members that worked on the development of Stalker 2 have since resigned from the studio due to issues with relocating and problems associated with the war. We don’t know the exact details of this story, but Kazunov suggested that these issues led to new employees being recruited at the studio that have been forced to redo some aspects of the game and in some cases, basically start from scratch. But these were all rumors started by the editor-in-chief. And these rumors have since been denied recently. GSC Game World quickly came on the scene and refuted the rumors via Discord and has since released an official statement to alt/char refuting the “absurd nature of the info”. It was earlier this month that Xbox began refunding the pre-orders for Stalker 2 and denied taking any further pre-orders from the game entirely. This doesn’t point to a potentially huge delay, as Microsoft’s policy states that pre-orders for the game will begin once again after a release date for a title is confirmed. Following the refunds, Stalker 2 developers at GSC Game World reported that they had to postpone the game to 2023 with no exact release date in mind. Stalker 2 was initially set for an April 8, 2022 launch date which was later rescheduled to December 8, 2022. That was all before the Russian Invasion of Ukraine. STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl is currently expected to be released sometime in 2023 for the Xbox Series X | S and PC and will be available on Steam, Epic Games Store, and Microsoft Store. So, what do you think of Stalker 2 and the whole news story? Let us know in the comments below. We upload daily on Appuals, so stay tuned for more. Till then, see you later and goodbye!
