But how did we get to STALKER 2?

Eastern europe gaming is not all a jumble of cyka blyat shouted in the chats of well-known competitive video games made in Valve but it hides video games of undoubted quality and brands that, in one way or another, have managed to carve out a particular niche, made up of passionate gamers and hardcore gamers.

One of the strangest things that happened in that of Twitch over the past few years is undoubtedly the success of Escape From Tarkov, a hardcore first person shooter that can't be more hardcore, equipped with high risk - high reward mechanics and very very far from what we commonly associate with the first person shooter genre.

At the time of writing this special Tarkov sits very high in the ranking of Twitch, with twelve thousand spectators. Between disused nuclear power plants, an abandoned feeling of security and a color palette worthy of a trip to the rusty regions of the world, today we see which video games have most inspired this success and, above all, how the world of video games has managed to arrive. to see the announcement of STALKER 2 to an important event Microsoft.

From Ukraine with fury.

STALKER 2 is a video game presented atXbox Showcase developed by GSC Game World, same software house author of the three previous chapters of the saga. After having cut their teeth to the sound of strategy in real time (anyone who remembers the saga of Cossacks please strike a shot) GSC released the first in 2007, practically seminal, S.T.A.L.K.E.R Shadow Of Chernobyl.

Shadow Of Chernobyl specifically it is still today a more unique than rare case: a monstrous jumble of bugs and technical problems capable of looking at a certain type of players and making them fall in love. Strengthened by light RPG mechanics and a practically unparalleled atmosphere, the first chapter of the Stalker saga nowadays is still a video game with a very strong personality.

GSC's inspirations are self-evident: there is Roadside picnic and there is also the splendid Stalker di Andreij Tarkovskij.

The first represents its backbone, isetting the worldbuilding, the extravagance and the general setting. By Stalker GSC film instead takes up the aesthetics, the color palette and the atmosphere, sacrificing on the altar of playability the philosophical / introspective path that brought the masterpiece of Russian cinema to history.

Shadow Of Chernobyl puts the player in the shoes of a nobody inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone, in an alternate reality in which a second nuclear disaster has forever changed the reality of the place as we imagine it. Walking through the barren radioactive steppes means coming into contact with alterations of normality, with artifacts capable of bending the physics we know, with living beings worthy of being called monsters or aliens.

In this stage all terror and bolts thrown in the attempt to discover the next trap of nature, as players, we have the possibility to shape our story following different threads. Shadow Of Chernobyl immediately leaves us the possibility of putting into practice the morality we prefer, letting ourselves be affiliated with one of different factions in perennial struggle with each other.

Iterations

The recipe of Shadow Of Chernobyl, from the top of its technical imperfections, it has allowed CSG to obtain the success necessary to mount two sequels / expansions, each of them centered on a particular mechanic or on a particular concept.

STALKER Clear Sky (2008), for example, significantly broadens the discourse of factions within the zone while STALKER Call of Pripyat (2009) focuses on creating a real sequel, adding a veil of militarism that clashes slightly with the context otherwise encapsulated by the very first chapter of the saga.

All this until then, in the now distant 2010, the first announcement concerning STALKER 2, son of what should have been the new engine graphic of GSC and intended for release in 2012. As expected something went wrong and the game it was deleted a couple of times, until the definitive hello announced by the software house during 2012.

Six were the years of silence that interspersed that last declaration with the new hope, which materialized in 2018 on a facebook post on the page of Cossacks 3.

STALKER 2 was coming back to life, this time animated by a new graphic engine (Unreal Engine 4) and was looking for a publisher, thanks to an announcement released shortly before theE3 2018.

Fast forward: two years have passed and Microsoft officially unveiled the first title-related content at its event Xbox Showcase 2020, aiming for a release for 2021 and simultaneous launch on PC e Xbox One/Series X, representing the first landing on consoles for this series of video games.

The trailer of STALKER 2 looks dirty and dark as always, showing once again an atmosphere perfectly in line with what was designed in the past and with what we loved in Roadside picnic and Stalker.

Once again it will be an open world videogame that will dominate, once again it will be a hybrid shooter, a little immersive sim, a little role-playing game; once again there will be bonfires with the other stalkers, all immersed in their thoughts singing about the days gone by in a fragment of the world that is no longer a world.