Stalker 2 dev says "the game is huge," takes 100 hours to fully beat, and was built entirely "by hand"
Aug. 23, 2024“You will not notice two exact buildings or two exact rooms”
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Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobylis a big ol' game with a huge map and a story that’ll take around 100 hours to fully explore, and even so, it was essentially built entirely by hand.
“Of course you can make a big map, but it should still, first of all, be playable, beautiful, and you as a player should remember the locations of the Zone,” Kulyk said. “The main thing here, if you’re talking about the map - yes it’s big. It’s really big, but we still almost didn’t use any procedural generation for the world.”
Procedural generation is a common design technique that generates and/or places variants of in-game assets partly to save on development time and cost, and it’s often used for less focal aspects of the environment and non-player characters. According to Kulyk, however, everything that you see in the game was actually touched by a human hand at some point in development.
“So everything you may notice or experience in our game was made by the hands of our talented level designers, level artists, team designers, and so on,” Kulyk said. “You will not notice two exact buildings or two exact rooms with the same placement of the same props of meshes or something like that. So every player that is playing Stalker 2 will get their story.”
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Stalker 2 will be enjoyable to new and returning players, because even its protagonist doesn’t know what’s going on.
After scoring a degree in English from ASU, I worked as a copy editor while freelancing for places like SFX Magazine, Screen Rant, Game Revolution, and MMORPG on the side. Now, as GamesRadar’s west coast Staff Writer, I’m responsible for managing the site’s western regional executive branch, AKA my apartment, and writing about whatever horror game I’m too afraid to finish.
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