STALKER 2: Heart of Chernobyl, timed Xbox Exclusive, has been delayed until December 2022, sources officially confirm.
GSC Game World’s iconic open-world first-person shooter Stalker 2: Heart of Chernobyl, which has been in development for years, has been delayed for 7 months. In a statement released today, the studio said that the game will now be released on December 8, rather than April as previously planned.
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Back in 2021, fans were taken by surprise when they saw a teaser trailer for Stalker 2: Heart of Chernobyl at the Xbox and Bethesda Games Showcase last year. And when they discovered that the game would be released on the Xbox Game Pass on April 28th, 2022, they were overjoyed.
Sadly, today GSC announced that they had to delay the game for an extra 8 months, officially announcing the new release date of Stalker 2: Heart of Chernobyl as December 8th, 2022.
“These additional seven months of development are needed to fulfill our vision and achieve the desired state of the game,” GSC Game World announced. “Stalker 2 is the biggest project in the history of GSC, and it requires thorough testing and polishing. We are convinced that development should take as long as necessary, especially in the case of such a project.”
The developer said that the decision did not come by lightly but they needed to so that they can “deliver [players] a game that will live up to the expectations.”
The announcement comes as a bit of a blessing in disguise considering that two of the most highly anticipated games of the last two years ended up being extreme disappointments.
The hype was palpable for Cyberpunk 2077 and Battlefield 2042 but both games ended up shipping in in incomplete states.
While many bugs plagued Cyberpunk 2077, the games downfall was ultimately due to performance issue on the original PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One.
Battlefield 2042, on the other hand, was shipped in a partially completed and completely broken state. In-house sources at EA Games informed POPTOPIC that the game would be doomed if the launch date was not postponed by at least six months. Unfortunately, the game was launched in a barely playable state, with some key legacy features such as leaderboards, scoreboards, and voice chat completely absent from the game’s experience.
Some believe that the delay may come down to last year’s decision to introduce NFTs into the game, a decision that was not received well by the community. The outcry from players was so strong that the studio decided to cancel the plan the following day.
While this is not specified in the announcement of the delay, such a last-minute modification is certain to cause some level of development interruption. The length of the delay, though – more than half a year — implies that Stalker 2 need much more than a minor modification.
The new release date for Stalker 2: Heart of Chernobyl is set for December 8, 2022, and the game will be available to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate members day one as a three-month timed exclusive.