GSC Game World's CEO Answers All of Our Questions About STALKER 2 | gamescom 2023

ign.com:

It's been a long time coming, but it looks like STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl will finally be coming out early next year, with developer GSC World hitting gamescom to talk all about their highly anticipated sequel. And GSC has quite the story to tell: after being announced and then canceled in 2011, revived in 2018, and then delayed amid Russia's unvasion of Ukraine. But now, we've finally got more to see of STALKER 2.

Game director and CEO at GSC Game World Evgeniy Grygorovych made the time to stop by IGN's gamescom studio to answer our questions about how the team is doing, the importance of creating a realistic recreation of Chornobyl, what audiences can expect after more than 10 years after the original, and more.

IGN: I've put a call-out on Twitter asking what people want to know about S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2. And right now the team is obviously dealing with the war in Ukraine. It's had a huge impact on development, not just for the game, but on the people working on it. So everybody wanted to know how is the team, and then how are they feeling now that the game is out here for the public to play?

Evgeniy Grygorovych, GSC Game World CEO: Well, it's a good question. So the team feels very different. Mostly all of our team are Ukrainians, who some of the team members let the country before the war starts because we realize that it may happen and we want to keep everyone safe. And our main motivation was to save everyone. So we are thinking we are going to move everyone to the safe place and then we'll decide what to do next.

And we propose everyone to get their bags and travel. We have a plan. We prepared the plan long before this. We had a lot of buses standing with drivers 24 hours, seven days per week who were standing