GSC Game World’s new S.T.A.L.K.E.R. online video game, that leads players into the Chornobyl exclusion zone, was released on Wednesday, Nov. 20 to much excitement for gamers who had waited so long to get their hand-held controllers onto the fourth instalment of the franchise.
GSC Game World, the Ukrainian developers of the STALKER 2 game, who are now based in Prague, Czechia celebrated the release with a love letter to their fans and Ukraine.
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It took 15 years for the studio to develop the new game. “That’s totally wild. So was the whole development story,” GSC Game World wrote in their letter to players published on X.
The number of players simultaneously playing the game reached 113,587 during the first hour after release of the game, according to statistics published on the Steam database. Over the next 24 hours the number of players at any one time averaged between 55-80,000. On the next day the number of simultaneous players peaked at 117,928.
During the first 48 hours after its release, the game received 79.4 percent “mostly positive” user reviews from 18,247 players while 4,738 players, 20.6 percent gave negative reviews.
IGN the US video game and entertainment media website was generally enthusiastic about the game saying, “it becomes clear that the survival instincts embedded in the STALKER series are very much alive in the long-awaited STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl.”
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The reviewer went on: “STALKER 2 is a masterclass in atmosphere: stunning dynamic weather, pitch-dark nights, and radioactive storms that paint the sky a hellish red or toxic green keep things both eerie and threatening in different ways over time. Even something as small as hearing the patter of rain from inside a dilapidated ship pulls you into Chornobyl’s wasteland.”
However, the evaluation, which was admittedly based on a pre-release review copy, bemoaned a plethora of technical glitches in the game saying, “…severe bugs have been adding the wrong kind of friction to this refreshingly brutal single-player FPS,” before going into the nitty gritty of some of its faults and hoping that the final release would iron out these shortcomings. From the numbers who are already playing the game then it could become the biggest earner of all Ukrainian game makers.
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