Following yesterday’s barrage of Xbox reveals in a stream that has proven to be controversial, some more news has popped up about one of the games: the Stalker 2 reveal trailer wasn’t actually in-game footage.
The information was revealed in a new FAQ on the game’s official website which answered some questions about this long-anticipated upcoming title from GSC Game World. The developers confirmed that we didn’t see actual game graphics in a rather roundabout way, saying that the trailer instead demonstrates “the level of graphics and atmosphere we are aiming to achieve on release.”
That same FAQ does inform us that the studio used “actual in-game models” to create the trailer, but there’s more to a game than just that. The particle effects, lighting, and general graphical detail aren’t really finished until a game goes gold — everything we saw was tailor-made just for that trailer.
To put it another way: no, the Stalker 2 reveal trailer did not just give us our first look at the game in action. It’s a wonderful concept for what its developers aim to do, but that’s about it.
The FAQ also reveals that Stalker 2 has been hit by a delay. Two years ago, the game was originally announced as targeting a 2021 release. Now, the developers have walked that back and said that its release date has been moved back, with no new date confirmed.
Mind, GSC Game World weren’t the only developers who left out important details about what they were showing. Microsoft themselves dropped the ball in a similar fashion with the Halo Infinite reveal; the YouTube description on the standalone trailer notes that it was “captured in real-time and representative of the experience on Xbox Series X running at 60FPS and up to 4K resolution.” In other words, that wasn’t the actual game running on Xbox Series X hardware, either.
Graphics on the level of what we’ve seen in the Stalker 2 reveal trailer are certainly attainable even on current-gen consoles; anyone who has played the similarly-themed Metro Exodus is well aware of what a dedicated developer can do to make a console game great. For now, you can check out the Stalker 2 reveal trailer below as we wait for GSC Game World to make its ambitions a reality.
