In just over a week’s time, GSC Game World will release STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl, the long-awaited follow-up in the studio’s cult horror FPS series. The last installment we saw was Call of Pripyat way back in 2009, so it’s been a while.
In preparation for STALKER 2‘s release, you may need to clear some space on your hard drive. As noted by PC Gamer (and seen on the game’s Steam page), you’ll need storage capacity to the tune of 150GB. It also looks like you will definitely need an SSD rather than a much slower HDD, which most people will likely have these days. Still, that’s a fair amount of space needed.
To put it into perspective, Black Ops 6 “only” requires 128GB, according to Steam. Call of Duty games are often noteworthy for their hardware requirements, so seeing Heart of Chornobyl asking for about 22GB more than that feels like it’s worth mentioning, in case you need to clear some space. While the Xbox site doesn’t say, I imagine the console version of STALKER 2 will need the same amount of storage.
The end of a long road
It goes without saying that the game has been in development for a very long time. Perhaps one of the biggest setbacks was GSC getting caught up in the middle of the war between Russia and Ukraine. The Russian invasion forced the team to relocate to Prague, where work continued.
Outside the war, the turmoil didn’t end. The studio announced in June 2023 that hackers were leaking test footage from the game. Given the delays, fearing for their lives, and cyberattacks, it’s by some miracle of determination that STALKER 2 is almost upon us, at last.
In fact, a few days ago, an announcement was made that said it had finally “gone gold.” This means the project is now at the point where the developer feels it’s ready to launch. And launch it shall. It’s been a trying time for the people at GSC, but by God, they’ve pulled through. Given the blows that have been dealt, maybe making room for a 150GB game isn’t such a bad thing after all.
Published: Nov 12, 2024 07:58 am