Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl is scheduled to be a part of GDC 2023, with an “exclusive look” planned at the event.
As indicated on the GDC website itself, they will have a sponsored session this coming March 23, 2023, titled ‘Stalker 2’: Next Gen Game Development with NVIDIA Omniverse Audio2Face (Presented by NVIDIA).
The event’s speaker will be Anton Riabchuk, a 3D animator at Stalker 2 studio GSC Game World. He describes himself on his LinkedIn as mainly skilled in animation and rigging in Maya, and lives in Prague, in the Czech Republic.
The Game Developer’s Conference frequently shares their talks with the greater public, but don’t get it wrong: this is mainly an event for the video game industry. It’s not really a marketing or promotion event for the wider gaming public.
Riabchuk’s speech itself will be about Nvidia’s Omniverse Audio2Face technology. Audio2Face is a generative AI program that is used with CG graphics. It automatically creates the facial visual animations from any audio sample you provide it, whether that’s recorded or produced by voice actors live.
You can read more about Audio2Face here, but it’s reasonable to expect that most of this 30 minute speech will be discussing technical details of this CG technology, and perhaps some promotion for Audio2Face itself.
Still, this is the promotional ad copy for this event:
“Join this session to hear how developers from GSC are adopting generative AI technology from NVIDIA in their content creation workflows. We will present an exclusive look at Stalker 2, present today’s workflow challenges in the facial animation and localization process. Then we will introduce Omniverse Audio2Face AI SDK, the challenges it helps solve, and how we are implementing the AI technology into our pipelines.”
So, Nvidia and GSC Game World are promising an ‘exclusive look’ at Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl. This may amount to a short trailer, probably no longer than 5 minutes at most, and also likely designed to show off Nvidia’s technologies.
But it will be the first update regarding Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl for quite some time. The last news we had received originally from GSC Game World was a confirmation that they are still aiming to release the game on 2023.
It should probably not be surprising that GSC Game World were using shortcuts and tech like Audio2Face. Other productions that aren’t dealing with as troubled a development environment as Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl also use these tools, to speed up their development timeline and get to the finish line sooner rather than later.
Hopefully this is a sign that production is already finishing up and they will be announcing a release date or window soon, if not in this event itself.
Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl was announced for release on Xbox Series X|S and PC via Steam, Epic Games Store, and GOG.
