Update:
It’s being reported that the decryptions keys have been posted online. If true this could be a very big hit against the development team and their project.
Original Story…
Stalker 2 has had a rough development cycle. The folks over at GSC Game World have been working hard to get this game out into the marketplace. In fact, they were looking to get this game out last year back in December of 2022. But because of the war in Ukraine and their headquarters being set in Kyiv, the studio was forced to delay the project indefinitely. Things were looking grim for the project, but it wasn’t too much longer before the studio revealed that they moved the development of this project to Prague, Czech Republic.
But that wouldn’t be the only obstacle that the project would undergo. It was just earlier this year that the development studio revealed that a Russian community hacked them. That has left the studio to alert fans that they are weary of leaks and to avoid checking the content that could arise online from this hack. They hoped that the fans of the franchise wouldn’t get spoiled with what was to come with this game or catch an early build that was not finished. Now we can fast forward to today, where a significant leak has surfaced online.
There are two complete internal game builds of Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl. These leaks are entire game builds which come near 200 GB of storage space requirements. Players find these builds surfacing on torrent websites and might be tempted to download these files. But to save you some time, if you were tempted to download these files, you can’t even play the game. Furthermore, it’s reported online from Exputer that these game files are still encrypted, which means that they are completely useless right now.
Now the question remains how these builds managed to leak out in the first place. Two speculations are going on right now. For instance, it’s speculated that this could have been the fault of the development studio itself marking these files open to the public. Meanwhile, there is speculation that a hacking community could have leaked these builds.
With the game files being rather hefty in size, it could be that these files contain content that would get cut for the final public build release. But again, we’re left waiting on just when the full launch will end up being. Currently, the development team is still slating this game to launch at some point this year. Of course, we know that when Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl does launch into the marketplace, we’ll find it available for the PC and Xbox Series X/S platforms. In the meantime, you can check out the game trailer for the title in the video we have embedded above.
