Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl is a big ol’ game with a huge map and a story that’ll take around 100 hours to fully explore, and even so, it was essentially built entirely by hand.

GamesRadar+ had the chance to sit down with Stalker 2 technical producer Yevhenii Kulyk at Gamescom 2024, and we were told “it was quite a challenging task” making a map that isn’t just expansive, but also memorable.

“Of course you can make a big map, but it should still, first of all, be playable, beautiful, and you as a player should remember the locations of the Zone,” Kulyk said. “The main thing here, if you’re talking about the map - yes it’s big. It’s really big, but we still almost didn’t use any procedural generation for the world.”

Procedural generation is a common design technique that generates and/or places variants of in-game assets partly to save on development time and cost, and it’s often used for less focal aspects of the environment and non-player characters. According to Kulyk, however, everything that you see in the game was actually touched by a human hand at some point in development.

“So everything you may notice or experience in our game was made by the hands of our talented level designers, level artists, team designers, and so on,” Kulyk said. “You will not notice two exact buildings or two exact rooms with the same placement of the same props of meshes or something like that. So every player that is playing Stalker 2 will get their story.”

This is, of course, made all the more impressive when you consider the unprecedented complication facing GSC Game World: it has been developing the game in an active war zone since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began in 2022. While a new office was established in Prague in the midst of the war, many Stalker 2 developers have chosen to remain in the original Kyiv headquarters and others still have chosen to fight in the war.

First announced way back in 2010, Stalker 2 is finally set to release on November 20 for Xbox Series X/S and PC.

Stalker 2 will be enjoyable to new and returning players, because even its protagonist doesn’t know what’s going on.