The developer of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl, GSC Game Worldhas confirmed the worldwide release dates and times for its highly anticipated post-apocalyptic shooter.
In a tweet, GSC said that the game's launch set for November 20 will begin at 8 a.m. PT / 11 a.m. ET, both on PC and Xbox Series X and S. For France, it will be this same day at 5 p.m.knowing that the game will also be available at the same time directly in Xbox Game Pass as part of the second wave of games in November 2024.
GSC also confirmed the system requirements to play STALKER 2 on PC.
GSC offers four graphics presets here: low, medium, high and epic, as well as a target resolution and FPS for each of them. The high graphics preset is what GSC calls recommended, and allows gaming at 60 frames per second at 1440p.
For this high graphics setting, you'll need an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti/RTX 4070 or AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT GPU and 32GB of RAM. Low and medium tiers require 16 GB of RAM and less powerful GPUs.
However, all graphics presets require 160 GB of SSD storage, which is a significant weight to take into account if you plan to play it.
Meanwhile, GSC has confirmed that STALKER 2 offers upscaling options for DLSS and FSR. Specifically, the game launches with DLSS 3 and Reflex, meaning players with GeForce RTX 40 series graphics cards can enable DLSS 3 with Frame Generation and Super Resolution out of the box, speeding up the game's performance.
STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl release times based on time zone
November 20, 2024
- Seattle: 8am PST
- New York: 11am EST
- São Paulo: 1pm BRT
- London: 4pm GMT
- Prague: 5pm CET
- Kyiv: 6pm EET
November 21, 2024
- Beijing: 12am CST
- Tokyo: 1am JST
- Sydney: 3am AEDT
- Auckland: 5am NZDT
However, there is no point in rushing according to our Stalker 2 test (or precisely, our current test not yet rated), which recommends waiting for the next bug fixes and balancing: “If we set the rating now, we couldn't change it for Metacritic afterwards, so I'm simply avoiding it for the moment, on this PC version that I was able to play, it would be rated 4 at best. fix everything? If you support the developer with your money, we'll see after a while.”
STALKER 2 has undergone a number of understandable postponements, the most recent being announced in July when the game was planned for September. GSC, the Ukrainian studio behind the game, then declared that it needed two additional months to allow the developers to correct “unexpected anomalies”, in other words bugs.
GSC also discussed the challenges the studio faced in getting its title back on track after mixed reactions following its first public presentation last year. During Gamescom 2023, the gameplay trailer presented suggested a rather blatant downgrade.
At the time, the studio told our colleagues at IGN US that its teams still aimed to offer a visual experience that matched the images of STALKER 2 presented in 2021, despite the difficult working conditions of its personal, at a time when the war against Russia is still raging in the country.
Wesley is News Editor at IGN UK.
