One of the biggest games on Xbox Game Pass recently — as well as one of the biggest new games in general — was STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl, a sequel to the original open-world survival shooter trilogy from the late 2000s. First announced back in 2010, the game went through countless delays, revamps, and even a cancellation over the years, ultimately resurfacing back in 2018 with developer GSC Game World reopening its doors a few years before that.
To say that STALKER 2's development cycle was tumultuous would be a huge understatement — and that's before taking Russia's ongoing war of aggression against Ukraine into account. GSC planned to launch the game in 2022, but the start of the invasion severely impacted the Kyiv-based Ukrainian studio. The short film "War Game: The Making of S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2" chronicles the immeasurable adversity faced by the developers, with the company and families of its staff forced to evacuate to the Czech Republic while many employees either chose to remain in Ukraine to fight for their homeland and aid their communities or simply were not able to safely retreat out of the country.
