Update: On June 1st, GSC Game World published a statement regarding this situation:
“Our team has identified a vulnerability exploited by a group of Russian hackers attacking the company for almost a year and a half. Unfortunately, they were able to access and compromise some of our leaked information for internal testing of various game aspects.
As for now, we kindly ask stalkers and those who want to join the Zone in the future not to look at or share any leaked materials from the game. Although these materials are only used for testing purposes and are not release-ready, these leaks may ruin your experience of exploring the Zone by yourself.
Rest assured, our team remains dedicated to delivering an exceptional gaming experience. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl is the game we dedicate our hearts and souls to. Despite the issue, we will continue to ensure that the game will satisfy your expectations, as we hope.“
STALKER 2 has been in development for more than a decade. It was first announced back in 2010, and following a miserable path, it was cancelled, restarted, re-cancelled, and re-restarted. For the last few years, it has been under active development, but it has faced constant delays, and recently, the game’s developer – GSC Game World – has been suffering under the weight of some sizeable leaks.
It was recently revealed that a STALKER 2 dev build had leaked from inside the company. Reportedly, this leak came from GSC’s own technology teams, with torrents leaking online to the public in error.
Note: As a result of the recent statement posted by GSC Game World, it has been confirmed that Russian hackers leaked the dev build, and not any internal teams at GSC.
For a while, it seemed as though everything was okay, as the files were intensely encrypted. But now, it has been claimed that one of the dumped files contained a decryption key, and the STALKER 2 dev build has now been cracked wide open and is being explored as we speak.
Is It All Over?
In the last few weeks, the developer has been dealing with malicious acts committed by spurned Russian hackers that claimed to be fans of the franchise. They attempted to blackmail GSC, stating that they had ’30 GB of STALKER 2 files’ that they’d leak if GSC didn’t reverse the decision to lock Belarus and Russia out of STALKER 2 upon release.
Now, a STALKER 2 dev build equalling almost 200 GB in size has been leaked online and is in the process of being circulated, explored, and blown wide open. On 4Chan, threads are popping up with some anonymous users sharing screenshots from the game. We’re seeing menus, environments, weapons, and elements of the UI.
One user was running the STALKER 2 dev build while monitoring their performance, and in an open environment featuring what looks like intense particle rendering, we can see an RX 6700 XT using almost 10 GB of VRAM, and as much as 26 GB of RAM is being used – all for a grand total of 25 FPS.
It’s a dev build – what do we really expect?
Sadly, it looks good – and so does everything that we’ve been shown up until this point, but there are now some concerns circulating within the community that this leak will bring the project crashing to the ground.
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