S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 dev team wanted to continue development

Couldn’t reach agreement to acquire rights

Chris KempApril 28, 2012

The team behind the development of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 wanted to carry on with it after GSC shut down, but couldn’t win the rights.

That team has since gone on to start up Volstok, and co-founder Oleg Yarvorsky has explained what happened.

“In December 2011 Sergiy Grygorovych – the owner of GSC Game World – decided to close down the company, for his personal reasons as he explained to the team. Effectively, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 development was stopped therefore.

“The team was at a choice of either going to seek employment opportunities elsewhere, or stick together and try to attract external funding and secure the IP rights to be able to complete S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2. We chose the latter option and this is how the new studio ultimately emerged.

“As developers of the game, we were certainly eager to continue with S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 and finish the project. However, after a month or so of negotiations, we did not reach agreement with the rights owner to continue developing under the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. brand. Alas.”

He confirmed that the rights remain with what’s left of GSC, and that despite not reaching an agreement Vostok is on good terms with Grygorovych, who is in no way involved with the new studio.

Despite S.T.A.L.K.E.R.’s shutdown, Vostok hopes that their first game, Survarium, will appeal to its fans.

“[The] Survarium concept is a next evolutional [sic] step of S.T.A.L.K.E.R we’ve been working on for the last ten years. Survarium will go a step further, forcing the mankind to fight for survival not only within the closed area of Chernobyl zone, but also far beyond,” explained Yavorsky.

“We are keen to preserve the S.T.A.L.K.E.R.-similar atmosphere and feel of the game. There are quite a few ideas that we will be borrowing into Survarium.

“For example, players can expect to see a lot of survival elements, factions, anomalies and so on. We are also open to integrate the players’ community to sharing ideas and feature plans to determine what would be most appreciated by the players in the new game.”

While we may never get to see what S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 might have been, at least there’s a silver lining to this cloud.