The half-hour-plus video called Developer Deep Dive is certainly interesting and gave us a pretty extensive look at the highly anticipated shooter on Monday STALKER 2: Heart of Chernobyl. Unfortunately, it strengthened even more the already widespread, but completely misconceptions that Microsoft is somehow involved in the development and that STALKER 2 is a project that can be classified as a first-party title intended only or primarily for Xbox.
The premiere of the Deep Dive video on Microsoft's Twitch profile, the availability of the game in Game Pass, or the fact that YouTube will recommend the version of the video from the Xbox channel rather than from the account of the developers themselves, but nothing changes the fact that GSC Game World is a completely independent studio. Alternatively, that the console exclusivity is only temporary, that the fan base is still primarily made up of PC players, or that GSC also represents the role of the publisher. Now anyway, the creators are taking marketing into their own hands again, and the result is the first blog post released on the official website and on Steam, which brings additional context to what we have seen.
In this way, for example, the authors confirmed that numerous and rather mysterious X-labs are still found across the Zone already known from the previous games in the STALKER series Using an unsupplied cooling tower, they also offered an impressive comparison of a real photo with a rendering from the game engine, which suggests that the virtual Zone is almost indistinguishable from reality in many places.