S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 Gameplay Won’t Be Shown at Xbox Event

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 was one of several games highlighted in Xbox‘s announcement about its indie event scheduled to take place next week, but it looks like fans won’t be seeing gameplay from the game after all. As it turns out, the wording used in Xbox’s announcement was inaccurate and has since been updated to say that we’ll get an “update” on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 instead. The game’s developer, GSC Game World, clarified its plans for the Xbox event not long after the announcement while also showing off some new artwork from the game.

The exact wording of Xbox’s announcement when it was initially revealed (and seen here through an archived version of the post) promised “new trailers and gameplay for more than 25 games, including S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, Second Extinction, The Ascent, The Wild at Heart, Voidtrain, Exo One and many more.” It was apparently updated pretty quickly because the version we saw not much longer after it was published instead said we’d get “an update on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 and many more.”

GSC Game World acknowledged in its update above that the issue was corrected within a few minutes, but not before people had already taken notice of it and were led to expect gameplay from the event. The developer said it still hopes to make its fans happy on March 26th, the day the event is scheduled to take place, and promised “bigger and louder” announcements for later in the year.

“We prepared this for Microsoft’s stream on March 26, but the whole thing was revealed a little bit too early on Xbox Wire Blog,” the statement from GSC Game World read. “We didn’t plan to show more during this showcase. But we do have bigger and louder announcements in store for 2021.”

So, it looks like we will indeed be getting an update on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 from the Xbox event, but don’t expect to see any gameplay. We got a teaser for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 gameplay back in December that looked impressive enough, but it didn’t actually show gameplay. Last we heard about the game, progress was going smoothly with work being done on the Xbox Series X|S versions.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 does not currently have a release date but is expected to be released some time in 2021.