The highly anticipated first-person shooter, survival horror S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl has revealed a, quite literally, colossal detail about the vast new open-world experience: the entire map is going to have a total area of more than 60 square kilometres. Not only is this significantly larger than previous titles in the series, but it is also set to be one of the biggest open worlds in video game history. But despite the mammoth size, technical producer Evgeniy Kulik has announced that the studio will be crafting most of the map by hand.

This effectively means that GSC Game World will not be relying on procedural generation to bring the game and all its locations to life.

The developers of Stalker have always been very keen to express the size of the game’s map. It has a seamless open world map consisting of 20 regions, each of them having their own residents, architectures, enemy types, and anomalies. Anomalies are dangerous zones of said region which can have different effects on players, with most of them being hazardous while others helpful intraversing complex geometries.

Maria Gregorovich, the creative director said that the game is about freedom and that's why it's so vast. Not only that, the game is also about loneliness. To that extent, the developers said that they want you to feel the vast emptiness. There are no barriers that will block the players from entering different regions and in most cases, the players are free to go wherever they want, whenever they want. The developers took many photographs of the real exclusion zone as references and built the map from the ground up, so many of the locations in the map are based around real life locations and previous games too.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl is all set to release later this year in November. The game is currently available to pre-purchase on Steam for 34.99 USD.

Sami is a contributor at The Daily Esports.