After a bit of speculation, GSC Game World today confirmed Stalker 2 is running on Unreal Engine 5. The upcoming title was already known to be running on the Unreal Engine, however, there was no indication whether that meant Unreal Engine 4 or Unreal Engine 5.
The announcement dropped as an unceremonious reply to an Unreal Engine post on Twitter. The official Stalker account made the brief announcement, then released a new image of the game in development.
As is always the case with Unreal Engine updates, Unreal Engine 5 offers developers tools to "build bigger worlds" and pump out some of the best-looking visuals in the industry. There's a bunch of fancy new tech going on behind the scenes – including the Nanite geometry system and dynamic global illumination courtesy of Lumen – but on the user-end, all we need to know is that Unreal Engine 5 looks pretty.
Stalker 2 currently has more than 300 people working on it, and when it launches will clock in at a massive 150GB. The highly anticipated title will be an Xbox Series X|S exclusive for three months following launch and is skipping out on PS4 and Xbox One to take full advantage of the current-gen technology.
If you're interested in learning more about how Unreal Engine 5 will impact Stalker 2, you can find out more about the engine on its official website.
Stalker 2 is expected to launch on April 28, 2022.