In the «Workshop» section of the Steam service, which is used to host and install modifications, a mod has appeared that «returns» Soviet symbols to the Ukrainian game STALKER 2. It uses materials from an early stolen build of the project, which was uploaded to torrents by Russians in 2023.
In the «Workshop» section of the Steam service, which is used to host and install modifications, a mod has appeared that «returns» Soviet symbols to the Ukrainian game STALKER 2. It uses materials from an early stolen build of the project, which was uploaded to torrents by Russians in 2023.
The modification «2023 build Soviet symbolics» was noticed by Ukrainian user X (Twitter) with the nickname corvin_leon.
«What a mess. Not only do you want to puke from the Soviet-communist symbols that were successfully removed from STALKER 2, but now the Russian-speaking Soviet-lovers are putting them back into the game, using materials from a stolen build», — he wrote.
The modification «2023 build Soviet symbolics» was published on Steam on July 9 by a player with the nickname JerryK, who hid his profile.
«This mod restores Soviet symbols on some vehicles, gates, props, and weapons. All textures and models are taken from the STALKER2 2023 devbuild leak, which was mistakenly published on a torrent and first found and downloaded by Western dataminers on May 28, 2023», — says the author of the modification, who claims not to support piracy.
After the start of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, GSC Game World stopped selling its games in Russia. Later, it announced that it had decided to cancel the Russian dubbing of STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl. This caused a flurry of discontent, threats, and blackmail from the Russians.
As a result of several hacking attacks, a group of Russians managed to get hold of many files of the unreleased game. They began to blackmail the developers, in particular with demands to return the Russian dubbing and apologize to the Russian audience, threatening to start publishing the stolen materials of STALKER 2 in the public domain.
GSC Game World, which by that time already had a colleague who had died in the war, did not succumb to blackmail. And the attackers began to upload content and entire game builds to torrents.
On June 1, GSC Game World released an official statement stating that Russian hackers exploited a vulnerability that allowed them to steal STALKER 2 files that were intended for internal testing.
The developers urged not to watch or distribute these materials.
Currently, the modification «2023 build Soviet symbolics» has over 3,000 views and about 800 subscribers. Ukrainian players are calling for complaints on Steam about it, as it uses assets from a stolen build.
Recall that in May, GSC Game Worlds released an improved re-release of the first three parts of the STALKER series, which faced numerous negative reviews from players. Some of them pointed to objective shortcomings, such as bugs and blurry textures, but most of the negative reviews came from Russians. They were offended that the Ukrainian developers «took down» the stele with Lenin, which was in the original.
