What’s that coming through the hiss and crackle of static? It’s a transmission from the Gamescom zone, where a trio of RPS survivalists are fighting to stay alive amid all manner of hazards. You don’t want to know the things they’ve told us about the loos. One of them, James, has ended up hunkered down in the same room as Stalker 2 devs GSC Game World and had the chance to ask them what’s in store for the game now its 2.0 update and Cost of Hope expansion are out. The answer is a “different” second DLC and a free multiplayer mode the studio insist won’t just recycle mechanics seen elsewhere.

“The biggest, not very nearest but close to nearest things, [are] that we are working on DLC 2 and multiplayer mode,” GSC CEO Ievgen Grygorovych said when James asked him what the future looked like for Stalker 2. Those are the “two biggest next steps”, but the exec and head of creative Mariia Grygorovych made clear both are currently still in the works and are seeing the studio aim to put together things which don’t just repeat what they’ve done or seen other developers do previously.

In terms of the second DLC, Ievgen said that it’ll feature a “different kind of storytelling and experience” to Cost of Hope, which he hopes will provoke reactions along the lines of it not being what players expect, but in a good way.

When it comes to the free multiplayer mode, previously teased as coming not long after the shooter’s release, the pair outlined a similar philosophy. “We believe that we are not doing something that everyone [would] do”, the CEO said. “We are not trying to copy other mechanics and we are doing something that our players, who’re playing for 2000 hours in our game, would like.”

“Not a lot of our players really even wait for multiplayer, because we’re mostly a single player game and company,” Mariia added. “So we just experiment [with] what we can do in multiplayer.” She noted that it might not be what certain players are expecting, simply because different sections of the community will expect totally different things from the mode. As to what you can expect, Ievgen did specify that the mode, which GSC hope to announce pretty soon, won’t be “session-based like Counter Strike”.

For now, sit tight and read James’ Cost of Hope review and his testing of the 2.0 update. FWWSSSSHHHH. That’s it, he’s vanished into the static again. Here’s hoping the unholy halls of Cologne don’t eat him alive before he can unearth more whisperings to relay.