Before you discover the Cost of Hope, it’s back to X-18 Lab in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl, courtesy of the new Sealed Truth update. It adds a new quest where Slag Heap’s Diod asks the player to retrieve something from the lower levels.
If you’ll recall, the base game didn’t fully open up the sinister laboratory like Shadow of Chornobyl. As such, it’s lain dormant all this time, or at least it seems so. Regardless, your task for this “high-risk, high-reward” mission is to get in and find out what’s what. While that may include “lost knowledge” and “useful gear” – no word on whether anything new has been added – it seems that “something far more significant” also awaits.
Interestingly, GSC Game World says the update is a “thank you” to “the community for staying with the Zone.” It could be hiding a highly requested addition or a callback to previous games. Time will tell, so get cracking.
Otherwise, don’t expect too much in terms of fixes. Patch notes on Steam note a fix for an excess of strong mutants in long campaigns. The “Dark as a Dungeon” mission should no longer cancel if you’ve hit a critical point in the story (read: the point where you can’t go back and finish other missions), and there are also new loading screens.
As for Cost of Hope, it launches this Summer for Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and PC. While pricing remains to be announced, it adds two new regions, a storyline spanning dozens of hours, several new quests, and more.