You are invited to explore the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone twisted by anomalies and divided between rival factions whose territories shape the danger around you. Choose your side and over time you’ll learn where it’s safer to travel and also where every route can become a gamble.

Experience nail-biting tension without the frustration of loss: keep your gear and long-term progress but the loot you find is at risk until you bring it back alive. Upgrade your weapons and refine your build. No one can take it away from you.

The world persists and is not just a place to loot. NPCs live in it, factions fight over it, and players shape it with no escape timers or progression wipes. It's the only extraction shooter that plays like an MMO — and the only MMO that plays like an extraction shooter.

The Zone is a living social ecosystem where open-world events, faction conflicts, social hubs, and a player-driven market bring people together. Trade, cooperate in 5-player squads, ambush, betray, or carve out your own reputation. Every system creates interaction, and every interaction becomes a story.

A cinematic storyline that includes main and side quests smoothly immerses you in the world and its mechanics through nail-biting action, dialogues, and real choices that affect the story. You’ll enjoy a narrative experience almost like a single-player STALKER-style journey inside a persistent online world.

New to extraction shooters? Stalzone is built to give you the best of all worlds. Enjoy a 50+ hour cinematic story campaign that guides you through the Zone step by step delivering dangers, progression, factions, and PvPvE tension. It gives you room to learn, adapt, and survive against both the world and other players, turning extraction into something you discover through fun, not suffering.

Stalzone is intentionally free to play. No box price, no trick, no scam — just a world we have spent years building, asking only for your curiosity and nerve.

Explore more. Risk more. The Zone doesn’t punish curiosity and remembers.

Stalzone has grown through years of development, iteration, and community-driven evolution. Over that time, it has become a unique ecosystem of mechanics, social systems, and player-made stories unlike anything else.

Developer EXBO announced that StalCraft: X is being renamed Stalzone. The new name marks a fresh chapter for the game and arrives together with a wave of updates aimed at making the Zone easier to step into, better to look at, and more alive than ever before. 

The rebrand is part of a series of major updates EXBO launched in early summer. Along with the new name, the game is receiving changes to its visuals, starting locations and missions, English voiceover, seasonal content, and key gameplay systems.

A new way into the Zone

One of the main changes in the latest updates is a fully reworked early game experience. New players are welcomed with updated starting missions and locations, improved tutorial mechanics, a major rebalance for an improved PvP experience, and a wide range of QoL improvements.

To make the world feel more alive, STALZONE has also introduced constantly changing weather, more dynamic NPC behavior, and chat bubbles above players. Anomalies have received a new visual update as well, while players now have a built-in detector to help identify them.

A new summer storyline

With the summer season, foreign military forces from the United States and South Korea have begun arriving in the Zone, affecting both the game world and its environment. A new storyline will let players dive into this conflict, face a dangerous new enemy, and earn valuable rewards, while new open-world activities will appear across the Northern Zone, including intelligence gathering, supply deliveries, and other field missions. The season's main reward is the AAC Honey Badger assault rifle, featuring increased damage and reduced range, placing it in a balanced middle ground between submachine guns and assault rifles. 

Starting July 4, Stalzone will launch "The Great Zone Rush", a U.S.-themed event where players push into the frontiers of the Zone, complete a variety of fun challenges, and earn patriotic rewards, including the full American Ranger outfit. 

A sharper, more expressive world

The latest updates have delivered a noticeable visual improvement to Stalzone. Characters now feature new face models with emotions and lip-sync for dialogue, making story scenes and conversations more immersive, especially alongside the recently released English voiceover. 

EXBO also introduced a new light-source-based lighting system. This update adds proper indoor lighting and a more expressive nighttime visual experience. Campfires, lamps, and other light sources now integrate more naturally into the environment, giving familiar locations a renewed sense of depth even for long-time players who have explored the Zone extensively. 

Talk, explore, and compete

Proximity voice chat is rolling out letting nearby players communicate naturally as they explore and survive together. Partial and then full English voiceover with live actors is also coming to the game, covering key NPC dialogue and making the complete story more accessible than ever for English-speaking players. 

Later this summer, EXBO plans to further expand Stalzone's endgame content. The team has already announced a recurring seasonal session-based mode designed as an alternative to clan-focused activities for players who want to make full use of their skill and gear. 

Built around the community

Alongside the in-game changes, EXBO has expanded its English-language community presence, including a player Focus Group program that feeds real player insight back into development and a Community Helpers program that rewards the game's most engaged players. A new media partner program has also launched where streamers, YouTubers, and other content creators may receive exclusive bonuses and income from referrals to the game. Information about the partner program is found here.

"For us, this rebranding is not just a new name or a prettier sign on the door. It marks a much bigger shift for the game, for the team, and for the company as a whole. With Stalzone, we are entering a new stage with clearer positioning, more concrete plans, and a development structure that finally matches the scale of what this project can become. We believe the game deserves a strong future and this change is one of the steps that will help us build it properly," said ZIV, CEO of EXBO.

Key Features:

• Skill-driven gunplay — victory comes from aim, tactics, and game knowledge, not just gear. Master 200+ realistic weapons with deep customization built for true gun lovers.
• Persistent progression — your character, reputation, equipment, faction ties, and place in the world carry forward over time with no progression wipes.
• Fair free-to-play model — monetization focuses on cosmetics and optional progression support, not buying power. Everything can be earned in-game and even paid skins or boosters can be obtained through the player-driven marketplace.
• Global matchmaking for fairer fights — players are matched by similar power, keeping raw gear advantage in check. High-tier gear brings high-tier danger, so success still depends primarily on skill and experience.
• In-house anti-cheat — STALZONE runs on our own engine and is protected by EXENS, our dedicated anti-cheat team, giving us maximum control in a genre where balance is crucial.
• Community-shaped world — years of updates, feedback, balance changes, and player behavior have turned STALZONE into a living online world with its own rules, stories, and culture.
• Proximity voice chat — hear the players around you before you see them. Every encounter becomes a negotiation, a deception, or a standoff.

Stalzone is available for PC (Steam / Epic Games Store).