The boss of Stalker 2 developer GSC Game World has spoken about its troubled development and the brutal crunch it suffered as it tried desperately to get the game ready for launch amid Russian’s invasion of Ukraine.
Stalker 2 finally launched on PC and Xbox Series X and S at the end of November after a number of high-profile delays and after half the development team had moved out of Ukraine and into a new studio home in the Czech Republic. However, half the staff stayed in Ukraine even as the war raged around them, making development extremely difficult. Stalker 2’s rocky road to release and the incredibly difficult circumstances its developers found themselves in is at the heart of the 90-minute documentary, War Game: The Making of Stalker 2.
Stalker 2’s most recently delay was announced in July, when the game was due out in September. GSC Game World said at the time that the extra two months would give the developers the chance to fix “unexpected anomalies,” aka bugs.
But Stalker 2 launched with a number of bugs and features that do not work properly including A-Life 2.0, which governs the way life operates across the open-world. Following a screening of the documentary at BAFTA in Piccadilly, London, IGN spoke with GSC Game World CEO Ievgen Grygorovych and creative director Maria Grygorovych about what went wrong with A-Life 2.0, but also more generally about the game’s development and launch.
One of the key questions GSC has faced is whether it could have delayed Stalker 2 further in order to iron out its bugs before launch. But both Ievgen and Maria said this would have been impossible, given the crunch the team had already endured in the months leading up to November.
(It’s worth bearing in mind that English is not Ievgen or Maria’s first language.)
“Game development, it’s hard,” Maria said. “Players can compare us with a lot of companies. A lot of companies have much more budgets for development. So for us it was even harder because we are an independent company, so we don’t have some, I dunno, big daddy to help us every day.
“It’s a problem that we are not so perfectly finished like we really wanted to do before release, but for us we can’t do better.”
Ievgen insisted GSC Game World did everything it could to get Stalker 2 in a decent spot for launch considering the impact the war had and continues to have on the developers. “We did everything possible considering everything that’s happening,” he said. “Considering how much time we have, considering what is our resources, considering, look, we have so much people, but what part of the daytime – part of our people don’t have electricity at all and they can’t work.”
Both Ievgen and Maria admitted it’s difficult for GSC to make excuses with its customers, customers who at the end of the day have spent their money on a product they expect to work properly irrespective of the circumstances in which it was made. But they hoped the documentary would help create a degree of empathy for the staff.
“We can’t tell our players that every day, half of our team don’t have electricity at all week after week,” Maria said. “And some of our people can’t sleep at night, half of our people, because of drones, because of missiles. And it happens every day. And how can people even survive when they can’t sleep? Can’t work because of electricity. For example now, a lot of our people have problems with warming their apartments, because it’s very cold. Now Russia is beating [targeting] the place [energy infrastructure] who heat apartments, like houses. But it’s the game industry. We can’t talk about it.”
“We can’t say to a player, look, it’s hard to make the game,” Ievgen added.
Despite the bugs, Ievgen is proud of Stalker 2, which he compared to building a “huge ship” it hauled over the Atlantic. Maria, too, sounds happy with the foundation GSC produced: “You hope that people can feel like the game is there… It’s not so perfect that we wanted, but it’s a game with soul.”
And it seems players have responded, too. Stalker 2 sold one million copies in less than two days, and currently enjoys a ‘very positive’ user review rating on Steam (84% of the 64,872 user reviews are positive).
But Ievgen isn’t satisfied. Indeed, he wants Stalker 2 to eventually achieve a 90% user review rating: “For a creative person, we want to get an achievement, like we did a game that 90% of people loved, not 85, not 83, not 86. We want 90. ‘But 89 is also good!’ No! 89 starts from eight and you want to start from nine. I spent six years. It’s maybe like a child’s thing that you want to achieve it.”
Ievgen then admitted that he expected a much worse user review rating on Steam than Stalker 2 ended up getting given the bugs the team knew players might run into at launch.
“I expected to have much less success than we had from the audience,” Ievgen said. “We were afraid of that… we know that the game released in a state that we would like to make it better. And you release the game, there is always some bugs. We know maybe half of them. We know that we would like to have more time, but it’s our limitation. It was impossible to make more than we were making.”
He continued: “We as a developer, we see much more problems in the game than the players usually face. So many players didn’t face 99% of the bugs inside our game. And we know much more problems. And we were like, ‘what if players face this problem and we haven’t fixed it yet?’ And because we saw much more, we were much more stressed. It was impossible to say how many people would face this problem, or how many people would face problems we haven’t faced yet and we don’t know about. It’s a very stressful moment.
“So I was afraid that it [Stalker 2] may get it [the reception from players]] worse than it was, but still we want it better.”
So, why not delay Stalker 2 yet again? Ievgen said the team simply had nothing left in the tank, equating the development to running a marathon.
“We were working maybe 16 hours a day for several months,” he said. “You are running a marathon and there are 10 kilometers left until the end, and you are so tired, and you say, ‘look, you have to run an additional 40 kilometers.’ And you say that I can’t but okay, and you are running and running and running and running, and you understand that the time is going out and still some kilometers left, but you are not there. Not because you were not doing your best, you were trying to do your best and you can do it, but you just need more time.
“But everyone has limitations, so it’s impossible to pause the time, to stop it and to make it better.”
To help you survive in the Zone, we’ve got a list of Essential Stalker 2 Tips and Tricks, plus a guide on Things to Do First in Stalker 2 to help you through the early game, and Things Stalker 2 Doesn’t Tell You – everything we wish we knew before we started playing. Save time scouring the wasteland with our Artifacts checklist and locations guide, and every Stash location we’ve found so far.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
