The Boss of Stalker 2 Dev GSC Game World Didn’t Expect Such a Positive Response From Players Given the Bugs, Insists It Was Impossible to Have Delayed the Game Again

ign.com:

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,