STALKER 2 dev has earnest answer for why game shipped with bugs

STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl creative director Mariia Grygorovych recently addressed the game’s rough launch with a heartfelt appeal to its overall quality.

“It’s not perfect, we need to fix everything, it has some problems,” she told Eurogamer. “But it’s a game! It’s a game with soul, with feelings there, with love there. Even the problems, you can’t fix them if you don’t have a game.”

The long-awaited STALKER 2 arrived on Nov. 20 to both acclaim for its immersive gameplay and criticism over its many bugs. Despite this, the game sold over a million copies in just two days, which doesn’t even factor in the scores of players who no doubt jumped into the Zone with their Xbox Game Pass subscriptions. Ukrainian developer GSC Game World has also followed the STALKER 2 launch with three sizable updates focused on fixing some of the worst issues, removing some of the barriers to entry so more players can see the special foundation underneath.

GSC Game World CEO Ievgen Grygorovych told Eurogamer in the same interview that he and his team decided to do as much as they could before last month’s release and then work to fix what was left post-launch, comparing another delay to running a footrace on zero energy.

“It’s very hard to explain your state when you’re in a very intensive work process for many months until release, and you’re working over, over, over what you usually can do and in the highest possible stress and overwhelming period,” he said. “You have no energy at all and you decide, ‘Should we take one more marathon?’ And you just can’t say yes, let’s make one more marathon, because you’re already broken.”

If it feels like folks are giving STALKER 2 grace not typically reserved for bad launches, it’s probably because of the environment in which it was developed. Ukraine, the country GSC Game World called home before having to relocate, is still locked in a brutal conflict with Russia, which invaded the smaller nation in Feb. 2022. Many employees left Ukraine to continue developing STALKER 2 elsewhere, while others stayed behind to work on the game through the constant blare of air raid sirens or, in some cases, to take up arms to fight for their country.

Then, when STALKER 2 finally launched, the sheer amount of simultaneous downloads choked a Ukrainian broadband infrastructure beleaguered by warfare. The developers just couldn’t win, but they’re finally starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

“It touched everyone in the country, but after releasing this it slightly justified that, yes we left our country and decided not to stay there, but we still made something that could help Ukraine in some way,” Ievgen said. “We are artists, we are creative people, but it was our way to bring value to our country.”