How the developers of Stalker 2 weathered the Ukraine war to make their game | The DeanBeat

I spoke with Ievgen Grygorovych, CEO of GSC Game World, and Maria Grygorovych, creative director at Gamescom. They’re a husband-and-wife team, running one of Ukraine’s biggest and best known game companies with 460 employees. Yet they’re just an indie game studio. They spread out into new locations such as Poland and Prague and elsewhere, with some working remote.

Ievgen’s brother Sergiy started GSC Game World in 1995 as a company that localized games to the Russian market. It went on to create the Cossacks series of games, and it began developing and publishing its own as well as third-party games. Ievgen joined the company in 2001.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl came out in 2007 and it was a success as a first-person shooter. It combined ideas from the novel Roadside Picnic with the real world disaster of the Chornobyl nuclear meltdown, positing that this created a Zone where hunters known as Stalkers could go to find anomalous treasures. But they ran the risk of running into enemies including monsters unleashed by the radioactive contamination.

Two more Stalker games came out in 2008 and 2009, but none was called Stalker 2. In fact, the prior CEO, who was Ievgen’s brother, asked him to make Stalker 2 and Ievgen said no because he didn’t think the team was ready to take on such a big project. The company announced Stalker 2 in 2012, but that team never finished and it was rebooted altogether later on.

Ievgen eventually relented. “It was a crazy business decision to start this project, but we were sure that we would do everything possible,” Ievgen Grygorovych said in our interview.

Abandoning earlier directions, they created a plan and built a new team. They worked on getting the script right from the start. After six rewrites, they finally started moving forward.

Even without these external challenges, the game was ambitious, even for developers who had been working on games for decades. The team started with new technology. They came up with a list of tasks and broke it down into hundreds of thousands of tasks, Ievgen Grygorovych said. By the end of the process, many of their family members lost loved ones in the war.

One Stalker 2 developer, Volodymyr Yezhov, was killed in the war with Russia. In December 2022, he died in a battle near Bakhmut, defending the city from Russian attackers. GSC Gameworld has made numerous donations to cause of Ukraine and it solicits funds from visitors to its web site as well.

During all this time, they never considered shutting down the game. They felt like a responsibility toward their country to get it done, to put Ukraine on the map of the game development world. When they saw their countrymen and women win medals at the Summer Olympics, they were proud, and they want the country to be proud of their work on Stalker 2 — even to the point of using the Ukrainian version of the spelling of Chornobyl (instead of the Russian Chernobyl).

It’s been a hard road and the longest journey. With some pride, the Stalker 2 leaders joined a picture with the Xbox European game dev team in Cologne, Germany. What’s their ultimate lesson? In game development, you have to really love the process, Maria Grygorovych said.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview. Disclosure: Devcom paid my where to Cologne, where I moderated a couple of panels at the Devcom developer event.

GamesBeat: How do you stay resilient enough to do this for such a long time?

Ievgen Grygorovych: It’s a hard project for us. It’s huge. We started from scratch. We started with new technology. We started before the current generation of consoles appeared. We started with a mostly new team. We had a total lack of experience in the move to consoles. We were a PC-only game developer before. It was a crazy business decision to start this project, but we were sure that we would do everything possible. We had a lot of experience making games. I have about 24 years making games.

In the past we were asked at different times to make a Stalker 2. All the previous times I refused to start making it, because it’s a very ambitious project. The player expectations would be very high. It would be a very long journey, a very hard journey. When you’re not very young and you understand what that’s going to be like, how you’d have to work and how stressful it would be, it’s hard to say, “Yes, I’m ready to do that.” When you’re young and experienced you don’t know what you’ll have to go through making this kind of game. You’re more likely to say yes.

The last time, we talked with Maria and we decided it was time to do it. We started from that point. It’s been a big part of our lifetime. From what I can see now, it’s going to be a very good game. We’re happy with what we could achieve. We didn’t expect that we would do it, but we did it. We’re still a bit nervous. You never know how players are going to take your game. But inside me I think that we’ve done everything possible in our situation.

We’re an independent developer. We have a lot of limitations that other developers might not have. We have all the situations connected to the war with Russia. With all these difficulties, we’ve still come to this point where we’re near the release. It’s been a long journey.

GamesBeat: How long have you worked on Stalker?

Maria Grygorovych: For me it’s been since 2017.

Ievgen Grygorovych: Yes, the same for me.

GamesBeat: The first set of games, the first three games, did you work on those?

Ievgen Grygorovych: I was working with the company, but on different games at that point. I hadn’t been working on Stalker. But we sat just nearby. I was in the RTS development department, leading the RTS line. I’ve been with GSC since 2001. I had worked there part-time before, but 2001 is when I joined up as a full-time job.

Maria Grygorovych: I worked in cinema and TV before I joined GSC. In 2016 they asked me to help out for a couple of days. It’s been eight years since. I was a producer on some projects at first.

Ievgen Grygorovych: She had experience that could help us with games that were approaching release.

GamesBeat: When you think about how long it’s been, do you think of it as certain stages? Changing directions or working on different things. How do you explain the time involved?

Ievgen Grygorovych: There is a certain degree of uncertainty here. When we started, we didn’t have a blueprint for developing these kinds of games. We started by writing a new plot and story. At first we had to gather the team that would do this project. The first big find was a story writer. We found someone with a lot of experience in the development industry in Ukraine. He has much more experience than I do. We got started working on the story, and when we looked at the first concept, we said, “No, this isn’t Stalker 2.” We moved away from that and started again.

In the end it was fully rewritten about six times. These are long stories. He’s a professional. He wasn’t afraid to drop it all and start again. After those six times, we had the story we wanted to tell with our game. We were happy with it. It was very detailed. The whole history of this world, starting from 1960 until the game begins. That was where we could start.

Then we took on building the world map. We knew it would be an open world, but how big? Is it 16 square kilometers or 64? It was a little crazy. We decided to do something bigger than everyone usually does. We did eight kilometers on a side, 64 square kilometers. It has a lot of underground locations as well, a lot of tall buildings. There are areas above and below. Overall, the area is huge.

Maria Grygorovych: I don’t think we really developed this game any more than anyone usually does. A lot of companies have much more experience. They have their team built from the beginning. They have a lot of money. They don’t have any issues with a war going on, anything like that. And they still work on a game for six or seven years. In our case, we started this game from scratch with a totally new team. We had corona, war, problems with the electricity. Half of our team has had a lot of trouble with the electricity for the past two years. They can’t work properly every day. With all these issues, we’re still close to release. A lot of companies take that much time without any of these issues.

GamesBeat: I remember Stalker 2 being announced a long time ago. How long has this project taken?

Maria Grygorovych: There was a reset, so this has been about six years. This has a totally different team, a totally different approach. Nothing is the same.

GamesBeat: You mentioned there were other games, but nothing you thought of as Stalker 2. What did it mean to you to have something that could be called Stalker 2?

Ievgen Grygorovych: I really love my previous games. Some of them were very successful. Some were not so successful from a player’s perspective, but they were successful for us as experience in making something unique. For me, I can say that Stalker 2 is something totally epic. Previously I had experience with RPGs, with turn-based strategy, and with a mix of RTS and RPG. Some of these were very different, very experimental projects. It wasn’t just copy-paste. Stalker 2 was easier than that in a way, because we had Stalker to start from. The new game should be a successor, continuing what we had in the first game.

We had some basis for the gameplay design, a blueprint for what we had to achieve. In that sense it was easier. But having totally new technology, a totally open world and so on, that was a huge challenge. Making a very big game sounds difficult, but like any difficult task, you can break it down into smaller tasks, and then it will be simple. You just have to do hundreds and thousands of simple tasks. It just takes a lot of time. You have to be a very calm person to work six years without having a product you can share. It’s much easier to do short projects, where you have something to release after a cycle of, say, two years.

Maria Grygorovych: In game development you really need to love the process. Real satisfaction will come after those six years. You need to love the process that leads up to that. You could have a couple of children in that much time. If you really need to have that satisfaction right away, you might not want to go into game development. You need to be a patient person.

Ievgen Grygorovych: I love the process of development, solving these tasks.

Maria Grygorovych: You need to love and respect the people you work with, if you’re going to spend so many years with the same people.

GamesBeat: I’m in a science fiction book club. I read Roadside Picnic, and I was astonished by how different it was from Stalker. Do you see any resemblance to that original material?

Ievgen Grygorovych: We actually didn’t have a target to make a game by the book. It’s very different, as you say. We live in a totally new time. There’s a lot of new science fiction now. Game design is much more advanced. We can’t just make good science fiction. We have to make a good game. The story needs to drive that game. We weren’t aiming to make it by the book.

GamesBeat: It seems like the Zone might be the only thing that’s still there from the book. The idea of a special place in the world that’s very different.

Ievgen Grygorovych: The biggest thing that Stalker 2 takes from the book is the idea of these anomalies, yes. They have unknown origins. If you haven’t tested it, you don’t know how they work. A lot of people have died to understand how these anomalies work in the game world, just as in the book. The idea of artifacts, items have some unknown effect that also has to be discovered. And the idea of an object you use to find the anomalies.

Everything else is different. It’s a different location, about 100 kilometers away from our home in Kyiv. It’s a real place, and it’s a huge disaster after the Chornobyl accident. It has a lot of connection to our personal stories. I was born in the year of the nuclear disaster. Our parents could tell by the earth shaking that something was happening, but the government didn’t tell them anything. Still, everyone could see that something was happening. They decided to move me and my brother away from Kyiv to another part of Ukraine, to Donetsk, with my grandparents. It’s very connected to what happened in our lives. Starting from this part of the world, it’s logical for us as Ukrainian developers.

But in short, it’s very different from the book. It’s influenced by our experiences, personal experiences, and some features from the book. That’s how you get the game.

GamesBeat: The war came to disrupt everything. What had to change for you? What did you have to do to adapt once that started?

Ievgen Grygorovych: The short answer is that everything changed. But it’s different when you look at the team’s personal lives, our personal lives, how we live, our goals, our interests. For the development, it was a very hard moment. But we were prepared. We had prepared everything so as to not let this affect, as much as possible, our team’s lives, their families’ lives. We were ready for evacuation before the war started, and we did it.

Maria Grygorovych: Still, it’s a totally different life from the day before the war started. Emotionally, for everyone – everyone in Ukraine, everyone on our team – it’s a point where you understand will never be the same again. At some points it’s hard to work, emotionally. You see tragedy happening every day, every couple of days. It’s a usual thing for missiles to hit Kyiv near our office. It was really scary in the beginning, and it’s still really scary now. You can’t adapt for moments like that.

Ievgen Grygorovych: What happens if it drops 100 meters, 500 meters away from the target and it hits your office, with your people there? What are you going to do at that moment? It’s very stressful. We did everything possible. We have a bunker just near our office. It’s an actual bunker built for nuclear attack. We’ve asked everyone to go there when there are missile alarms. But still, there’s a chance it could happen.

Maria Grygorovych: And sometimes a really quick missile strike can happen before the alarms sound. 

Ievgen Grygorovych: It can be a four-minute missile.

Maria Grygorovych: But you need to work, so you just work. It’s hard to explain to someone what it’s like to work like that, or what you’re feeling. A lot of our relatives, people in our families have died in the war. It might be your brother, your mother. Some of our people have lost their parents. After that you go into work and get back to the game. If you’re doing something, it’s a little easier to keep from going crazy. But at the same time, it’s been two and a half years. It’ll be three years soon.

For the people who moved to Prague, it’s not the same as being the usual kind of immigrant, where you decide to go somewhere that you want to go, and you can go back home whenever you want. It’s different being a refugee. It’s not your decision to leave your country. It’s something you had to do to protect yourself, to protect your children or your family. It’s hard.

GamesBeat: Did you have to stop work together for some amount of time?

Maria Grygorovych: It was almost two months. 

GamesBeat: Did you consider moving from Kyiv, going further west?

Maria Grygorovych: From late December 2021 we were making plans for what we would do if a real war started. What employees should do. Russia had already attacked Ukraine in 2014, but it was only a few territories. Now we were planning for a war that would affect the whole country.

GamesBeat: Did you lose a lot of staff who enlisted or were conscripted?

Maria Grygorovych: Yes. It’s an honor to consider them our friends and colleagues. None of them were professional soldiers. They were programmers, QA, community managers who decided, even before the full-fledged invasion, that if it happened they would enlist. They went to the recruiting centers on the first day to fight for our country.

Ievgen Grygorovych: They’re still our employees.

Maria Grygorovych: After our victory, I hope they’ll come back and keep working.

GamesBeat: Have any of them been able to come back yet?

Ievgen Grygorovych: No, they’re still fighting. There’s almost no way to stop for now.

GamesBeat: Did you ever think about stopping the game, shutting down the project?

Maria Grygorovych: No, that was never an option. It was just a matter of looking at each issue and figuring out how to solve it.

Ievgen Grygorovych: This is a hard project, but it’s a weapon against Russia. When Ukrainians can make something so big, so known to the world, it’s a way to fight on the artistic front. We’re not risking our lives, but we’re doing something to separate Ukraine from Russia, to highlight Ukraine. These are different things. We’re talking about what’s happening in our country. We won’t let the rest of the world forget about the war. It’s still going on. If we fail, it’s going to be bad for everyone who lives in western Europe and the rest of the world. We’re keeping Russia out of normal life in Europe. We’re doing it by highlighting the war with what we do, with our interviews, with whatever ways we have.

GamesBeat: If you stopped work in Ukraine, Ukraine would become weaker. By continuing this work, it feels like you can help keep Ukraine strong

Ievgen Grygorovych: Like our sportsmen winning medals at the Olympics. They’re also fighting for our country in a different way, using the strengths they have.

Maria Grygorovych: When you do something with a lot of love and soul–our dream is that a lot of people will love this game. They’ll understand that we exist. Ukraine exists. Ukraine can create these things, bring life to great games. Like CD Projekt has done for Poland. A lot of people around the world know of Poland because of CD Projekt. 

Ievgen Grygorovych: We’re bringing Ukraine to your PC screen.

Maria Grygorovych: But not in an aggressive way. Within the game we’re not trying to make an obvious statement against Russia. We want to show love to our culture and bring that to players around the world.

GamesBeat: You’ve drawn a lot of support from players. Is there anything particularly memorable you’ve seen?

Ievgen Grygorovych: We have a lot of people defending us. When someone who isn’t just like you is willing to defend you, to speak for you – “Don’t worry that they changed the release date. These guys are going through a lot.” – for me it’s a way they support us. It’s not just people who might buy our game when it releases. They’re fighting for us. That’s been important to me.

Maria Grygorovych: I’ve seen people post some funny memes. “A developer announces that they’re going to be late because of the coronavirus. Stalker developers: ‘Hold my beer.’”

GamesBeat: As you come toward the finish line, what are some things you’re still working on? Is there a different feeling now that some of the most difficult work is behind you?

Ievgen Grygorovych: There’s going to be a big sigh of relief after the release. But before that, it’s still hard. At this point I can say that a lot of the players who’ve played the game love it. We have that proof that we put together a good design and did good work. It’s much easier to finish the game when you know that you’ve reached a good atmosphere and a good challenge for the players. It’s much easier to finish a game like this once you get it to players and they can test it and tell you what’s good.

GamesBeat: Are you at the point where you’re getting a lot of feedback from testing?

Ievgen Grygorovych: We still don’t have it in the hands of the whole audience. It’s external QA, QC, people at our publisher. But they agree on a lot of things. We know that there will be at least some people who think the same way.

Maria Grygorovych: Sometimes, as a developer, you can get in the mindset that it’s really bad, it’s a disaster, there’s no way you can show it to anyone. Then someone plays it and says, “It’s so cool!” Maybe it’s good after all? I don’t know many other developers, but within our company we always want to do more and more. We’ll definitely keep working after the release to keep working toward what we want to do. We’ve built a universe. There’s not really a point where you can say you’re done and that’s all. We can keep bringing more into this world.

Ievgen Grygorovych: We have a lot of ideas for things we wanted to do in Stalker 2 that we decided should wait until after release. We still have a lot of things we want to add to the game. Release day isn’t the point where we’ll stop making the game. It’s just the point where players will get it and start giving us feedback. We’ll start communicating with players about the game design.

Maria Grygorovych: There are some features you can release without and it’s totally okay, but you still want to do it, because it’s cool.

GamesBeat: What has working with Microsoft been like?

Ievgen Grygorovych: They’ve been helpful around two big things. One, the technical part. They dedicated an experienced team from their technology group to help us with optimizing certain things for Xbox. It’s been very good to work with people who have that kind of low-level experience. The second part is emotional support. They’ve been very supportive. They’ve shown the game on their channels, and not just because it’s a good game, but because–I feel like they’re sympathetic to our personal situation, what we’re going through. They’ve been willing to support us on a personal level. It’s been very important for me. If a company this big believes in us and is willing to use its resources to help us, maybe we’re important after all.

Maria Grygorovych: It’s a rare situation. Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond have helped us in a lot of different ways. It’s not just business. They’re just good people. A lot of people from Microsoft have helped us out from different points of view, even when it wasn’t necessarily easy for them. They love games and they’re good people.

GamesBeat: How would you set fans’ expectations at this point? Is there anything you wanted to say to explain the most recent delays, where it was moved to November?

Ievgen Grygorovych: Our goal is to make a good game. We’ll do anything to make that happen. Our target is not to release the game at the moment where players expect it. Our target is to release the game when it can meet players’ expectations. I’m not afraid to delay the release if it’s to accomplish something good. 

We’re definitely in a hard situation where it justifies the delays. It’s hard to explain to people–you’re on a Zoom video call with your colleagues, working on the design, and then the sirens go off. Half the team on the call has to get up and go to the shelters. That affects development. You can’t predict how many missiles Russia is going to launch at Kyiv. When that happens, the alarm affects the whole region. It’s hard to explain that to someone who hasn’t had that experience. They might understand the facts, but they haven’t felt it. We can feel it. We can justify moving the release to make the game good, because we know our situation. We know what we’re going through. We have the moral right to delay the release until we make this as good as we can. 

GamesBeat: You have a lot of people pulling for you. I think they’ll understand.

Maria Grygorovych: Our delays aren’t only because of the war. That’s important to point out. It’s a big, difficult project. We have issues sometimes that we need to fix. It’s a very complex game technology-wise. We’re working on new platforms. Sometimes we need to push the release date just because we need more time to fix things and polish. Right now it’s mostly down to bug fixing and more bug fixing. There are expectations from the players out there that we want to meet.

Not every developer has this kind of independence. Every developer would like to have more time to finish their games. That’s a privilege not everyone out there has. We don’t have Microsoft demanding that we release the game on a certain day. We have a very warm relationship. Some people might not expect that they would be like that, but it’s completely true in our case. 

Ievgen Grygorovych: Even without the war we would have delays. We need to make the game better. It’s coming all together now.

Maria Grygorovych: We’re doing this for our players. We’re not a big company with a lot of money. Every delay, for us, it’s hard financially. We don’t have money coming in from other projects.

GamesBeat: How many people are working on the game now?

Maria Grygorovych: It’s 460. That’s the most we’ve ever had. Every delay is hard, but if we do it, it’s because we really need to fix something or add something. We really have some issues that we need to solve.

Ievgen Grygorovych: My point is, we’ve not been developing this game for a long time. We’ve been developing it for a normal amount of time. But for us it’s harder to predict an exact release date. Our capacity is not totally under our control. My point about the war, it’s about our planning capabilities.

Maria Grygorovych: For example, it’s a common situation that every night we’ll have alarms for a whole week. People don’t get to sleep. We have 240-250 people in Ukraine. In one week the bigger half of your team might not have gotten any sleep.

Ievgen Grygorovych: Or the electricity is out during working hours and it’s only on at night. You have one hour of overlap between time zones to have meetings. We’re not complaining. But we’re just trying to communicate the facts of the situation.

GamesBeat: Is it true that one of your people was killed in the war?

Ievgen Grygorovych: He worked on the original trilogy, yes. And one actor, who did voice-over and motion capture for Stalker 2. He died several months ago. Maybe a year? Time flows very differently right now.

Maria Grygorovych: It’s a nervous thing. A lot of our people have family members who’ve died in the war. Our employees are on the front lines. One of my biggest fears is that at some point it will be someone close. People die every day. You never know.

GamesBeat: Well, I look forward to playing the game.

Ievgen Grygorovych: We’re waiting for the moment we can bring it to players. 

Maria Grygorovych: I’m hoping for it. I need some point of satisfaction. It’s done! And we’ll keep going after that. But we’re very tired.

Ievgen Grygorovych: I’m sorry that so much of this has been negative.

Maria Grygorovych: It seems like we’ve talked more about war than about the game.

GamesBeat: It’s real life. It’s a true story. It’s good to hear it.