Stalker 2 is great. Heck, it's my game of the year, and I said as much in my Stalker 2 review. But it also launched with a hell of a lot of bugs. To its credit, developer GSC Game World is cranking out patches at a dizzying pace, and they seem to be making a difference, but it does raise the question: why didn't the studio just delay the game?
In a chat with Eurogamer, GSC boss Ievgen Grygorovych said the reason was simple: it might have finally, totally broken the devs. "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… You have no energy at all and you decide—should we take one more marathon?"
The answer, of course, is no. "You're so tired that you would just die if you say let's run an additional marathon," explained Grygorovych. So the studio decided to finally ship the game it had worked on in one form or another—suffering delay after delay after delay—for 14 years. "We didn't have a chance to say let's do it more. We just had a chance of 'let's do until this moment—the release date—as much as we can.'"
Of course, the other part of that calculation is that pushing Stalker 2 away from its end-of-November window also moves it out of that Black Friday/Christmas sales window, which Grygorovych also acknowledges. I have to imagine that the thought of delaying the game to fix it up further only to be rewarded with fewer sales for your efforts after over a decade of work and relocating from your home country due to a Russian invasion didn't really appeal.
Which meant players ended up with a pretty buggy game, and reviewers playing before release ended up with a very buggy game, reflected in the wide range of scores handed out to Stalker 2 in various outlets across this great games media landscape of ours. Still, it doesn't seem to have hurt the game too much: it's got over 62,000 user reviews on Steam right now and 84% of them are positive.
"It's not perfect, we need to fix everything, it has some problems," said creative director Mariia Grygorovych, "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."
