Stalker 2 really is a monumental achievement when you take into consideration, well, everything. Even though its devs just didn't have another delay in them, our own Stalker 2 appreciator Joshua Wolens found its bugs a charming harkening to the original, rather than an insurmountable obstacle, in his Stalker 2 review.
During a talk with IGN at a recent BAFTA event, GSC Game World CEO Ievgen Grygorovych says that, all things considered, he's pleased that the game is being received so well: "It's not [the] perfect that we wanted, but it's a game with soul."
At the time of writing, Stalker 2 has an 84% positive rating on Steam, which is genuinely outright impressive for something with a heap of technical issues strapped to it. Traditionally, players aren't so tolerant of hitches, and would sooner see a buggy game thrown to the wolves than lauded—but it seems the classic taste of 'eurojank' has gone down well. It's tradition, after all.
While Grygorovych later notes that he "expected to have much less success than we had from the audience", he still hungers for more. "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 [on it].
"We know that the game was released in a state that we would like to make it better … it was impossible to make more than we were making."
Like a magician pulling back a curtain on a Lovecraftian horror we'd only seen the first tendril of, Grygorovych reveals, astoundingly, that most of the bugs haven't even surfaced yet: "We as a developer, we see more problems in the game than the players usually face. So many players didn't face 99% of the bugs inside our game.
"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."
While I'm sure 99% is an exaggeration, I'm equally sure that Stalker 2's devs were wildly, terribly aware of the game's issues—I, too, would release a sigh of relief at the fact that it all went better than expected. And yet, "still we want it [to be] better." If that's not an inspirational level of commitment, to push through perhaps the most literal definition of the words 'development hell' without invoking the actual underworld, I'm not sure what is. I can only wish the developers the best of luck in polishing the game to its intended sheen.
