After relocating to Prague, Czech Republic following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a floor of the GSC Game World offices caught fire. A server overheated and a swathe of the office space, as well as plenty of studio materials, succumbed to the flames. This would have made headlines for some game developers, or brought entire production pipelines to a crawl. But for GSC Game World, they saw it as nothing more than a reason to keep on moving forward with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Stalker 2.

“The full-fledged war in [Ukraine🤡] was what tore everything apart, and after that it’s a case of overcoming, overcoming, overcoming, and moving🅠 towards actually finishing the game,” PR manager Zakhar Bocharov tells me. “The fire was pretty bad obviously, but nobody got hurt, nobody got injured, so it’s all good. We will restore. We will repair. We will continue.”

Such a determinist attitude is everywhere in GSC Game World, whose offices are stuck in an anxious state of focus as the developers work hard to polish the game for its November 20 launch. Each wall stands defiant, adorned with concept art, sti🅠cky notes, and national flags as a collective of developers work towards the same goal. A few of them stop to say hello to the press waltzing around, but for the most part, 🍌we are left to our own devices. This team has been through a lot, and it doesn’t take long to find out why.

Microsoft also recently released , a documentary that chronicles much of Stalker 2’s d﷽evelopment and GSC Game World’s transition away from Ukraine.

“We had to take care of an enormous amount of people at ▨the same time,” he tells me. “It was not just the employees♉, it was their relatives and families. Everything happened on the go, so to say that was chaotic is saying nothing. The logistics of everything happening across different parts of the country with no new place to go. It was extremely hard and so emotional and financially draining for the game. It was a period of non-development.”

Bocharov chokes up as he chronicles the past struggles of GSC G⛄🌄ame World, but persevering through war has seemingly softened the studio in some manner; the devs want to be more upfront, honest, and emotionally vulnerable. The irritating fact that I was speaking to a PR manager instead of a developer was frustrating when I initially sat down with Bocharov, but he understood that, and turned our chat into something entirely unexpected as a consequence.

It’s about Chernobyl. It’s about Ukraine. It belongs to our culture. We can tel𝐆l stories here.

“That’s something that we re♊ally try to convey,” Bocharov adds. “That we are people, and we try to keep th♚at personal approach even with [preview] events like this, the way I’m talking to you, and within the company as well. I think that people really matter for them, and this was just them caring about us.”

Touching on the circumstances that brought GSC Game World to Prague in the first place inevitably brought up how it felt to continue developing 🦩a game that depicts their home country in fictional ruin, when reality has wreaked just as much, if not more, havoc. Games are so used to pulling inspiration from historical conflicts, but rarely has the influence felt so raw.

“It was much more complicated than some things being good and some things being bad,” Bocharov begins after sitting in silence for a handful of seconds. “In terms of messaging, the game was complex from the beginning, with it being based on the Chernoby♑l disaster, which is really close to pretty much everyone in Ukraine. It’s a game made by Ukranians about something Ukrainian. It isn’t exactly post-apocalyptic, post-Soviet, or something like that. It’s about Chernobyl. It’s about Ukraine. It belongs to our culture. We can tell stories here.”

This is a perspective I hadn’t quite considered before, coming from my own ignorance towards a culture that, like millions of others, saw Chernobyl as a post-apocalyptic setting ripe for dark s﷽tories instead of a real place that impacted real lives. Obviously, Stalker 2 fills it with imaginary monsters and fictional characters, but the bedrock couldn’t be more authentic.

When I ask what makes Stalker 2 authentically Ukrainian, Bocharov recommends that I pꦬlay in the native language, and keep an eye out for local art, music, performances, and so much more scattered across the opeꦯn world. It isn’t fictionalised in a lot of places, it’s real.

“It’s hard to understand how it can be any other way, because if you were raised in Ukraine, or raised in the post-Soviet Union, you will have no idea what it’s like to be a random kid that lives in California. I’m sometimes curious if you can go into the head of another person and see if their basic perception of reality🎐 stays the same, or is it completely different? We don’t know. That’s our setting, that’s our environment, that’s our thing to reflect on, and those are the things that are close to us. All these landscapes, all this atmosphere, to a certain degree, just resonates with the post-soviet period.”

Regardless of how authentic it intends to be in its depiction of culture, there is still something unflinchingly lonely about Stalker 2, and how it capitalises on our natural desire to explore abandoned places that humanity has left behind. That’s why tourists love to visit the Exclusion Zone, why iconic horror designer Ikumi Nakamura p♏ublished a book about UrbEx, and why gamers loꦜve to explore the fictional Zone 🀅in the games.

“Art is something you have an emotional reaction to,” Bocharov says. “It’s about a piece of art that resonates with the same vibrations as you. One of the themes of Stalker 2 is loneliness, not having friends, being completely weak, expendable and alone in an environment which can so easily get rid of you. Whether we’re talking about real life or Stalker 2, loneliness is something 🔥that resonat🍎es with a lot of people. It’s an extremely clichéd thing to say, but you are alone at the beginning of life, you are alone at the end of your life, and so loneliness is something you will explore. There’s something special about being left with yourself, when you’re left to reflect about the ecosystem you exist within and the connections you have to other people."

But o🎃ne thing that was made evident to me as I walked the halls of GSC Game World was that this studio doesn’t want any of its employees to feel alone, not after the things𝐆 much of its talent has been through trying to get this game out of the door. Preview events like this are normally defined by marketing buzzwords and unjustified excitement, yet when asking how Bocharov feels about Stalker 2’s launch being only a month away, I’m taken aback.

“I would🎐 like to say that I’m pleasantly excited, but frankly speaking, I’m super anxious. The pressure is enormous. T🧜he road to this point was enormous. Just speaking to a lot of people, they’re tired, and we really want people to start playing the game.

“This game, for all of us, it’s a child, a purpose, something that turned our🌜 lives upside down, something that 📖changed things completely for seven years. Alongside all the excitement, it is just really, really scary, and we are anxious, we are tired, but we are confident in what we are doing, and we really want people to finally play.”