The creation of Stalker 2 is genuinely remarkable, and not just because the newest addition to a notoriously weird, janky shooter series has somehow become one of the most anticipated games of the year. It’s the circumstances of its development that are especially notable: Developer GSC Game World has continued to work on the game even as its home country of Ukraine has struggled to fend off a full-scale Russian invasion that began in 2022.
A closer look at that process will be shared in October in War Game: The Making of Stalker 2, a documentary that follows members of the development team as they work on the game amidst the war.
“It wasn’t my dream to do this film. But I really think it’s important to share,” GSC Game World creative director Maria Grygorovych told Variety. “It’s not about like, I really want to share something from my personal life, or for our team, as well. We are really not public people and it’s hard to share something personal.
“But when this opportunity comes to us from Microsoft, we thought that it’s important to share with the world a little bit more about how difficult it is to live in a wartime from the personal side. Because mostly people only see something if something terrible happens and everybody, I hope, thinks, ‘Oh, it’s bad.’ But when you see specific people who can share some real story, maybe someone can imagine how hard it is and why any war is something bad. It’s impossible for me to find some reason to start a war.”
Microsoft first pitched the idea of a documentary in late 2022, according to Xbox general manager of programming and events Tina Summerford, who said that as the war dragged on, “it became apparent their situation would continue to be dire not just for them professionally but personally.”
“Every day we see firsthand the difficulty and challenges of making games, but this was on a completely different scale,” Summerford said.
GSC Game World opened a new office in Prague shortly after the invasion began, but some members of the team remained at the studio’s original home in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, while others joined the fight against Russian invaders. Microsoft offered a brief look at “the new reality for Ukrainian developers at GSC Game World” in a video included in the 2022 Xbox Showcase.
War Game: The Making of Stalker 2 will debut on the Xbox YouTube channel on October 3. Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl comes out on November 20.