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 [[link]] 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… [[link]] You have no energy at all and [[link]] 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.'"