Can you tell us a bit about the expanded nuclear power plant and the Red Forest locations that were originally unlocked through the stretch goals?
We wanted to add places which are not easily available to reach for tourists and also are a great fit for our story. We plan to recreate these areas as precisely as possible and add something extra from us. However, sometimes it can be a tricky task because few places in the Zone are harder to be digitized - especially when there's a higher radiation level there. To properly prepare to work in these places we needed more time and better logistics than for scanning the random parts of Pripyat city or Chernobyl village. For example, when we wanted to scan the undergrounds of the Power Plant below reactor 4, it turned out they are completely sealed due to high radiation and entering them would kill us. Fortunately, we were lucky to scan other parts of the undergrounds that are identical and implement them in the game.
What was the reason for splitting the locations into different maps in Chernobylite instead of using a seamless 'open world' design?
First, we wanted to recreate a real Exclusion Zone of Chernobyl and in reality the area is 2500 square kilometers, 95% of which covered with forest. We didn't want to change its character and ruin its real mood by artificially placing hundreds or thousands of artificial objects only to give players anything interesting to watch or to do there. Instead, we decided to focus on showing the most interesting parts that are scattered within the whole area, and in order to do this, we had to cut the smaller parts from the whole Zone. And second, but not less important - we're a small team of around 30 people and creating a seamless open world with such detail as we do would be impossible in a team of this size. We would need to sacrifice the quality just to let players explore bigger and more empty or non-inspiring areas. That was a big no for us. However our maps are still going to be big, and the player will be able to walk around wherever he or she pleases... while paying attention to radiation of course.
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What do you think of the store war between Epic and Valve? Would you ever consider going exclusive to the Epic Games Store?
We hope that the existence of more store platforms will ultimately lead to a better situation for players and for developers. But since we've decided to go into the community driven development, launching Kickstarter, planning Early Access - then a non-exclusive presence on platforms like Steam and GOG seemed a much better idea for us with Chernobylite.
Thank you for your time.
