Chernobylite 2 Q&A – 20 Times Bigger World, 2-3X Longer Playtime, Third-Person View, Fall 2025 Release Window
Polish developer The Farm 51 announced Chernobylite 2: Exclusion Zone, the sequel to 2021's first-person shooter survival horror game, just before Gamescom 2024.
While there, I had the chance to speak with Wojciech Pazdur, Development Director at The Farm 51, who discussed the big changes of this sequel, which is moving to the third-person open world role-playing game genre (albeit with an optional first-person view for exploration) and shooting for a much bigger game in terms of explorable area and playtime, not to mention optional support for cooperative multiplayer.
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When did you begin working on Chernobylite 2?
We started working on it as soon as we launched the first game. However, Chernobylite 1 was never fully finished because we just released the last DLCs, the last expansion packs, a bit over a month ago. This is actually the end of our journey with Chernobylite 1. A port is coming for Nintendo Switch, but we are not developing the game ourselves.
We first started working on concepts and prototypes for Chernobylite 2 in the second half of 2021, so it's been almost three years today. The pre-production took us one year and a half, and we've been in production for over a year. We still have one year until the game is finished. Today, we are close to the Alpha stage, meaning you can play almost all the game. We actually wanted to wait to announce Chernobylite 2 up to the day when the first one was completely done from our aspect.
Are you going to do early access again?
We are considering early access. However, because of the scale of the project, we would prefer not to. We know that early access is very helpful. But if we went with early access, then probably the release date for the final game would be postponed, because early access gives you a lot of extra work. So today, we would prefer not to go for early access, but we will see how our playtest goes and how our talks with investors and the publisher regarding the distribution model go.
Ultimately, early access gave us an enormous amount of value-added feedback for the first game, helping us make a better game. Looking just from this perspective, early access is a good tool. But for a game of this scale, supporting and managing early access would be heavy for us because the game is many times bigger than the original.
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