“We can't make an interesting and immersive game completely without PvP.” The developers of Glory to the Heroes have nevertheless added the ability to play as Russian soldiers

— Last year you announced that you had completely abandoned the PvP mode with the ability to play as Russians after criticism. Now PvP is returning. What has changed?

We never gave up on PvP. At that time, we focused solely on the PvE mode, which we have been developing all this time until today. Now we have started to introduce PvP and it is being tested in a closed format. But PvP is not the main direction of the game, the main one is both PvP and PvE. That is, we have a separate, very good, tested, cool PvE mode that really gives interesting gameplay. It is offline, and you cannot play as Russians there.

Regarding PvP, we, as developers from Ukraine, do not support Russian aggression. Therefore, in our project, the presentation of PvP is different from projects where there is an opportunity to play for the Russian and Ukrainian sides.

— But still, just to clarify, if I go into the Play Test of your game, there will be two warring factions, one is the Ukrainian armed forces, and the other is what?

The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation with an authentic look, with their weapons.

— That is, if I choose, for example, the side of the Russian Federation, then my opponent will be the Armed Forces of Ukraine, right?

Yes, this is your opponent for the game.

— It turns out that you haven't completely abandoned the PvP mode, which you talked about earlier in the media.

First of all, this is not my quote, it is a submission from GameDev DOU.

Secondly, this is really, in principle, true, because at that time we were not developing PvP at all. Before the criticism, we had a line that we do PvP mode first, then everything else. Then we rethought it, first did PvE and now returned to PvP. But PvP mode was never canceled , because all game systems, all game mechanics, are made to work as efficiently as possible in PvP.

— Ukrainians understand the context in which the game takes place, but gamers from other countries do not. For them, it's just a game.

Not just a game, because when you play our game as a Russian, you are not playing a simple game. The locations are created authentically and the very concept of the game and game mechanics immerse the player. Therefore, during the gameplay, watching the events on the screen, the thought appears that (playing as a Russian) you are not exactly a good guy here.

We have certain limits of the genre, we can't make an interesting and immersive game completely without PvP .

But like I said, we have a PvE mode and any player who doesn't want to play PvP for whatever reason can literally skip it and just play PvE. Plus, we're still working on a story campaign that will further flesh out the idea of ​​who's good and who's bad.

— And if the player ignores the story campaign and goes straight to PvP, the context is lost. Without a script and moral accents, the game turns into pure gameplay, where killing the enemy becomes just a fun mechanic and it doesn't matter who plays in what uniform.

That's true.

The game is primarily a media product that people will play. It does not have any primary coded goal - we are not a propaganda project , we are simply recreating real events. And for this we needed to add the armed forces of the Russian Federation as a faction that can be chosen.

Previously, Serhiy Voronov claimed that Glory to the Heroes is an ideological game about glorifying events and people who gave their lives in the war. He noted that a large part of the target audience is Western players, for whom events do not play the same role as they do for Ukrainians.

After a flurry of criticism over the ability to play as Russians, the developers decided to abandon the previous version of the PvP mode.

However, this week, closed testing of the PvP mode will start, where players will have access to the Russian and Ukrainian sides, and the gameplay will take place on a map that recreates the city of Chasiv Yar.

Let us remind you that dev.ua published a large article about how Russian developers glorify their war crimes in Ukraine through video games , which describes the problems of describing modern tragic events by Ukrainian game developers.

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