The Sinking City 2 Q&A – Frogwares on Renewed Combat Focus, UE5 Switch, and Continued War Impact

Ukrainian developer Frogwares is currently seeking funds for The Sinking City 2 on Kickstarter. After two weeks, and with another two left before the end, the campaign has so far gathered over €383K, nearly four times the minimum amount of €100K. Of course, the studio hopes that the momentum continues; according to Kicktraq projections, it could land anywhere between €424K and €483K.

It has not been smooth sailing for Frogwares in the past few years. In 2019-20, their games were delisted from digital stores twice in the span of a year due to problems with French publishers Focus Home Interactive and Nacon. Then there was the pandemic, of course, which affected everyone. Just as things were looking better, the Russian invasion of Ukraine suddenly happened in early 2022.

We talked with them just a few days after the war started, learning of all their fear and day-to-day troubles. Thankfully, Epic awarded the studio a MegaGrant, offering them a reprieve of sorts. Even so, they had to re-evaluate their roadmap and decided to develop Project Palianytsia, which turned out to be Sherlock Holmes The Awakened, a reboot of the first entry in the franchise that was funded via Kickstarter. The ongoing war caused a short delay, but the studio still managed to release a solid game, as outlined in our review.

Now, the studio has returned to what it really wanted to make: The Sinking City 2. This one will be a full-fledged horror game, whereas the first entry was more of an open world investigation game with horror undertones. Right in the middle of the Kickstarter campaign, we reached out once more to Sergiy Oganesyan, Publishing Director at Frogwares, to discuss how the project evolved over the past couple of years (including the switch to Unreal Engine 5), what fans can expect from it, and how the war is still affecting the development team.

Exactly a year ago, you told fans the Kickstarter campaign would open up soon, but then you went dark for a while. Can you disclose what happened?

A few things really. Over the past year, we made the decision to focus on giving ourselves some time to develop the game so we could showcase real gameplay for Kickstarter, rather than just concept art. Along the way, we also refined some of our designs to better fit actual gameplay, ensuring a stronger experience.

When we announced it in 2024, we had some closed playtests very soon after that with a group of our closest fans. Through their feedback, we started refining even more on where we should place our focus and efforts, which dictated a lot about how we’d present the game in our campaign. Much of what we showed in the gameplay and dev diary we just released is due to our work with our fans. Additionally, we took the time to carefully map out and design physical rewards for the campaign, making sure they are meaningful and high-quality for our backers. It’s the first time we've done something like that, and there was a lot of fog of war to deal with.

Lastly, we are all still mostly working remotely as a team due to the war. So, we work more around our team and their needs. We didn’t want anyone to feel rushed on the campaign. Progress on the game was the priority, and then getting what we needed for the launch of the Kickstarter came when everyone felt ready to help. So these factors all stacked up, but we’re glad we could take our time.

How has your vision for The Sinking City 2 evolved since the game's announcement?

Our vision for The Sinking City 2 is a Lovecraftian survival horror game with deep investigation mechanics, and that hasn’t changed much. But there’s still a huge difference between the first vertical slice we created back in 2023 and the recent playable footage that we published for Kickstarter, and that, thanks to the feedback from playtests, has definitely shown us where we need to adjust our priorities.

If you take combat, for example, we spent a lot of time improving the overall feeling of it. How enemies behave, how they react to being shot, how impactful the shotgun is, that kind of thing. There’s still a lot of work ahead, but we are happy to see that most people are satisfied with where this particular mechanic is going.

How recent is the Pre-Alpha gameplay footage that you just shared? How much more polished do you expect the full game to be?

Well, this is sort of the downside of a Kickstarter campaign—you often have to launch it at a time when you can’t really show anything totally final. Much of what we showed was recorded in late 2024, but in order to really understand how much things can change, we need to take into consideration how game development works.

For example, we create our levels in a vacuum of what we call Vitaras (visual targets) - separate maps inside the engine where you don’t have any real gameplay. So while the work on those continues, inside the real game you have placeholder assets, which, as you can imagine, are very far in terms of the quality of what we want to achieve. But when those Vitaras are fully migrated to the real game, you suddenly have beautiful meshes, materials, lighting and so on and the difference is like night and day. The same goes for your enemies and everything else, really. What I’m trying to say is that there wasn’t anything in the trailer that was truly final, locked, and won’t ever be touched again. Once we fully integrate our locations, combat, and other gameplay together, you’ll see the difference for the better.

One of the big areas of focus for this sequel is combat. Can you talk about some of the improvements fans will see compared to the first game?

Where do I even begin? I have already mentioned that we are putting a lot of emphasis on how combat feels because it must feel fun and convincing. You must enjoy landing a shot, and this is achieved through a number of things, primarily VFX, sound design, recoil, enemy hit reaction, etc. We mentioned a wound body system for our enemies in our recent dev diary - it’s essentially a second layer of muscle, ligaments, and blood mass underneath the skin, which reacts when hit. It’s all a bit gory, but in my opinion, very satisfying to see working under the hood.

So, a lot of work is being done on enemy visuals, animations, attacks, and, of course, enemy placement around each map to make this all come together. I’m not going to lie; combat is probably the most challenging aspect for us, especially since this is now a core focus of the game compared to the original. One enemy can take months of work, and that’s just the visual design, without any gameplay. But so far, the results we and our closed playtesters have seen prove we’re on the right track. We’ve still got a lot more work to do, and we’ll likely be refining this right to the end, but we’re really happy with the progress so far.

Will players be able to dodge out of the way and perform some melee actions in combat?

Yes, we are experimenting with some dodge and “last-resort” melee mechanics.

In terms of narrative and atmosphere, how is The Sinking City 2 going to set itself apart from its predecessor? Are there going to be any easter eggs or even returning characters for fans of the original?

So, the two games are set in the same universe and time setting. 1920s United States drenched in a gloomy, Lovecraftian horror vibe. And just like before, a supernatural flood has taken hold of a city and is changing it in unfathomable ways. But that’s mainly where the similarities end. The Sinking City 2 features a new, stand-alone story entirely separate from the one told in the original game. So we’re not going back to playing as Charles Reed, nor are we going back to the city of Oakmont in any way, and we made all these narrative and atmosphere choices for a reason. We wanted to create a story and setting that wasn’t burdened by what we created in the original game, especially since players have various endings they favor or consider the “true ending” to that story.

This way, we can let existing fans come back into this familiar world fresh, while anyone who never played the original can also step in without feeling like they are missing a big chunk of the story. So while we might have some small Easter eggs or hints here and there, they will be there mainly as a wink and nudge for us and our most devoted fans.

You've said that while this isn't an open-world game, it will feature plenty of secrets and large explorable zones. Considering side content, how long should we expect the game to be?

That’s not something we can answer right now, as there are still parts of the game we haven’t finalized yet. However, it’s a survival horror game, so it would be fair to look at some recent releases in the genre to get a ballpark idea.

The Kickstarter campaign appears to have gone very well so far.

Yup. Just yesterday we unlocked another stretch goal - a new giant monster type, the Shoggoth. Now, just to be clear, we already did promise a Shoggoth encounter in the game, but these are two very different enemies, both visually and mechanically. We’ll probably hit one more stretch goal after this one is funded.

Will the game launch in early access or straight to full release?

The game will launch in full on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox X/S at the same time. At one point, we considered the Early Access route but decided we were better off using Kickstarter and closed playtests to help develop the game.

Was it hard to transition to Unreal Engine 5? Are you leveraging all their technologies (Lumen, Nanite, etc.) to elevate the visuals?

There was a learning curve for sure, but it was quite smooth. It was really helpful that we knew from the start that The Sinking City 2 was going to be made in Unreal 5. Speak to any team who made the transition, and almost all of them will tell you to make the switch at the start if you can. It will save you so much time and effort in the long run. So, we finished our last game on UE4 and started pre-production for TSC2 from scratch. All our internal tools were developed as separate plugins, so although the migration took some time, it was fairly straightforward. This also provided a great opportunity to get rid of a bunch of legacy code and finally perform a long-overdue refactor.

The tools UE5 brings have been amazing, for sure. Lumen has significantly improved our lighting and reflection systems, creating a more immersive and visually stunning environment. For us, especially where The Sinking City 2 has many wet surfaces, Lumen allows us to achieve much more realistic and dynamic lighting effects that were previously really difficult to attain.

With Metahuman, we were astonished at how fast, simple, and realistic the results were. After our initial tests, we reviewed our entire cutscene and dialogue creation process and reworked everything to better utilize these tools.

Nanite significantly changed our approach to asset creation, allowing us to use highly detailed models without compromising performance. This has been particularly beneficial for creating the much more detailed environments that were required for this game. Since we are going for that feeling of isolation and a more contained play space, we need the environment itself to do a lot of the immersion heavy lifting.

That said, while new technologies are fantastic and help solve old problems, they can also bring new issues to tackle. Nanite was no exception. For instance, in our previous projects, a single Static Mesh asset did not take up more than 200MB of disk space, but now it is pretty common. So, managing the increased asset sizes and optimizing our workflows to accommodate this change has been a significant task.

Will you support ray traced effects like global illumination, reflections, etc.?

Lumen already supports software ray-tracing out of the box. Our team is also looking at the hardware one, but it’ll depend on the optimization.

Do you plan to prepare enhancements for the PS5 Pro console?

It’s likely, but I can’t say which enhancements yet.

Would you like to share anything about Ukraine's situation and how it's still impacting your daily work?

Missile strikes and drone attacks almost every goddamn night. Just yesterday, around 20 drones attacked the city of Kropyvnytskyi. In Kyiv, you can’t fall asleep without listening to air defense fighting off another swarm of Russian drones. In a way, we have become used to it, but not exactly in a healthy way. You have to just accept it and try to keep living, not knowing if your luck will run out soon.

Thank you for your time, and stay strong.

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