Best Way game development studio was founded in 1999. It was located in Sievierodonetsk, a small industrial city in eastern Ukraine with many talented IT engineers.

Dmytro Morozov. A decent man. Who had created a profitable business and eventually became a little bored. Dmytro was a daydreamer. He was into playing video games and dreamed of creating his own virtual worlds. But in the city there was nearly no one who knew anything about creating games.

Nevertheless, he was to build a team of creative open-minded people. And he did manage that. A programmer, an artist, and the director. That’s how it all started. Even the longest road begins with a small step…

Best Way team had to start from scratch. They dug around. They tried a few existing engines just to figure out none of them would satisfy the thirst. Dmytro had a very high bar,  though his concept was still taking shape. Thus the need for their own engine became very clear.

It was an era before graphics hardware acceleration became common. Popular games were mostly 2D or 2.5D. But the advent of the third dimension was already in the air. Experiments with voxels (volume pixels) were ultimately put aside in the favor of mixing 2D and 3D graphic assets.

A creative search for the setting was also taking place. Space adventures, orbital battles, spaceship crafting, interstellar traveling – the team was obsessed with such topics. They moved blindly yet decisively. Prototype after prototype. On and on and on.

The team was working hard on their own game engine that utilized DirectX 6 and 7. The engine rendered voxel models and tile-based landscapes.

A concept of strategic gameplay was also in development. Similar in a way to the one in Dune 2, but instead of developing player bases it mainly focused on tactics with advanced physics and ballistics. The MVP contained a level representing some distant extraterrestrial planet. A group of space marines were searching for the scientists who mysteriously disappeared. They encountered an aggressive alien species and fought them. When the battle became unbearably tough, the geologist, a powerful NPC who arrived on a shuttle, helped the marines to get rid of the nasty aliens.

The demo was fully playable from initial team setup to the end. Rather interesting than stunning. Best Way wanted much more.

While the sci-fi theme remained attractive to many of the team members, deep inside, it felt a bit wrong. It led nowhere. They needed something different.

A turning point for the studio became a prototype in which World War II tanks moved along chains of waypoints and then fired at specified targets. Dmytro’s idea was the ability of moving a tank with arrow keys, guiding its gun with the mouse, and firing with the mouse button.

In other words, to control the player’s unit in a shooter style while remaining in a top-down view. This approach, eventually called Direct Control, would become a signature feature of all Best Way games.

A few years of searching and learning, trying this and that, had passed. The pillars of the future game had finally taken shape and were ultimately embodied in a fully playable demo representing 3 battles that took place in Ukraine during World War II. It looked fresh, bold, original. The only question left on the table was about scaling that approach into a commercial product.

When the disc with the demo reached 1C Company, the publisher instantly recognized the potential. Within a couple of weeks the publisher’s folks arrived in Sievierodonetsk through the abandoned mines of Donbas. The reason was to sign an agreement in person for publishing Soldiers: Heroes of World War II, which happened to be Best Way’s first game. It was the beginning of the franchise history now known as Men of War.

In March 2003, at the International Game Developers Conference, the demo received the award Best Foreign Game, drawing the attention of Codemasters, a British publisher.

Best Way was busy working on their very first commercial product – Soldiers: Heroes of World War II. While finalizing the game, Best Way published a warm-up product. A demo with a single mission called Officer. It quickly became very popular. Despite having only one playable mission it seemed endless in terms of replayability and modification. And heated up players’ anticipation for the game release.

Before long the work was done. Best Way managed to release Soldiers. It was the thing! It won players’ hearts. It amazed influencers. Reviews ranged from strongly positive to awesome. The game was noted for interactive and fully destructible environments, freedom in how to complete missions, bold experiments with RTS clichés.

Soldiers sat among top sellers for weeks across Western Europe and the ex-USSR.

Success of Soldiers: Heroes of World War II turned Best Way from a promising indie team into a prominent game developer. The employees woke up famous and rich (joke). However, paths of Best Way and Codemasters had diverged so that Soldiers 2 did not happen.

Yet you can’t afford to stay still for long because of dynamics and competition in the industry. You have to move forward, always. So Best Way did. But attempts to simply evolve original game mechanics did not satisfy Best Way’s creative director. He did not want just another game. Though it would have sufficed for others. In fact Soldiers’ engine, further called GEM1, was licensed to 3rd parties. Due to that, Saboteurs, a spin-off series, was created.

Best Way, however, decided to move further. So a bunch of serious (but not radical) changes were green-lighted.

During 2005 and 2006 the new game, Faces of War, received several major awards and became one of the most anticipated RTS titles. Published by Ubisoft and 1C Company, the game had to be released in spring 2006. But the release milestone was too ambitious. Some major systems weren’t going to be ready. Trying to keep the schedule on track, the publisher suggested feature cuts. Best Way insisted on releasing only when the whole thing was done. The publisher wasn’t happy. The release was moved from spring to fall 2006. The original PR plan was heavily cut. Fines were applied, too.

There was another thing. Faces of War was pictured as a sequel to Soldiers. It was partially true. The game inherited pillar mechanics including Direct Control. But in fact it offered a new gameplay experience, in a way, more casual. Which worked like a schism. Casual players welcomed the changes, while hardcore fans remained dogmatic about the original formula. A lot of heat was emitted across gaming forums and communities. Best Way had the old game with its fans, the new game with its fans, and a need to choose its further direction.

After the release of Faces of War, Best Way began developing a standalone expansion intended to return the series to its roots of realism, micromanagement, and historical authenticity.

Work was carried out on the GEM2 engine. The German studio Digitalmindsoft joined the collaboration, focusing on mission detail, authentic sound design, and narrative. The developers sought for a balance in the unit control system by combining precise execution of player orders with AI-based autonomous unit decisions, while preserving Direct Control as the series’ calling card.

In parallel, several Best Way programmers began creating a new version of the engine, GEM3. The task before the team was to develop a modular and cross-platform system suitable for licensing and for parallel work on the studio’s own games and third-party projects.

By taking a step back toward hardcore gameplay, Best Way released the new game Men of War, which became a benchmark of the tactical action genre. Tactical flexibility, realistic physics, and an interactive environment earned the project recognition among critics and players. The game received a score of 80 on Metacritic and positive reviews, including from the editor-in-chief of Eurogamer.

The success of Men of War inspired the publisher to fund new projects built on the game. The series’ universe began expanding with new settings and unique gameplay experiences.

The year 2008 was not only a period of expanding the Men of War franchise, but also the beginning of licensing the early version of the GEM3 engine. The talented Ino-co team chose Best Way’s technology to create a unique strategy with indirect unit control set in the fantasy kingdom simulator Majesty 2.

While developing GEM3, Best Way began a series of experiments with new genres and settings. The process resembled the studio’s early years: the team once again learned how to create games, but at a new technological level, implementing modern solutions and exploring new creative directions.

By testing different settings and combining mechanics from various genres, the team produced several demo videos on GEM3 that demonstrated the engine’s potential for future projects. The project received the working title Men of Stars

The year 2009 saw the release of two games built on GEM technology. Men of War: Red Tide was released on GEM2, while Majesty 2: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim, developed by Ino-Co, became the first major external project built on GEM3.

Experiments with the capabilities of GEM3, together with the successful releases of the Majesty 2 series by Ino-Co, led to new results. The Best Way team received an unexpected proposal to create an RPG built on GEM3, set in a post apocalyptic world with elements of alternative history.

The idea seemed ambitious, as the studio was known primarily for strategy games. Nevertheless, the team accepted the challenge. Its own engine opened opportunities for realizing bold ideas, and its technological level was comparable to the leading game engines of that period.

The game was titled Nuclear Union and was announced in 2012.

At the end of 2011, a group of enthusiasts approached Best Way with an ambitious idea: to turn a mod for Men of War into a full fledged game about Great War titled Battle of Empires: 1914-1918.

The studio not only granted a license to use GEM2, but also took on publishing responsibilities, helping the development team bring the project to commercial release.

The news quickly spread through the community, and Best Way soon received several requests from indie teams interested in licensing GEM2. As a result, the company established its own publishing division, opening a new line of activity for the studio.

Ukraine entered a phase of revolution. Nuclear Union lost its funding. Best Way tried to continue developing the game independently while simultaneously seeking new investors or a publisher to complete the project.

But new challenges awaited the team: war, the freeze of Nuclear Union, evacuation of a significant part of the team from the combat zone, settling in a new place, all without losing momentum in the development of the GEM3 engine and the Project5 game, which inherited the core idea and gameplay mechanics of Nuclear Union.

The year 2014 became one of the most eventful in Best Way’s history. The team worked on its own project, Project 5, which drew on experience gained during Nuclear Union but offered greater freedom of action, variability of playthroughs, and a new character control system with command distribution in Bullet Time. A demo version was shown at an international game developers’ conference in hopes of finding a publisher or investor; however, the project’s scale seemed too ambitious for a small team, and the risks were deemed too high.

In parallel, the programming team ported key gameplay mechanics from the Gem2 engine to Gem3; the game designers and 3D artists prepared for the creation of a Soldiers remake. In December 2014, Best Way’s publishing division released Battle of Empires by the independent Great War Team into Early Access. Meanwhile, Best Way’s management sought new partnership opportunities.

In 2015, Best Way froze development of the GEM3 engine and all related projects, making the strategic decision to focus on developing its own series of tactical strategies using the Men of War gameplay formula. The company announced Soldiers: Arena and presented an updated modification of the GEM2 engine with Steam integration, support for modern platforms, and a new interface.

In parallel, the publishing division of Best Way expanded support for external studios developing games on the GEM2 engine. Among them were the projects Gates of Hell and Draft Wars, both submitted to voting on Steam Greenlight in autumn 2015.

At the beginning of 2016, Best Way faced an internal crisis and resource reductions. The company temporarily suspended the activities of its publishing division and partner support for external projects, keeping only maintenance of Battle of Empires. To preserve the team and focus, the studio made the strategic decision to concentrate on developing Soldiers: Arena and improving its own technologies, which later became the basis for GEM RTS.

During this period, the concept of Soldiers: Arena was completely revised. The premium model was replaced with a free-to-play format with microtransactions and long-term live-service support. Instead of traditional campaigns and co-op scenarios, the team began work on a short-session multiplayer PvP game. The planned gameplay structure included a player progression and specialization system, a tech tree, unit development, and building a personal deck of units for each session.

Best Way continued to stabilize the team and internal processes after the previous year’s crisis. The main focus remained on developing Soldiers: Arena and refining the technologies that later became the foundation of GEM RTS. The team worked on the service model architecture, network code optimization, support for dedicated servers, battalion balance, and the progression system, testing mechanics on internal builds.

In parallel, Best Way continued supporting Battle of Empires project, worked with the community, and conducted limited testing of Soldiers: Arena among the most engaged players. The following years became a period of quiet but systematic work aimed at strengthening the technological base and preparing the team for subsequent public steps.

After several years of experimentation, Soldiers: Arena was preparing for release in Early Access. But the team openly acknowledged that the technical debt and the complexity of the systems accumulated during the active phase of development would not allow the game to be completed within the planned timeframe.

Throughout the year, Best Way stayed in touch with the community through developer diaries, talking about changes in balance, interface, networking mechanics, and map tests. The project turned into an internal testing ground for the development of GEM RTS engine technologies.

At the end of the year, Best Way received an offer from 1C Entertainment to release the game under the Men of War brand. On September 25, 2019, the project officially received a new title — Men of War II: Arena.

On February 18, 2020, Best Way and 1C Entertainment made a joint announcement featuring the debut trailer for Men of War II: Arena and the date of the closed beta test. The test began on March 31, and on July 29 the game opened its doors to everyone.

The team actively worked on updating maps, battalions, the progression system, and the network code, building the server architecture and improving balance. The community participated in tests, helping shape the game in direct dialogue with the developers.

However, player expectations did not align with the developers’ vision for the free-to-play model. The Men of War community perceived the online service format ambiguously, so despite constant updates, the experiment with a service-based RTS came into question.

The beginning of the year became a period of reflection and rethinking. Despite every attempt to stabilize the service and monetization, Men of War II: Arena failed to find its audience.

On September 30, the servers of Men of War II: Arena were officially shut down with an announcement of compensation for all players. In an address to the community, the developers thanked all fans for their support and announced a new course — the creation of a full-fledged premium game, Men of War II.

Thus ended the story of an ambitious experiment that was meant to become a long-term service but instead became an important lesson and a technological foundation for a new stage in the studio’s development.

The war drastically changed the life of the studio. The frontline reached Sievierodonetsk, the main office came under crossfire, and employees along with their families were forced to evacuate urgently. The production process came to a halt.

That year, the team suffered its greatest loss. The heart of founder and creative director Dmytro Morozov stopped beating.

After relocation, the developers gathered their strength and returned to work on Men of War II under the extremely difficult conditions of war and prolonged blackouts.

For the previous couple of years, the team worked under conditions so harsh that every new day could have been the last. Countless blackouts, shelling, and other challenges only hardened the team, while the support of Fulqrum Publishing ensured the project would come through.

In 2024, against all odds, the long-awaited release of Men of War II finally saw the light of day. It is worth noting that it was the most complex and content-rich project in the history of the franchise, with numerous game modes and unbelievable replayability.

The release of Men of War II became proof of the developers’ core belief: dedication to the craft and the support of like-minded people can overcome any challenge. No darkness, no cold, no war, nothing can stop creativity. Art finds a way.

Actually this story began many years ago, somehow in the dark winter of 2014. A team member was trying to compile old code with a fresh Visual Studio. Carried away with fixing compilation errors, he ended up having a working build of Soldiers: Heroes of WWII. He managed to backport Steam integration code from its offspring, but then further work in this direction was suspended.

After more than a decade, that dusty work was taken back from the shelf. The code was adapted to modern hardware and Windows, and volunteers from the community helped out to polish all those changes to release quality. Not only did Soldiers: Heroes of World War II – Enhanced Edition become an act of honor to the brand origin, but it also was a gesture of gratitude to players. The glorious past got suddenly spotlighted. Enjoy the moment, let it go, and be ready for the next chapter.