By Patrick Garratt

Expression Games is no longer a total stranger to live-ops, but when you sell more than one million copies of a game in this space you're going to need experienced pathfinders. Paul Rustchynsky joined the British developer in November 2025, when Hell Let Loose: Vietnam was a few months from its alpha, and directed the Team17 squad shooter to launch. Having managed a live-service production before in the shape of Sony’s shakily launched online racer, Driveclub, Rustchynsky knows what Expression’s game needs right now: content.

"We've got a very clear kind of roadmap of updates – 2.0 and 3.0 over the next few months – that we really feel is going to draw a lot of players back," he tells Knowledge of the studio’s plan to revitalise PC player figures, which have fallen from a launch peak of around 30,000 to the low thousands on Steam.

"We've got new maps coming, which are major additions, and maps that are quite different to the existing maps, from the first six inside the game. We've got a lot of community-requested weapons that are going into the game very soon."

He adds: "We want to make sure we've got a range of features that are going to make the moment-to-moment a little bit more involving for particular roles and classes, adding new abilities."

What did Driveclub and work on subsequent projects tell Rustchynsky about steering a live-service title through a potentially rocky launch period? What does he know about the audience that will keep Hell Let Loose: Vietnam alive for years rather than months? Put it this way: Steam numbers may not be the truest measure of the project's health, now or in the future.

Lessons from Driveclub

Rustchynsky's route into Driveclub differed from his arrival on Hell Let Loose: Vietnam. He rose through the ranks at Sony's Evolution Studios over several years, becoming game director on MotorStorm: RC before leading design on Driveclub, and then taking over as director in 2014 ("I think I was the third game director on that project"). There was no such progression at Expression.

"I joined a few months before alpha," he says. "The pillars and all the vision were set. Everyone knew what they were doing with the game, so my job when I came in was more about executing on that vision.

"You can't just jump in, roughly 12 months before release, and upend the project just because you’re a game director."

Instead of imposing his personal vision on the game, Rustchynsky familiarised himself with the franchise by cramming Hell Let Loose, the WWII game developed by Australian studio Black Matter and published by Team17, released into Early Access in 2019 and fully launched in 2021.

"It was all I played for a good six to eight weeks beforehand," he says, "putting in hundreds of hours to truly understand the product.

"This was a live-service project. I can put more of my stamp on it over time."

His time on Driveclub was fundamental to the way he approached his leadership of Expression’s FPS.

"There was a huge amount I learned from that launch," he says of the PS4 racing game. "Not necessarily the way I would have liked to have learned it, on the job, but lots of important lessons learned."

Those lessons shaped Vietnam's run-up to launch, including an open beta whose feedback led the team to delay the original release.

"One of the things we didn't do back then was too much in the way of closed betas, alphas, tests – all these types of things that you now need to do in any modern live-service game," he says.

"We were able to pause the release date and push it back a couple of months to make sure we had a little bit of extra time."

The plan for year one

Player feedback is now critical to the continuing development of Hell Let Loose: Vietnam. Team17 provides a weekly community report, "which actually breaks down every comment from Discord, Instagram, X, all the social media platforms… So we can kind of map whether or not our updates and fixes are actually improving sentiment."

That feedback sits alongside the studio's own strategy: performance and stability fixes come first, followed by planned content and community requests. Principally, Rustchynsky is seeking to broaden Vietnam's overall experience.

"It's about ensuring that we actually kind of capture more of the Vietnam War," he says. "One of the things that most people don't realise is actually it took place over quite a long period of time. There were many individual conflicts and fights over various quite infamous locations.

"We want to push this more into different types of environments with a broader range of factions that were involved, because we focus very narrowly on just the NVA and the US to start off with."

Player feedback is telling Rustchynsky and the team to deepen the functionality of the game's 17 roles.

"We're finding different players and segments gravitate towards certain types, and they're all asking for different things. So a big part of the plan is to ensure that we actually flesh out a lot of these roles and give them more tools, more utility inside the action."

The unexpected audience

The roadmap leaves room to respond to that feedback, but Rustchynsky's bigger point is that judging the game by Steam figures gives a skewed picture of its playerbase.

"People often focus on the numbers and make a big deal out of it," he says. "Of course, people only look at the Steam side of things. And at the moment we've got a relatively healthy userbase.

"I'm not sure I can give exact numbers, but I will say that individually PS5 and Xbox both dwarf the PC audience."

Once more for those at the back: "Vietnam is predominantly a console game in terms of its audience."

That the original game is mainly played by PC users meant the success of Vietnam's console versions over the PC SKU came as a surprise to Expression, and is shaping the incoming content.

"We've had to adapt a little bit and push a little bit of focus onto our console players," says Rustchynsky.

"I came in as a PS5 Pro player and I was like, 'We could do a little bit more work on the console version to bring it up to par.' I think we use most keys on the keyboard – trying to adapt that to a console experience is a good chunk of work."

Expression, then, is building a game based on feedback from an unexpected audience with a PS5 Pro-playing director who's spent years on the front line of high-profile live-service development. Declining Steam numbers aren't necessarily a death knell, and Rustchynsky is confident the tide can be turned.

"With updates two and three, I think the community is really going to want to come back and pick up the game again," he says.