Key Takeaways
- Stalker 2 players suspected that A-Life 2.0 was removed from the game, after noticing issues with the NPC AI.
- Two leads now argue that it is in the game, it’s just “very broken”.
- They say that devs are still working on ironing out the issues, and will have it working as intended in a future update.
After Stalker 2 launched, fans began to suspect that the A-Life 2.0 AI system never made it into the final game. While initially mentioned on the Steam page, fans noticed it was removed from the description prior to launch.
Now, developer GSC Game World has shed some light on this, arguing that it is in the game, it’s just “very broken”. Speaking with IGN, CEO Ievgen Grygorovych and creative director Maria Grygorovych explain why the devs couldn’t get it working as intended before launch, but also reassure fans that it’s still in development.
Stalker 2 Leads Explain What Went Wrong With A-Life
“This system to work properly requires a much larger area for spawn NPCs, and it requires much more memory resources,” says the CEO. He explains that the issue was optimisation, saying that the process of making sure the game ran well caused issues with A-Life.
“To make it work we had to optimise some things, and they make A-Life work in many situations not as it should,” he continues to explain. “Also, we created some bugs not long ago before release with NPCs spawning in the air and dropping back to the bottom. They should actually spawn in the terrain. Why it happened, I don’t know! And also we had some bugs with AI behaviour.”
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He reassures fans that the developers are still working on the system, and will make sure it gets “more resources” in further updates.
Maria Grygorovych then explains that any mention of A-Life being removed from the Steam page was not a coverup, but stemmed from miscommunication with someone in the marketing department. She says she did not sign off on this decision, and that it will be added back into the game’s description once the feature is working as intended.
There’s no word on when it will function properly, but the devs are clearly still hard at work on the game. Just the other day, we got two patches in the space of 24 hours which rolled out more than 650 fixes.
Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl is the long-awaited follow-up to the apocalyptic first-person shooter. As a Stalker, you must venture into the deadly Exclusion Zone, contending with mutants and warring factions alike, in search of valuable artifacts.