Stalker 2 has been getting a broadly positive response since launch, but it's clear the game isn't yet everything it could be. Key among the complaints from players is that the A-Life 2.0 system the devs talked up years before launch doesn't appear to be working in the game, and the fact that details on this system disappeared from the game's Steam page made some players believe this was a case of false advertising. But the husband-and-wife team at the top of developer GSC Game World insist that unfortunate bugs and miscommunications are to blame here.
A-Life 2.0 is basically a fancy name for the game's NPC AI. The original Steam page described it as a "life-simulating system" that would make "the game world feel alive as never before." Of course, the AI ended up being one of the weakest elements of Stalker 2, with players quickly getting tired of enemies spawning out of nowhere to instantly hunt you down.
GSC Game World CEO Ievgen Grygorovych tells IGN that in order to work properly, the A-Life 2.0 system requires a "much larger area" to spawn NPCs than what's currently in the game. The spawn radius had to be cut down because the devs "were fighting with optimization," particularly in managing memory resources. "To make it work we had to optimize some things, and they make A-Life work in many situations not as it should," Ievgen explains.
"All these things connected make it look like it's very broken and not working," Ievgen says. "But we are now continuing working on the optimization part to bring more resources for the A-Life system, to increase the range where A-Life is actually visualized."
As for the disappearance of any mention of A-Life 2.0 from Stalker 2's Steam page, creative director Maria Grygorovych tells IGN that this happened because of an innocuous conversation with someone on the marketing team. "He told me there will be a lot of new players who don’t know what A-Life is. They need to understand what we’re talking about in this description. So I will try to change it to a more understandable form," Maria explains.
"He did that without any discussion or permission," Maria continues. "He didn’t ask, ‘Do we have some bugs with A-Life or something?’ Because we had. We knew that. It’s a really huge and difficult system. But, when he did that before release, it was a surprise for me, because I noticed it because of Reddit. We did the Steam page in 2021. So for me, I was shocked, honestly."
Stalker 2's current Steam page now simply notes that the game features "advanced artificial intelligence systems that will keep engaged even the most hard-boiled players." In our Stalker 2 review, Andy calls it "the best but most broken game" he's played all year, and that broadly seems to be the tone of the response to the survival FPS so far: a fantastic foundation that's currently being dragged down by a laundry list of bugs and polish problems.
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