STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobylis a phenomenally atmospheric take on the beloved franchise, but if you’re a series veteran, then you’ve probably noticed something is amiss with the game’s AI. Its A-Life systems, specifically, are either broken or not even present in the final product.
A-Life is one of those eclectic game features that are hard to put into words, thoughI have certainly tried my hand at explaining its importance. While GSC Game World hasn’t dedicatedtoo muchmarketing time on discussing it, the team was quite clear in stating thatA-Life was present and accounted for inSTALKER 2. Naturally, I expected to be able to see the effects of online and offline simulations of Stalker gangs, factions, and roving mutants basically right off the bat, only for it all to fall flat on its face. I’m not the only one who noticed something was amiss with A-Life, either.
GSC claims A-Life is simply broken, and fixes should be coming
Enemies spawn in willy-nilly (and often behind your back), patrols randomly fall off the face of the Zone if you let them out of your sight, and there’s generally a sense that virtually nothing is going on outside of randomized encounters and story-related happenings. There’s genuinely no point in using sighted weapons sinceSTALKER 2only seems to have an active NPC spawn range of about 100 meters or so, which is awildthing to say about this franchise.
It’s still the early days, of course, but I’m extremely thankful thatit didn’t take long for GSC Game Worldto respond to the players’ worries about A-Life. After all, it was A-Life specifically that drove much of the old titles’ emergent and dynamic gameplay. Not having it in a new, cutting-edgeSTALKERgame would be frankly ridiculous.
Straight from theTark’s mouth, then: “There are several known issues with A-life 2.0 system that we are aware of and are working on fixes/improvements. We know that this system is very important to the Zone having an immersive atmosphere, and we will do our best to fix the known issues,” says GSC Game World’s latest statement.
Having playedSTALKERsince the late aughts, I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that losing A-Life would’ve been an immediate problem with the game. A far more serious issue than the ongoing performance problems, even. GSC Game World did well to chime in almost immediately to assuage such concerns, and though people will still be unhappy with the current state of the game, having a broken AI system is much preferable to simply not having anything in place at all. After all, GSC is clearly trying to work out what went wrong with A-Life in the release build of the game, and the odds are good that it’s a priority issue, givenhow confused players are on the game’s biggest subreddit.
There’s no ETA on the A-Life fix forSTALKER 2, which sucks, but this is pretty par for the course as far as this series goes. Not one of the games has been perfectly stable and fully functioning on day one, so we really are collectively re-experiencing the classic jankiness that GSC Game World is known for. Here’s hoping A-Life gets sorted out in short order, so that the rest of the game gets the polish-upit so clearly deserves.
