Stalker 2 Dev GSC Game World Explains for the First Time What Went Wrong With A-Life 2.0, and Why It Was Removed From the Game’s Description on Steam

ign.com:

GSC Game World creative director Maria Grygorovych shows me a message on her phone. It’s proof, she says, that she’s telling me the truth about Stalker 2’s A-Life 2.0 system. The message is about why mention of A-Life 2.0 was pulled from Stalker 2’s Steam page and replaced with a generic description about the way AI works in the game. It turns out that Maria found out the description had changed when she saw players complaining about it on Reddit.

Stalker 2 launched late last month to a positive reception on Steam and one million sales. It’s a success for the Ukrainian studio, a miracle, really, considering the harrowing circumstances that followed Russian’s full-scale invasion of the country in 2022. Stalker 2 suffers from well-documented bugs; GSC knows this and is working as hard as it can to fix them. But it’s A-Life 2.0 — or its apparent absence — that has gained the most attention from fans.

A-Life was a key feature of the first Stalker game that governed AI behavior across the game world. At a high level, it is a system for simulating life in the Zone that works its magic seemingly independently of the player’s actions or whereabouts. It helps to create convincing AI and the emergent gameplay Stalker is famous for.

GSC had said A-Life 2.0 would make the Zone feel alive as never before, that it would fuel emergent gameplay on a scale previously thought impossible. Indeed for some fans, A-Life 2.0 was Stalker 2’s biggest selling point. Unfortunately, now Stalker 2 is out in the wild, A-Life 2.0 hasn’t quite lived up to that billing.

In fact, it feels as if A-Life 2.0 isn’t even in the game. Players have found little evidence to suggest anything approaching a life simulation is in operation at any scale, with NPCs and enemies spawning around the player and sometimes in obvious ways. This, players have said, lends Stalker 2 a more scripted feel than its predecessor, with emergent gameplay sorely lacking.

So, what happened? GSC CEO Ievgen Grygorovych and creative