Stalker 2 devs say the scrubbed mentions of anticipated NPC code A-Life 2.0 (which is busted, but there) were due to a marketing guy going rogue
Stalker 2 is out, and while I'm not exactly a big Stalker-head like our own Joshua Wolens, who gave it a 83 in his Stalker 2 review, I do know one thing about it through sheer cultural osmosis. The Stalker games are kind of jank, sometimes—and it's a part of their character, like how a whiskey takes on the flavour of the barrel. Except in this case, the barrel is glitched halfway through the floor.
One of the things its predecessor was lauded for, aside from a charmingly janky personality, was its A-Life system. This is a fancy term which, boiled down, essentially means that developers GSC nailed a sense of cause and effect with its NPC AI—something our Josh praises in his review when a pack of wild dogs run headfirst into an objective, and the game permits them to simply solve the military checkpoint for him.
As the devs mentioned late last month, A-Life 2.0 is still definitely in Stalker 2, it's just busted right now. But the bugs, combined with the sudden removal of A-Life's mention from the Steam page prompted a flurry of conspiracy theories, particularly on the game's subreddit. The idea being that GSC had simply abandoned the feature entirely. Turns out, it was just because some marketing guy got a little big for his boots at the worst possible moment.
That's according to creative director Maria Grygorovych, who spoke to IGN about the drama in an interview during a BAFTA event. The author of the blunder, according to Grygorovych, snipped the mention of A-Life from the Steam page because «there will be a lot of new players who don’t know what A-Life is.»
Grygorovych maintains that «he did that without any discussion or permission. 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.»
Which, if you're elbow-deep in a corkboard, might sound like a flimsy excuse—but in fairness,
Read more on pcgamer.com
