S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl

[adddeed]

Not being able to replicate a feature from a nearly 20 year old game on a modern engine due to technical limitations is pretty pathetic. I think this is the most palpable example of nothing but graphics tech being improved over time. The question is whether the fault is on the side of devs, or the engine itself.

Its baffling really. Physics, AI, sound are last priority these days. 20 years ago developers were pushing the limits with these.

 

[v1c70r14]

Dial back the revisionism here lads. SHOC was absolutely considered a good-looking game in 2007 and was used to benchmark graphics cards.

And it still has great art style, but technically speaking I don't think the game's graphics were at the top of the competition on release. However, Clear Sky (that came out in 2008) is a major increase in technical quality, while still retaining the atmosphere of SoC: https://cs.stalker-game.com/en/?page=screens so it's not like you must sacrifice style just because technical quality increases.

2007 was the year of Crysis and the very tail-end of PC-first games, at that point studios were just about to, or had began to start their shift away to consoles. The light system does compare favorably to Bioshock (Unreal Engine game) of the same year. FEAR was released back in 2005 and even in 2007 it held up well enough for the stand-alone expansion pack Perseus Mandate to be released. It's kind of hard to compare SoC to other games since the game itself can be pretty uneven and it did things other games didn't, like the very big open levels, and some amount of simulation, it wouldn't be fair to compare it to a movie game like Metal Gear Solid IV that came out the next year for example. I can't think of many other games of that vintage that were pushing the PC hardware more other than Crysis.

You're right about Clear Sky being more of a benchmark game though, I think it must have been some part of a big investment in the Eastern European games industry by Nvidia at the time, because not only was Clear Sky a game that partly served as a tech demo for graphics cards, but the same year you also got Cryostasis showcasing PhysX, with even more impressive effects, like frost melting, water physics, and more.





After that consoles dominated the industry up until very recently, more or less. The sequel to Cryisis, the benchmark PC game was developed with consoles primarily in mind. The Witcher, which also came out in 2007, had a console focused sequel. FEAR 2 was a console-first game. Metro 2033 was a more console friendly and cinematic version of STALKER's underground areas, without any attempts at large simulations or overly large maps it was much more polished, and more consistent both in content and graphics.

 

[Mortmal]

While the release of Stalker 2 was clearly rushed and unfinished, lacking features and serious polish, a similar situation can be observed with Flight Simulator 2024. The latter is disappointing, plagued by lag, an over-reliance on cloud storage instead of local storage—a baffling decision by higher-ups—and an overall lack of refinement.
Both titles being available on Game Pass helps mitigate some of the damage, but I can’t help but feel for those who might be enamored by the legacy of Stalker or the prestige of Flight Simulator and opt to spend €100 on a deluxe edition—or even €140 for the premium version of Flight Simulator 2024. These players are bound to feel disgruntled with the state of these games at launch.

 

[TheDarkUrge]

Finished the game. I rate it 7.5/10

No random events/squads basically at all makes running between POIs very boring. The characters in this game felt way more interesting than the originals. The consoles removed a lot of features the old games had, but at the same time the bigger budget allowed to do a really thorough job with the map and tons of nice scripted events. I think I would recommend waiting a year to see if mods and patches from the devs can make this game an 8.5/10. There's a solid base but it feels just unfinished.

How did consoles remove features from the originals? The original series is now on consoles - including Switch, the weakest of them all.

The switch came out ~8 years after SoC so it's not surprising it can run it. I just think the current generation of console hardware couldn't handle roaming enemies in UE5 so they cut it and will maybe fix it for us later. Or let modders do it. Even mid tier pc's have some problems running the game. I hope GSC or modders can get it fixed because I really enjoyed using my binoculars to scout around in the originals and playing carefully, but right now there's never anything far away from you. As a story game like Metro it's good, but as a free-play experience it's quite weak. Once you run out of sidequests it will probably feel quite boring even though I thought all the side quests I've done have been great.

 

[mondblut]

being on console doesn't mean being consolized. morrowind ran on xbox too. before the dark age of dumbing downs.

Daggerfall had flight, morrowind did not. Why? Maybe because xbawks gamepad run out of buttons?

 

[catfood]

being on console doesn't mean being consolized. morrowind ran on xbox too. before the dark age of dumbing downs.

Daggerfall had flight, morrowind did not. Why? Maybe because xbawks gamepad run out of buttons?

Morrowind had flight. Take your alzheimer pills boomer.

 

[mondblut]

Morrowind had flight. Take your alzheimer pills boomer.

It had slow walking on the air. Not even up and down buttons.

In Daggerfall, we could fly on a fucking horse-drawn carriage like a Santa Claus raining death.

 

[ArchAngel]

Found some new enemies yesterday. Snorks were first, they are more irritating version of the blind dogs as they take longer to die.
Then I fought some mutant Elk which summoned armies of other mutated animals, that took a few tries as multiple enemies like to knock you down and I brought a wrong weapon for that fight.

Then in open field I was "ambushed" by Zombies (didn't look like a standard spawn) and after I killed them suddenly phantom soldiers started spawning. After I killed 3-4 and they disappeared after I tried to take their loot I decided to leg it since I could not see anything to kill that could cause such things. I think maybe Controllers can do that but there were none around so maybe something similar but also invisible?!

 

[Iucounu]

Finished the game. I rate it 7.5/10

No random events/squads basically at all makes running between POIs very boring. The characters in this game felt way more interesting than the originals. The consoles removed a lot of features the old games had, but at the same time the bigger budget allowed to do a really thorough job with the map and tons of nice scripted events. I think I would recommend waiting a year to see if mods and patches from the devs can make this game an 8.5/10. There's a solid base but it feels just unfinished.

How did consoles remove features from the originals? The original series is now on consoles - including Switch, the weakest of them all.

Does A-Life in SoC and CS work in the console versions?

 

[Gerrard]

Found some new enemies yesterday. Snorks were first, they are more irritating version of the blind dogs as they take longer to die.
Then I fought some mutant Elk which summoned armies of other mutated animals, that took a few tries as multiple enemies like to knock you down and I brought a wrong weapon for that fight.

Then in open field I was "ambushed" by Zombies (didn't look like a standard spawn) and after I killed them suddenly phantom soldiers started spawning. After I killed 3-4 and they disappeared after I tried to take their loot I decided to leg it since I could not see anything to kill that could cause such things. I think maybe Controllers can do that but there were none around so maybe something similar but also invisible?!

Any psi field can cause the illusions to appear. The new psi radiation effects are schizo kino, but the illusions dealing real physical damage to you is kind of retarded.

 

[soutaiseiriron]

Does A-Life in SoC and CS work in the console versions?

why would you assume that a-life wouldnt work on 2012-2013 hardware when the games came out between 2007 to 2009?

 

[Iucounu]

Does A-Life in SoC and CS work in the console versions?

why would you assume that a-life wouldnt work on 2012-2013 hardware when the games came out between 2007 to 2009?

I was thinking maybe removing it would make it easier to port the games to console, though I don't see exactly why that would be the case.

 

[Perkel]

Not being able to replicate a feature from a nearly 20 year old game on a modern engine due to technical limitations is pretty pathetic. I think this is the most palpable example of nothing but graphics tech being improved over time. The question is whether the fault is on the side of devs, or the engine itself.

UE5 by alone doesn't have any simulation bit to catter to stuff like A-life. And in such huge engine it is actually hard to add anything without making huge issue with how fast it runs.

I think that the obvious "just use off the shelf engine" mantra for past 10 years is now rearing its problems. The idea behind that mantra was that with all devs using same engien it would be easier to develop as problems/bugs etc would be shared across all games and thus fixed faster. Same with feature developement etc. There were many other benefits like talent pool not needed to train for use of inhouse engine, easier to train newbs etc.

Problem is that this worked with something like UE3 because engine itself was simple. You could take out rendering part of it and leave rest without much trouble and plop your own rendering, networking or whatever. Sure there was cost to it but games aren't shoes some games require custom bits.

This is not the case with UE5 and in general with modern game making. Everything seems to be connected. Want to introduce some new effect that would be morphing texture around into an object or some other custom shit ? Well your game runs Nanite now, so you have to build around it or inside of that paradigm. No support for that ? Well, you can skip it then. Because you won't be making Nanite+ to support that and debug it.

The ground character is walking on ? Want to do some offline simulation and spawn stuff. Well now our LOD is completely dynamic and there isn't a way to spawn stuff easily and connect it with physics...

Then there is the final problem. Engine for everything is engine for nothing. RE engine is best example of that. It was darling of every engine maker ever. Superb performance all around, superb graphics and so on. Until you want to make open world game in it and suddenly that performance goes down the drain and you can't make it look good oh and btw if you have 10 npcs on screen and open world then good luck because your CPU will fry.

It's literally the same thing huge business software is struggling with, overcomplication and technical debt. The problem is that business software can be used literally for decades while game even live service ones can live at max 10 years and needs to be replaced with something else.

 

[ferratilis]

Fishy, but ok.
https://www.ign.com/articles/stalke...s-removed-from-the-games-description-on-steam

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​

Quick to market.​

By Wesley Yin-Poole

Updated: Dec 3, 2024 1:30 pm

Posted: Dec 3, 2024 12:13 pm


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 director Maria Grygorovych offer an explanation during our interview, which takes place at BAFTA in Piccadilly, London following a screening of War Game: The Making of Stalker 2. The 90-minute documentary, which includes interviews with GSC’s Ukrainian staff as they contend with the invasion, reveals the remarkable circumstances surrounding the extremely difficult development of Stalker 2.
It’s with this in mind that Ievgen and Maria explain what went wrong with A-Life 2.0, revealing for the first time how the studio's battle to optimize the performance of Stalker 2 in the months before release caused the feature to break down. A-Life 2.0 is in Stalker 2, the pair insist, it’s just bugged. Massively bugged.
Ievgen and Maria Grygorovych, far right, discuss the making of Stalker 2 at BAFTA 195 Piccadilly. Photo by IGN.
Ievgen offers a technical explanation of what happened. In short, optimization issues ahead of launch forced GSC to shrink the area around the player in which A-Life 2.0 works. It is supposed to extend much farther in virtual distance terms than it currently does, but to get Stalker 2 into a decent place performance wise across PC and Xbox Series X and S, the developers had to reduce this distance. Then came the bugs on top.
“This system to work properly requires a much larger area for spawn NPCs, and it requires much more memory resources," Ievgen says in English, which isn't his first language. "We were fighting with optimization. To optimize, you have a lot of things that need your resources, and you try to cut things from different directions to properly optimize the game well.
“But to make it work we had to optimize some things, and they make A-Life work in many situations not as it should. 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 behavior.
“So, all these things connected make it look like it's very broken and not working. 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.
“There are NPCs outside of the range of the player and they are in offline mode. And when the player reaches some distance, they are going to online mode and they pop back up. The distance is dictated by our optimization range, where we stream the real world and not real world with all the collisions. It was tough work, and because of these optimization problems and bugs, it's become broken.”
OK, so now we know what went wrong with A-Life 2.0. The question is, can GSC fix it? Or, can it get A-Life 2.0 into a place where it realizes the developer’s ambition and makes good on that initial promise? Absolutely, Ievgen and Maria insist. In fact that’s exactly what the developer is working on now.
“For now we committed to players to make it work and it can be done from directions both optimizing, giving more resources to A-Life, fixing bugs, making it work properly, and then putting more efforts to make it more advanced,” Ievgen says.
All this brings us nicely back to A-Life 2.0’s mysterious disappearance from Stalker 2’s Steam page upon the game’s release. Its original description, which mentioned A-Life 2.0 by name alongside promises about how game-changing it would be, was removed and replaced by another description that fails to mention A-Life 2.0 at all. "Advanced artificial intelligence systems that will keep engaged even the most hard-boiled players,” it now reads. That’s not particularly exciting to fans, who are at best worried about the future of A-Life 2.0, at worst accusing GSC of misleading them.
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.

“
Maria tells me someone on GSC’s marketing team took it upon themselves to change the A-Life 2.0 description to make it easier to understand. The thinking, apparently, was that Stalker newcomers wouldn't have a clue what A-Life meant and might dismiss it. But this marketing person didn’t run the change by Maria first before pushing it live.
“He told me there will be a lot of new players who don’t know what A-Life is,” Maria says. “They need to understand what we’re talking about in this description. So I will try to change it to a more understandable form. 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. We did the Steam page in 2021. So for me, I was shocked, honestly.”
Maria admits her explanation of events might sound unconvincing or suspicious, and suggests I probably don’t believe a word she’s saying. “People think it looks like it’s connected to us releasing the game with broken A-Life,” she says. “But it’s not. Even now, I’m talking about it to you, and you’re thinking, 'Hmm, yeah, yeah, it was some guy in the marketing team.' I understand it sounds suspicious!”
So she pulls out her phone and scrolls for a bit before showing me a screenshot of the inter-company message proving she was telling the truth about this marketing person changing the Steam page without her knowledge. I tell her I believed her anyway, but she insists on showing me her phone screen and yep, it’s there, in black and white.
So, will GSC put that A-Life 2.0 description back on Stalker 2’s Steam page? Not until the feature itself is fixed, Maria insists. But there’s no timeframe for that, and it’s hard to push for one given half the development team is still working in Ukraine and faces week-long power cuts that blanket the country in darkness and cut off internet access.
"We have a relationship with our players and players wanted to see something," Maria says. "We have to do it for them."
To help you survive in the Zone, we've got a list of Essential Stalker 2 Tips and Tricks, plus a guide on Things to Do First in Stalker 2 to help you through the early game, and Things Stalker 2 Doesn't Tell You - everything we wish we knew before we started playing. Save time scouring the wasteland with our Artifacts checklist and locations guide, and every Stash location we've found so far.

 

[Cyberarmy]

being on console doesn't mean being consolized. morrowind ran on xbox too. before the dark age of dumbing downs.

Daggerfall had flight, morrowind did not. Why? Maybe because xbawks gamepad run out of buttons?

 

[mondblut]

Nice try, but jumping is not controlled flight.

 

[Terenty]

Fishy, but ok.
https://www.ign.com/articles/stalke...s-removed-from-the-games-description-on-steam

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​

Quick to market.​

By Wesley Yin-Poole

Updated: Dec 3, 2024 1:30 pm

Posted: Dec 3, 2024 12:13 pm


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 director Maria Grygorovych offer an explanation during our interview, which takes place at BAFTA in Piccadilly, London following a screening of War Game: The Making of Stalker 2. The 90-minute documentary, which includes interviews with GSC’s Ukrainian staff as they contend with the invasion, reveals the remarkable circumstances surrounding the extremely difficult development of Stalker 2.
It’s with this in mind that Ievgen and Maria explain what went wrong with A-Life 2.0, revealing for the first time how the studio's battle to optimize the performance of Stalker 2 in the months before release caused the feature to break down. A-Life 2.0 is in Stalker 2, the pair insist, it’s just bugged. Massively bugged.
Ievgen and Maria Grygorovych, far right, discuss the making of Stalker 2 at BAFTA 195 Piccadilly. Photo by IGN.
Ievgen offers a technical explanation of what happened. In short, optimization issues ahead of launch forced GSC to shrink the area around the player in which A-Life 2.0 works. It is supposed to extend much farther in virtual distance terms than it currently does, but to get Stalker 2 into a decent place performance wise across PC and Xbox Series X and S, the developers had to reduce this distance. Then came the bugs on top.
“This system to work properly requires a much larger area for spawn NPCs, and it requires much more memory resources," Ievgen says in English, which isn't his first language. "We were fighting with optimization. To optimize, you have a lot of things that need your resources, and you try to cut things from different directions to properly optimize the game well.
“But to make it work we had to optimize some things, and they make A-Life work in many situations not as it should. 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 behavior.
“So, all these things connected make it look like it's very broken and not working. 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.
“There are NPCs outside of the range of the player and they are in offline mode. And when the player reaches some distance, they are going to online mode and they pop back up. The distance is dictated by our optimization range, where we stream the real world and not real world with all the collisions. It was tough work, and because of these optimization problems and bugs, it's become broken.”
OK, so now we know what went wrong with A-Life 2.0. The question is, can GSC fix it? Or, can it get A-Life 2.0 into a place where it realizes the developer’s ambition and makes good on that initial promise? Absolutely, Ievgen and Maria insist. In fact that’s exactly what the developer is working on now.
“For now we committed to players to make it work and it can be done from directions both optimizing, giving more resources to A-Life, fixing bugs, making it work properly, and then putting more efforts to make it more advanced,” Ievgen says.
All this brings us nicely back to A-Life 2.0’s mysterious disappearance from Stalker 2’s Steam page upon the game’s release. Its original description, which mentioned A-Life 2.0 by name alongside promises about how game-changing it would be, was removed and replaced by another description that fails to mention A-Life 2.0 at all. "Advanced artificial intelligence systems that will keep engaged even the most hard-boiled players,” it now reads. That’s not particularly exciting to fans, who are at best worried about the future of A-Life 2.0, at worst accusing GSC of misleading them.
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.

“
Maria tells me someone on GSC’s marketing team took it upon themselves to change the A-Life 2.0 description to make it easier to understand. The thinking, apparently, was that Stalker newcomers wouldn't have a clue what A-Life meant and might dismiss it. But this marketing person didn’t run the change by Maria first before pushing it live.
“He told me there will be a lot of new players who don’t know what A-Life is,” Maria says. “They need to understand what we’re talking about in this description. So I will try to change it to a more understandable form. 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. We did the Steam page in 2021. So for me, I was shocked, honestly.”
Maria admits her explanation of events might sound unconvincing or suspicious, and suggests I probably don’t believe a word she’s saying. “People think it looks like it’s connected to us releasing the game with broken A-Life,” she says. “But it’s not. Even now, I’m talking about it to you, and you’re thinking, 'Hmm, yeah, yeah, it was some guy in the marketing team.' I understand it sounds suspicious!”
So she pulls out her phone and scrolls for a bit before showing me a screenshot of the inter-company message proving she was telling the truth about this marketing person changing the Steam page without her knowledge. I tell her I believed her anyway, but she insists on showing me her phone screen and yep, it’s there, in black and white.
So, will GSC put that A-Life 2.0 description back on Stalker 2’s Steam page? Not until the feature itself is fixed, Maria insists. But there’s no timeframe for that, and it’s hard to push for one given half the development team is still working in Ukraine and faces week-long power cuts that blanket the country in darkness and cut off internet access.
"We have a relationship with our players and players wanted to see something," Maria says. "We have to do it for them."
To help you survive in the Zone, we've got a list of Essential Stalker 2 Tips and Tricks, plus a guide on Things to Do First in Stalker 2 to help you through the early game, and Things Stalker 2 Doesn't Tell You - everything we wish we knew before we started playing. Save time scouring the wasteland with our Artifacts checklist and locations guide, and every Stash location we've found so far.

So they just admitted to fraud and false advertising ala Cyberpunk.

Sheeple will gobble and ask for more. Sheeple deserve this kind of treatment

 

[Baron Dupek]

You mean - the game that runs far from perfect (read - like shit) on top shelves PCs is blocking notable feature that makes game playable even years later without mods?
i don't even

 

[ArchAngel]

Fishy, but ok.
https://www.ign.com/articles/stalke...s-removed-from-the-games-description-on-steam

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​

Quick to market.​

By Wesley Yin-Poole

Updated: Dec 3, 2024 1:30 pm

Posted: Dec 3, 2024 12:13 pm


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 director Maria Grygorovych offer an explanation during our interview, which takes place at BAFTA in Piccadilly, London following a screening of War Game: The Making of Stalker 2. The 90-minute documentary, which includes interviews with GSC’s Ukrainian staff as they contend with the invasion, reveals the remarkable circumstances surrounding the extremely difficult development of Stalker 2.
It’s with this in mind that Ievgen and Maria explain what went wrong with A-Life 2.0, revealing for the first time how the studio's battle to optimize the performance of Stalker 2 in the months before release caused the feature to break down. A-Life 2.0 is in Stalker 2, the pair insist, it’s just bugged. Massively bugged.
Ievgen and Maria Grygorovych, far right, discuss the making of Stalker 2 at BAFTA 195 Piccadilly. Photo by IGN.
Ievgen offers a technical explanation of what happened. In short, optimization issues ahead of launch forced GSC to shrink the area around the player in which A-Life 2.0 works. It is supposed to extend much farther in virtual distance terms than it currently does, but to get Stalker 2 into a decent place performance wise across PC and Xbox Series X and S, the developers had to reduce this distance. Then came the bugs on top.
“This system to work properly requires a much larger area for spawn NPCs, and it requires much more memory resources," Ievgen says in English, which isn't his first language. "We were fighting with optimization. To optimize, you have a lot of things that need your resources, and you try to cut things from different directions to properly optimize the game well.
“But to make it work we had to optimize some things, and they make A-Life work in many situations not as it should. 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 behavior.
“So, all these things connected make it look like it's very broken and not working. 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.
“There are NPCs outside of the range of the player and they are in offline mode. And when the player reaches some distance, they are going to online mode and they pop back up. The distance is dictated by our optimization range, where we stream the real world and not real world with all the collisions. It was tough work, and because of these optimization problems and bugs, it's become broken.”
OK, so now we know what went wrong with A-Life 2.0. The question is, can GSC fix it? Or, can it get A-Life 2.0 into a place where it realizes the developer’s ambition and makes good on that initial promise? Absolutely, Ievgen and Maria insist. In fact that’s exactly what the developer is working on now.
“For now we committed to players to make it work and it can be done from directions both optimizing, giving more resources to A-Life, fixing bugs, making it work properly, and then putting more efforts to make it more advanced,” Ievgen says.
All this brings us nicely back to A-Life 2.0’s mysterious disappearance from Stalker 2’s Steam page upon the game’s release. Its original description, which mentioned A-Life 2.0 by name alongside promises about how game-changing it would be, was removed and replaced by another description that fails to mention A-Life 2.0 at all. "Advanced artificial intelligence systems that will keep engaged even the most hard-boiled players,” it now reads. That’s not particularly exciting to fans, who are at best worried about the future of A-Life 2.0, at worst accusing GSC of misleading them.
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.

“
Maria tells me someone on GSC’s marketing team took it upon themselves to change the A-Life 2.0 description to make it easier to understand. The thinking, apparently, was that Stalker newcomers wouldn't have a clue what A-Life meant and might dismiss it. But this marketing person didn’t run the change by Maria first before pushing it live.
“He told me there will be a lot of new players who don’t know what A-Life is,” Maria says. “They need to understand what we’re talking about in this description. So I will try to change it to a more understandable form. 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. We did the Steam page in 2021. So for me, I was shocked, honestly.”
Maria admits her explanation of events might sound unconvincing or suspicious, and suggests I probably don’t believe a word she’s saying. “People think it looks like it’s connected to us releasing the game with broken A-Life,” she says. “But it’s not. Even now, I’m talking about it to you, and you’re thinking, 'Hmm, yeah, yeah, it was some guy in the marketing team.' I understand it sounds suspicious!”
So she pulls out her phone and scrolls for a bit before showing me a screenshot of the inter-company message proving she was telling the truth about this marketing person changing the Steam page without her knowledge. I tell her I believed her anyway, but she insists on showing me her phone screen and yep, it’s there, in black and white.
So, will GSC put that A-Life 2.0 description back on Stalker 2’s Steam page? Not until the feature itself is fixed, Maria insists. But there’s no timeframe for that, and it’s hard to push for one given half the development team is still working in Ukraine and faces week-long power cuts that blanket the country in darkness and cut off internet access.
"We have a relationship with our players and players wanted to see something," Maria says. "We have to do it for them."
To help you survive in the Zone, we've got a list of Essential Stalker 2 Tips and Tricks, plus a guide on Things to Do First in Stalker 2 to help you through the early game, and Things Stalker 2 Doesn't Tell You - everything we wish we knew before we started playing. Save time scouring the wasteland with our Artifacts checklist and locations guide, and every Stash location we've found so far.

This does not sound we will get something good anytime soon.. I hope at least in the meantime they can make spawning enemies spawn less often in same area that you are in. This shit is super irritating when stuff spawns every 5-10 minutes in some areas and every 30 minutes in others. Once you clear one area we need some peace to loot and find secrets, I do not want to fight new spawns every 5-10 minutes.

 

[ADL]

Even if this all comes back to optimization, "online simulation" should have been a performance slider and offline simulation should be enabled. How performance intense can offline A-Life honestly be?

 

[Perkel]

now this is a true sequel to stalker 1

Those who remember stalker1.0 didn't have a-life either and it was heavily criticized as they were touting this feature in previews showing how it works to journos who were selling living breathing world.
It was later delivered/enabled in patch after huge criticism.

 

[Odoryuk]

How performance intense can offline A-Life honestly be?

Tens of thousands of different parameteres could be changed and mutated with multiple algorithms over a single frame, it should not be an issue at all

 

[Perkel]

How performance intense can offline A-Life honestly be?

Tens of thousands of different parameteres could be changed and mutated with multiple algorithms over a single frame, it should not be an issue at all

And you don't need to even do that per frame. It could be easily done by per second basis.

 

[Odoryuk]

How performance intense can offline A-Life honestly be?

Tens of thousands of different parameteres could be changed and mutated with multiple algorithms over a single frame, it should not be an issue at all

And you don't need to even do that per frame. It could be easily done by per second basis.

True. But the most difficult part is making a system that feels interesting and plays interesting and gives new meaningful gameplay interactions

 

[Gerrard]

Even if this all comes back to optimization, "online simulation" should have been a performance slider and offline simulation should be enabled. How performance intense can offline A-Life honestly be?

It can't be, because the original games were single-threaded 32 bit applications that were limited to 4GB of RAM and they managed to do it. If you can't do it on a """modern engine""" this is just another example of the crisis of competence.