STALKER 2 developer reveals that A-Life 2.0 was cut down due to performance concerns

In a twist that should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone playing STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl right now, GSC Game World has admitted that it nerfed A-Life 2.0 ahead of release. This was done, as GSC claims, due to performance concerns, and it’s a believable argument for sure.

This information is the first time GSC Game World has officially commented on the status of A-Life 2.0 in STALKER 2, short of acknowledging the fact that it’s broken beyond belief. It comes from a recent interview with IGN, where studio heads Maria and Ievgen Grygorovych went in-depth on their reasoning for cutting the feature down.

“We were fighting with optimization,” said Ievgen. “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.” There is, certainly, much to discuss when it comes to reasonable management of game performance when you’re talking about cutting out beloved, experience-defining features.

A-Life 2.0 was massively ‘nerfed’ in STALKER 2 because it came at a huge performance cost

To be frank, Ievgen Grygorovich’s explanation does make sense in light of what modders have discovered about A-Life. “[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,” he explains. “Why it happened, I don’t know! And also we had some bugs with AI behavior.”

English obviously isn’t Ievgen’s first language, but I feel that his message comes through quite clearly. As many of us have suspected all along, A-Life 2.0 was truncated and cut down in STALKER 2 on launch day. In fact, had modders not been toying with the feature from day one only to find ways to re-enable it, warts and all, I’d have more doubts about what GSC is claiming here. As it stands, though, A-Life 2.0 is obviously a thing. A broken, useless thing that can be tricked back into sort of working if you install a particular set of mods.

“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,” Ievgen continued. What’s really important here is that he took the time to explicitly define what “A-Life” is for GSC: “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.”

The objective of A-Life (or A-Life 2.0, as it were) hasn’t changed from the days of STALKER, then. It’s just going to achieve its goals in a different, slightly roundabout way. I will say that the mod I mentioned above has kicked STALKER 2 back into high gear very quickly. With it, active squads spawn hundreds of meters away from me. Sometimes, they just roam about to and fro. Other times, they’ll interact with other (friendly or hostile) Stalkers and even mutants. POI takeovers are common, among many other non-scripted and organic encounters. GSC needs to bring this back into the base game, and they do need to be quick about it for a large portion of the community to come back.

GSC Game World claims the removal of references to A-Life 2.0 on Steam was accidental

On a similar note, GSC also used the IGN interview as an opportunity to chime in on why any and all references to A-Life 2.0 was purged from STALKER 2‘s Steam page ahead of the game’s release.

As per Maria Grygorovich’s claims, “[a member of the marketing team told her] 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. 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.”

IGN’s interviewer, Wesley Yin-Poole claims that Maria went so far as to pull out an intra-company message specifically referencing the discussions she described in her comment. This does help the veracity of GSC’s argument, but it doesn’t help the current state of the game at all.

Thankfully, patches are coming, and if I’m being totally honest, STALKER 2 is a pretty special game regardless. Heck, even the person responsible for the creation of Dishonored and Prey thinks so, going so far as to bill STALKER 2 as his personal GOTY for 2024. If you’re on the fence over the brokenness of A-Life, steer clear of STALKER 2 for the time being, or be prepared to mod it. Do circle back to it in due time, however.