STALKER 2’s A-Life is either broken or nonexistent

STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl is 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, though I have certainly tried my hand at explaining its importance. While GSC Game World hasn’t dedicated too much marketing time on discussing it, the team was quite clear in stating that A-Life was present and accounted for in STALKER 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 since STALKER 2 only seems to have an active NPC spawn range of about 100 meters or so, which is a wild thing to say about this franchise.

It’s still the early days, of course, but I’m extremely thankful that it didn’t take long for GSC Game World to 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-edge STALKER game would be frankly ridiculous.

Straight from the Tark’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 played STALKER since 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, given how confused players are on the game’s biggest subreddit.

There’s no ETA on the A-Life fix for STALKER 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-up it so clearly deserves.