Thick Thighs Save Lives
NeoGAF's Physical Games Advocate Extraordinaire
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 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.
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."
