Stalker 2 devs reveal broken A-Life system caused by aggressive optimisation, but promise they’re trying to fix it

The release of Stalker 2 has been extremely mixed with some very high reviews—including ours—as well as very negative ones. Amidst the game’s bugs and story issues, the biggest point of contention is its broken A-Life system which was highly advertised before launch.

While developer GSC Game World has promised the A-Life AI system will be fixed in future updates, the team has finally revealed why the living, breathing world has released in a botched state. As it turns out, aggressive optimisation prior to launch completely broke the game’s AI system, and it will require a lot of resources to fix.

Stalker 2 devs reveal why A-Life is broken

In an interview with IGN following a London screening of the brilliant documentary War Games: The Making of Stalker 2 (embedded below), CEO Ievgen Grygorovych and creative director Maria Grygorovych discussed why the AI system is so broken.

Talking to the outlet, the developers revealed that aggressive optimisation for both PC and console ended up creating tonnes of bugs shortly before launch. Without time to fix the issues before release day, the game has launched with a key component in a completely ruined state.

“This system to work properly requires a much larger area for spawn NPCs, and it requires much more memory resources,” Ievgen explained. “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.”

Ievgen explained that this optimisation caused AI to spawn “in the air” as well as forcing AI to spawn in very close proximity to fans. Ievgen admitted the current system is “very broken and not working”, but promised that the team is bringing “more resources” to fix A-Life simulation in future patches.

“For now, we committed to players to make it work,” Ieygen said. “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.”

Why was A-Life was removed from the game’s Steam page?

Prior to launch, the Stalker 2 Steam Page removed all mention of the A-Life AI system. Many fans assumed that this move was due to the game’s broken AI system, but creative director Maria Grygorovych revealed that isn’t the case.

Instead, the move was made by someone on the game on the marketing team without any approval and without knowing the system was broken. However, GSC Game World will not add the AI system’s name back into the game’s Steam page until it’s fixed. Speaking to IGN, Grygorovych even showed screenshots of company chats to prove the situation was entirely unrelated to the system’s broken state.

“We have relationships with our players and players wanted to see something. We have to do it for them,” the creative director explained.

Stalker 2 may be in a broken state, but it’s still an incredibly fun survival game. For more news on the new game, read about the modders trying to fix A-Life or the mod that removes one of the game’s biggest annoyances. Stalker 2 is available right now on PC and Xbox Series consoles.