ThoughI’m deeply conflicted about how I feel aboutSTALKER 2, there’s no doubt in my mind that its current iteration of “A-Life,” if you could call it that, isnotwhat the developer GSC Game World originally envisioned. One particular modder agrees, and there’s hope on the horizon.
There are no two ways about it,STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobylcurrently does not have an active version of A-Life. I’ve already written atsignificantlength about A-Life in this franchise andits importance, and there’s simply not a chance that GSC Game World would’ve ignored the feature in favor of the plain old NPC spawner we currently have in the game. The pre-release interviews statethe developers’ intentionquite directly, and while some members of the community might feel otherwise, everything points to stuff being broken rather than deliberately taken out of the experience.
The person responsible for the curious Roadside Panic mod that kind-of-sort-of retrofitsSTALKER 2‘s creature spawner into something that resembles A-Life agrees with this assessment, too. In fact, they recently posted on Reddit explaining what they think is happening with the system behind the scenes and what they feel might happen with it in the future.
STALKER 2’s new A-Life 2.0 system is different from A-Life 1.0, also entirely broken
Obviously, the featured Reddit post is quite lengthy. I do recommend reading it through, but here’s the gist of it:
Given that the author of the featured Reddit post has taken quite a bit of time dissecting what little is available ofSTALKER 2‘s game files right now, as well as developing a mod that sort of alleviates the problem, there’s merit in their writing.
Now, to look at the situation from a viewpoint that’s less favorable of GSC Game World, it’s equally possible that A-Life as such was simply abandoned at some point in the past. The Director could, technically, emulate the various situations that the oldSTALKERtitles organically produced as you went. There’d be no persistence between the various regions of the Zone, granted, but the illusion also wouldn’t be outright ruined within hours of gameplay if it worked correctly.
The fact of the matter is that there’s no software development kit available forSTALKER 2just yet, and even though modders can tweak some things along via .pak files, this is just scratching the surface of the real deal. A-Life may well exist tucked away broken in some corner ofSTALKER 2, but we have no way of knowing for real until the SDK is available.
STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl‘s very first patch is now out, andit resolves a frankly astonishing number of problemsthe community has had with the game. A-Life improvements, such as they may be, won’t be coming for a while yet.
