gamingbolt.com
Weve discussed GSC Game Worlds S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl a lot, both before and after launch. As the sequel to the beloved sandbox shooter franchise, which was first announced back in 2010 before being cancelled and re-announced in 2018, its been a long time coming with reasonable amounts of hype.Returning to the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone and immersing in the Anomaly-filled region, interacting with other Stalkers, fending off mutants, and uncovering mysteries felt like a long time coming. That it looked so good and offered substantial improvements over the older games was also exciting.However, the technical aspects have left something to be desired, though. Even after the launch with patches, there are still several bugs and performance issues. When the experience works, its an engaging affair, thats as oppressive as it is immersive. Seeing the Zone come to life like this, whether its the weather rolling in during a firefight or invisible mutants silently hunting before striking, is an incredible experience for fans, story be damned.However, when it doesnt work and makes fans question whether a feature is even working properly (or not), then there are some big problems, and nowhere is this more apparent than with A-Life 2.0.A-Life, for those who havent played any of the previous S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, is a system that affects the AI in the Zone. Non-playable characters arent just presenting detailed actions in front of the player they also have schedules and effectively exist even if you cant see them. As lead programmer and creator Dmitriy Iassenev explained in 2008 to AiGameDev, its like they have their own lives.You can essentially divide the system into two layers online and offline. The former dictates everything thats happening in front of or around the player, while the latter is whats simulated in the background when the player isnt nearby. NPCs and enemies will then switch between these layers within proximity of the player.Its a staple of the older titles and what effectively made them so dynamic. Even if you played through before, theres no guarantee that the same events will transpire, thus adding to the replay value. With S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, GSC Game World promised a reimagining of sorts. The reimagined version of this system, which we call A-Life 2.0, will control the state of the world and the behavior of characters and mutants, making the Zone ever-changing and truly alive. Countless events and encounters will happen every moment even if you are not around to witness them with your own eyes, it said.The FAQ also called it a simulation system for life in the Zone. Factions and mutants are fighting for living space, migrating, capturing new places, or retreating to safer areas. A-Life is what makes Zone truly alive and unpredictable. On the surface, it sounds like the evolution of a beloved system integral to the identity of the series as a whole.The good news? Its not missing by any means. The bad news? It doesnt currently work. At least, not like its supposed to.Post-launch, some players reported the AI scripting as being underwhelming. Theres even a clip of NPCs spawning out of thin air (and even behind the player) as theyre killed in rapid succession. Reports of GSC Game World removing mentions of A-Life 2.0 on the games Steam page also didnt help, though its still very much included in the FAQ on the games official site.However, the development team seemingly noted spawning issues with A-Life in the day one patch. The teams community manager would subsequently confirm that the system isnt working as intended. It will have updates coming up to make it really feel like A-Life 2.0, but unfortunately, it will take longer than expected. The recent patch notes confirmed the issues plaguing the system will take a bit longer to resolve.How long exactly? The same community manager didnt have a timeline, only commenting on Discord that it would be addressed in future updates.While GSC Game World hasnt gone into the nitty gritty outlining everything wrong with the current system, a modder named ConnerRia, who created the Roadside Panic mod to restore A-Life to the Zone, did offer some explanation. They noted that the AI director is adversely affected due to severe bugs compounding each other. The AlifeGridVisionRadius is allegedly quite low (about 80 meters), which means characters effectively dont exist outside of it.But what about the offline layer? Apparently, its not even working. As the modder notes, The offline A-Life of the past games no longer exists. The Director in this game has its own system to manage offline events outside the bubble range. Except this kind of flat out does not work. While Roadside Panic attempts to restore it, its very performance-heavy and can result in NPCs with quests outright disappearing or towns becoming empty, necessitating a reload. The modder notes, This is a stopgap measure until GSC fixes the underlying bugs with the AI Director, or A-Life 2.0. Try at your own risk and all that jazz.In a recent interview with IGN, GSC CEO Ievgen Grygorovych and creative director Maria Grygorovych offered more details on issues with A-Life 2.0 and why it ended up the way it did. The former confirmed that the distance around which the system should function had to be limited to optimize performance.To work properly, this system requires a much larger area for spawn NPCs and much more memory resources. 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.But to make it work, we had to optimize some things, and they make A-Life work in many situations in ways that it shouldnt. 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 dont know! Also, we had some bugs with AI behavior.So, all these things connected make it look like its very broken and not working. But we are now working on the optimization part to bring more resources for the A-Life system and 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. When the player reaches some distance, they go to online mode and pop back up. The distance is dictated by our optimization range, where we stream the real world and the non-real world with all the collisions. It was tough work, and because of these optimization problems and bugs, its become broken.However, the development team is committed to fixing A-Life 2.0 with optimization, squashing bugs, and giving more resources. Its also working to make it more advanced, though, once again, theres no ETA for all of this.Shipping a product with such a major feature in shambles would rightfully result in a fair amount of ire. Look no further than Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, which is suffering its own fair share of issues, not the least of which includes heavier reliance on cloud-based streaming of content. You could even point out how two out of three big console exclusives for Microsoft this season are buggy affairs and use that to criticize the publishers state of affairs.However, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2s situation is different, not just because the studio is independent but purely due to the hardship its endured after Russia invaded Ukraine (with some development team members even joining the fight). Then theres the fact that its faced cyberattacks, resulting in its test builds leaking and causing further strife. Its a brutal affair all around, and developing a video game in those circumstances, let alone one of this magnitude, seems straight-up impossible. GSC Game World pulled it off though, and deserves all the credit.Nevertheless, there is a school of thought which, though understanding the developers predicament, still points out that this is a full-priced game. Bugs and polish issues are one thing, but when an essential feature hyped for so long doesnt work, its not a good look. Then again, even if it took an extra week to fix the bugs and launch a more stable product, A-Life 2.0 would still be in shambles.Also, without the feedback that a wider player base can offer, GSC Game World may not have even caught on to how extensive the problems really were. And you would best believe that no one wants the system to work as intended as much as the team that created it.Its effectively a no-win situation for everyone involved. The only thing to be done is for players to effectively point out the issues and wait for the development team to fix them. Nothing more and nothing less.
