Stalker 2 Dev Explains 'Optimisation' Issues That Led To Buggy Xbox & PC Launch

Stalker 2 has been making many players very happy over the past couple of weeks despite launching with an array of bugs at launch, but the developer clearly knows there's much work to be done over the next few weeks and months.

One of the issues that's come to the forefront is the apparent lack of a working 'A-Life 2.0' system — our review noted that it was "absolutely 100% missing in action" at launch — and now one of the game's developers has addressed it.

Speaking to IGN, GSC Game World CEO Ievgen Grygorovych revealed that A-Life 2.0 is definitely in Stalker 2 as things stand right now, but optimisation issues prior to release caused it to become bugged and stop working properly.

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Firstly, here's how GSC describes A-Life 2.0 - this is what it's meant to achieve in Stalker 2:

"Often, the game world exists only in the player's field of view. A-Life 2.0 is 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 the Zone truly alive and unpredictable."

And now, here's a bit of what Ievgen Grygorovych had to say about why it didn't work at launch:

“This system to work properly requires a much larger area for spawn NPCs, and it requires much more memory resources. We were fighting with optimisation. To optimise, you have a lot of things that need your resources, and you try to cut things from different directions to properly optimise the game well."

“But to make it work we had to optimise 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."

Ievgen went on to explain that the team is working on further optimisation to "bring more resources for the A-Life system", promising that it'll be fully fixed at some point - and it may even become more "advanced" than was intended.

There's no timeframe on that for now, but we already know that Stalker 2 will be implementing more hotfixes and larger updates in the near future across Xbox and PC, along with a roadmap of content that looks set to arrive at some point later this month. Regardless of whether you're enjoying the game or not, it should only get better from now on!

What have your experiences been like with A-Life 2.0 in Stalker 2? Tell us in the comments section below.

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