Stalker 2 devs say the scrubbed mentions of anticipated NPC code A-Life 2.0 (which is busted, but there) were due to a marketing guy going rogue
Stalker 2 is out, and while I'm not exactly a big Stalker-head like our own Joshua Wolens, who gave it a 83 in his Stalker 2 review, I do know one thing about it through sheer cultural osmosis. The Stalker games are kind of jank, sometimes—and it's a part of their character, like how a whiskey takes on the flavour of the barrel. Except in this case, the barrel is glitched halfway through the floor.
One of the things its predecessor was lauded for, aside from a charmingly janky personality, was its A-Life system. This is a fancy term which, boiled down, essentially means that developers GSC nailed a sense of cause and effect with its NPC AI—something our Josh praises in his review when a pack of wild dogs run headfirst into an objective, and the game permits them to simply solve the military checkpoint for him.
As the devs mentioned late last month, A-Life 2.0 is still definitely in Stalker 2, it's just busted right now. But the bugs, combined with the sudden removal of A-Life's mention from the Steam page prompted a flurry of conspiracy theories, particularly on the game's subreddit. The idea being that GSC had simply abandoned the feature entirely. Turns out, it was just because some marketing guy got a little big for his boots at the worst possible moment.
That's according to creative director Maria Grygorovych, who spoke to IGN about the drama in an interview during a BAFTA event. The author of the blunder, according to Grygorovych, snipped the mention of A-Life from the Steam page because "there will be a lot of new players who don’t know what A-Life is."
Grygorovych maintains that "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."
Which, if you're elbow-deep in a corkboard, might sound like a flimsy excuse—but in fairness, let's apply our trusty Occam's Razor to this whole debacle. What's more likely, that GSC, a studio already wrestling with an infamously hard-to-code game under significant duress, worked on an AI system for years only to scrap it at the last minute and shove a different AI code that they got from… somewhere, into their game? Or that GSC is being GSC, and wrestling with the same jank fans know and love/loathe.
Still, she admits it sounds like a tall tale: "People think it looks like it’s connected to us releasing the game with broken A-Life. But it’s not." IGN reports that Grygorovych then proceeded to show their interviewer a phone exchange that proves her innocence, presumably before the drama made it to the ears of the general public.
As for why it's not back on the page now, Grygorovych says it's a matter of principle. While A-Life 2.0 is there, it's in enough of a state that it can't really be considered a selling point, so the team's not going to let it be one until it's fixed. "We have a relationship with our players and players wanted to see something. We have to do it for them."