IGN has published an in-depth article shedding light on the issues surrounding A-Life 2.0 in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl. The dynamic world simulation system reportedly broke down shortly before the game's release, prompting developers to remove mentions of it from Steam.
According to Evgeniy and Maria Grigorovich, A-Life 2.0 stopped functioning during optimization efforts a few months prior to launch. Originally designed to cover a vast area around the player, the system required significantly more memory in its initial form. Attempts to scale down its scope resulted in new bugs.
But to make it work we had to optimize 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.
The developers have promised to deliver on their commitment to A-Life 2.0. Further optimization of the game should free up the resources needed to expand the system's functionality.
The devs also clarified the removal of A-Life 2.0 from the game's Steam page. Just days before release, GSC replaced mentions of the system with a description of «advanced AI systems.» According to Maria Grigorovich, this was the work of a marketing team member who believed the term «A-Life» might confuse new players unfamiliar with it. Maria admitted that this explanation might sound unconvincing, but she shared internal chat logs with IGN to substantiate the claim.
He told me there will be a lot of new players who don't know what A-Life is. They need to understand what we're talking about in this description. So I will try to change it to a more understandable form. 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.
Maria assured fans that mentions of A-Life 2.0 will return to Steam, but only once the feature is fully functional. However, the studio has no timeline for when this will happen.