In just a couple of weeks, Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl has been out, but it’s still not fully complete.
A lot has happened since its release, and one big thing is the missing A-Life 2.0 feature that was promised on Steam. The developers, GSC Game World, released a patch right away to fix some problems, but the main feature, A-Life 2.0, is still not working as planned. In an interview with IGN, creative director Maria Grygorovych shared that even though the new A-Life is in the game, it isn’t functioning correctly yet. The original Stalker game had the first version of A-Life, which helped non-player characters seem alive, even when players weren’t interacting with them. The goal for A-Life 2.0 was to improve this system, but it’s been tricky to get it right.
As the launch date came closer, GSC CEO Ievgen Grygorovych explained they tried to make A-Life 2.0 affect a smaller area around the player. However, some huge bugs popped up, forcing them to disable it for now. Interestingly, Maria Grygorovych mentioned that the game’s description on Steam was altered by someone in marketing without her knowing. Despite these challenges, both Maria and Ievgen emphasized their commitment to getting A-Life 2.0 to work properly.
Fans believe in the magic of making games better, even when things are tough.
Ievgen Grygorovych said, “For now we [are] committed to players to make it work and it can be done from directions both optimizing, giving more resources to A-Life, fixing bugs, making it work properly, and then putting more efforts to make it more advanced.”
But there’s more drama. Russian news outlets started saying that Stalker 2 is recruiting players into the Ukrainian army. The documentary War Game: The Making of Stalker 2 showed how GSC Game World’s team was deeply affected by Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Half of them had to leave the country to keep working on the game, while others stayed and some even joined the fight. Despite all these hurdles, over 1 million copies of Stalker 2 have already been sold on PC and Xbox, and it’s available on Game Pass too.
