Survival Shooting Game Enemies Stalker 2 have a funny habit of appearing right behind you, like a panto villain with an AK-47. Far from being a premeditated ambush by intelligent AI-controlled soldiers, this is simply the result of the game. crazy appearances. These botched encounters are unlike previous games, where roving bands of factional murderers patrolled the radioactive waste, seemingly at their own whims. At the time, this roaming bad guy feature was dubbed “A-life” by developers GSC Game World – essentially a slang word for simulating enemies that would lead to “emergent” moments of violence and conflict. It was promised as a feature in Stalker 2 but many players have noticed that it seems missing. Over the weekend, GSC insisted that simulation was technically present in the sequel. It’s just broken.

“Often the game world only exists in the player’s field of vision,” the developers say when asked to define the feature in detail. Official FAQ. “A-Life 2.0 is a system for simulating life in the Zone. Factions and mutants fight for living space, migrate, capture new locations or retreat to safer areas. A-Life is this which makes the Zone truly alive and unpredictable.”

Whether this is currently present in Stalker 2 is hard to say. Right now, it seems like enemies spawn in a simple radius around the player, for example, and you’ll even see them spawn in the world sometimes. If you don’t see the enemy itself when it appears, you will see the white aim marker which abruptly shows that you have been instantly spotted by the bad guy who has materialized somewhere behind you. It’s not the smartest breeding system, but I guess it keeps you on your toes. This also doesn’t apply to all types of enemy encounters: some are scripted, while other bandits and soldiers are tied to particular locations, making these encounters more naturalistic.

Enemies also fight when they come into contact, but this most often happens after a group of bandidos or a pack of blind dogs appear near an enemy camp simply because you are there. I’ve encountered wandering groups of stalkers, but again, their appearance is sudden and they’re more likely to walk straight into toxic waste and die from a brain-dead path than to have any emerging scrapes with wildlife. I certainly haven’t seen any (non-scripted) instances of factions “capturing new locations” or “retreating to safer areas” as the developer’s definition suggests.

After a few players complained about the A-life system being absent (and pointed out that a mention of the feature was edited from the Steam page), the developers responded on Discord and Reddit to say that the system is there, but that bugs prevent it from acting as expected.

“There are several known issues with the A-life 2.0 system that we are aware of and working on fixes/improvements,” said the studio’s community manager on Stalker Discord (as spotted by PC gamer). “We know this system is very important for the Zone to have an immersive atmosphere, and we will do our best to resolve any known issues.”

It doesn’t help that “A-life” is (and always has been) a buzzword, even more vaguely defined than Battlefield’s “evolution” or Call Of Duty’s recent “omnimovement.” This leads to confusion and mixed expectations among players as to what this feature actually entails. What also complicates things from the developers’ perspective, according to GSC, is that two different systems in the game are responsible for creating these theoretically organic gunfights. Both will likely need tweaking to make the world feel inhabited by competing groups wandering around. And for each bug report or complaint received, they must determine which system is responsible for the unintended behavior.

“Combat AI and A-Life 2.0 are different things,” one of the developers notes in a response to a Reddit complaint. “One is actually a ‘brains’ for combat scenarios, while the other is a more complex, overarching system that attempts to manage life in the Zone.”

In the meantime, the first patch for the shooter is coming soon, says GSC, which recently released patch details they plan. Many of them will concern crashes, softlocks, balance adjustments and other high-priority items, they say. But at the bottom of the list is “A-Life system bug fixes,” which further suggests that the studio considers this important enough to fix soon.