They also told us why the mention of A-Life 2.0 disappeared from the game’s description on Steam.
Creative Director of GSC Game World Maria Grigorovich and CEO of the studio Eugene Grigorovich in an interview with IGN first told us about the problems with the A-life 2.0 system.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 was released last month and reached the more than a million sales. Despite the technical problems, the team is actively working to resolve them and has already released three patches.
What is A-Life and why is it important
The A-Life system was a key feature of the first part of the game that controlled the behavior of artificial intelligence in the game world. It created convincing NPC behavior and provided unpredictable gameplay. The developers promised that A-Life 2.0 would make the Zone more alive than ever before and provide an unprecedented level of emergent gameplay.
Flying stalkers and other bugs
GSC CEO Yevhen Hryhorovych explained in detail the technical reasons for the problems:
«For the system to work properly, you need a much larger area for NPCs to appear, and this requires much more memory resources. We struggled with optimization, trying to cut resources from different angles to properly optimize the game».
Yevhen explained one of the most noticeable problems of the system — the strange behavior of the characters: «We also recently created some bugs with NPCs appearing in the air and falling to the ground before the release. They should actually appear on the ground. Why this happened, I don’t know! We also had some bugs with the behavior of AI».
All of this combined with other issues makes it seem like the system is not working correctly.
«Outside of the player’s range, NPCs are in offline mode. And when the player reaches a certain distance, they switch to active mode and reappear», — explains the head of the studio the technical reasons for this behavior of artificial intelligence. According to him, the distance of the characters’ appearance is limited due to optimization requirements, where the studio balances between recreating the real world and its simplified version with all the conflicts.
«It was a difficult job, and due to optimization problems and bugs, the system became broken,» Grigorovich summarized.
Marketing embarrassment
Maria Hryhorovych told us about an unexpected change in the game’s description on Steam made by one of the marketing department employees:
«He explained to me that there will be many new players who do not know what A-Life is. They need to understand what we are talking about in this description. He changed the text without discussion or permission. He didn’t even ask if we had any problems with A-Life. And we did. We knew about it. It’s a really huge and complex system».
When asked about the return of the A-Life 2.0 description to the Steam page, Maria answered: «We are responsible to our players, they expected to see this system in the game. We have to do it for them». However, the team doesn’t give an exact timeframe for fixing the system, given the difficult working conditions in Ukraine, where half of the development team «face weekly power outages».
Source: IGN
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