The Stalker 2 developers say that the scrubbed mentions (which are busted but still there) of anticipated NPC code A Life 2.0 were due to a rogue marketing guy.

Stalker 2 has been released, and although I'm not a huge Stalker fan like Joshua Wolens who gave it an 83 in his Stalker 2 Review, I know a thing or two about it by sheer cultural osmosis. Stalker 2 is out, and while I'm not a huge fan of the series like Joshua Wolens, who gave it an 83 in his Stalker 2 review, I do know one thing about it through cultural osmosis. In this case, however, the barrel is glitched half way through the floor.

A-Life was one of the features that made its predecessor so popular, aside from its charmingly janky character. This fancy term means that the developers GSC have a good sense of cause and effects with their NPC AI. Josh praises this in his review, when a pack runs headfirst into a military checkpoint, and the game allows them to solve it for him.

A-Life 2.0, as the developers stated late last month is still in Stalker 2. It's just broken right now. The bugs, along with the sudden removal from Steam of A-Life, sparked a flurry conspiracy theories, especially on the subreddit for the game. GSC was said to have abandoned the feature. It turns out that it was because a marketing guy got a bit big for his boot at the worst possible time.

According to Maria Grygorovych who spoke with IGN during a BAFTA event, the creative director said that. Grygorovych said that the person who made the mistake removed the mention of A Life from the Steam page, because "there would be a lot new players" who didn't know what A Life was.

Grygorovych insists that "he didn't do that without any discussion or consent." He didn't say, "Do we have any bugs with A-Life?" Because we had. We knew it. It's a huge and difficult system. "But, when he released it, I was surprised, because Reddit made me aware of it."

This might seem like a flimsy explanation if you are knee-deep in a pile of corkboards, but let's use Occam's razor to examine the whole mess. What's more probable, that GSC, already struggling with a notoriously difficult-to-code-game under significant pressure, worked on an AI for years, only to scrap it last minute and shove another AI code they got from...somewhere, into their game. Or GSC is just being GSC and battling with the same jank that fans love/hate.

She admits that it still sounds like a tall story: "People think this is connected to the fact that we released a game with A-Life broken. But it's a lie. IGN reports that Grygorovych showed their interviewer an exchange of phone calls that proved her innocence, presumably prior to the drama reaching the ears and eyes of the public.

Grygorovych explains that it is a matter of principles. A-Life 2.0 exists, but it is in such a bad state that it cannot be considered as a selling point. The team will not allow it to be until it is fixed. "We have a good relationship with our players, and they wanted to see something." We must do it for them."