Stalker 2 has been enjoyable jank, but it’s also getting rapidly fixed

"A-Life" fixes will ensure even more randomness in an already odd fallout zone.

When the impossibly punctuated S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl released on November 20, after many delays (that included the Russian invasion of the developer's native Ukraine), it seemed like it could have used even more delays.

Stalker 2 had big performance issues and game-breaking bugs, along with balance and difficulty spike issues. Some things that seem "wrong" in the game are just going to stay that way. The first-person survival/shooter series has always had a certain wobbly, wild feel to it. This expresses itself in both the game world, where a major villain can off themselves by walking through a window, and in the tech stack, where broken save games, DIY optimization, and other unmet needs have created thriving mod scenes.

Developer GSC Game World has been steadfastly patching the game since its release, and the latest one should nudge the needle a bit from "busted" to "charmingly wonky." Amid the "Over 1,800 fixes and adjustments" in Patch 1.1, the big changes are to "A-Life." In porting Stalker 2 to Unreal Engine 5, the developer faced a challenge in getting this global AI management system working, but it's showing its weird self again.

A-Life, as detailed by Destructoid, is the idea that "the characters in the game live their own lives and exist all the time, not only when they are in the player's field of view." In a certain radius around the player, events happen "online," in real time, such that you could stumble upon them. Farther out, things are still happening, and non-player characters (NPCs) are trekking about, but on an "offline," almost turn-based, less resource-intensive schedule. Modders have had quite a bit of fun tweaking A-life in prior versions of Stalker 2.

With the latest patch, the weirdly engaging feel that the world goes on without you returns. There will be more NPCs visible, NPCs out of range will pursue their "goals," and a more diverse range of human factions, mutants, and weirdos will exist. Perhaps most intriguingly, an issue where "Human NPCs didn't satisfy their communication needs and talks" is fixed. If only that could be patched for most of us player characters here in the real world.

It's patched, but is it fun?

You see stuff like this all over Stalker 2, sometimes put there by the developers, sometimes just happening out of A-Life happenstance.

Credit: GSC Game World

I have been playing Stalker 2 on and off since its launch, checking in after most of the big patches so far. Not nearly enough to merit any kind of proper review, and it's my first time with the series. Early on, the performance was quite bad, devolving sometimes to a stuttering "I can't even press escape to save and quit" mess on a system with an RTX 3070 GPU, a 12-core AMD 5900X CPU, and 16GB memory. Since then, it has improved considerably. I no longer avoid walking up to NPCs talking to one another for fear of triggering the slight stutter that once made my teeth clench.

When I'm not noticing hitches or worrying about settings, I'm very much enjoying Stalker 2. It is unforgiving, it triggers the save-scumming response, and it makes you realize that getting shot five or six times would, indeed, kill most people. Maybe it's the winter or a reaction to the highly polished AAA titles or charming indie games I've been playing lately, but I appreciate the feeling of being overmatched and submerged in oddities. It's one of the rare games where I feel good for running away from a three-on-one firefight because I know I'll be better off saving ammo and item condition so I can go off and barely survive something else. It's a bit more active and game-like than a strict survival game, but it actively discourages the ridiculous bravado emphasized in most first-person shooters.

Even before this A-Life fix, the game's towns and landscapes gave off a sense of being inhabited (as much as a nuclear fallout zone can be), of your protagonist's path moving past a world that had its own rhythm. The developers seem to have had enough success (1 million copies within 48 hours of release) and real-world feedback to keep plugging away on fixes, up until the point the game has moved from "damaged" to "cracked in interesting ways." I intend to follow along, however many times my character must die on the way.

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