I hope this didn't come across as too negative, I see this as an opportunity to look at what Stalker 2 could be in the future, we all need to be aware of what we are missing because it is easy to forget after all these years. It's more than nostalgia. UPDATE: I have since tested and seen that enemies can loot eachother in Stalker 2, its just very rare and seems only enemies do it if they lose aggro on you after a fight, so this situation almost never happens, This is very good beacuse they can fix this easily because the system is already in place! Thanks and Credit to Shay, flic and wool (Gamma discord) for more info on Stalker 2 spawning. Hope everyone has a happy new year ♥
Have a good one, too! thanks for your work, I see it positive, there is always room for improvement. Stalker 2 is still a good game imho. It was never more pleasant to run through the zone without loading screens.
It's not negative when it's just a fair comparison, more people need to know about this There are so many newcomers who know nothing of A-Life, and don't even realize what we lost
It's not negative but I have seen bodies after offline fights; though they might have been fighting just inside bubble range. They loot bodies and inspect corpses of animals, don't take anything just an animation sadly.
Best of all the console ports are WAAAAY less buggy and prone to crashes i just hope the next gen update 4 the trilogy dosnt break more stuff and CoP gets the save file bug past THE BASEMENT
@@LaughingMan44 lol you're joking right? Are we just going to forget Soc at launch? Or the mods that still crashed TILL this day because of X ray? It's an impressive engine in terms of visual and physics but the stability is an absolute nightmare
@@Freedomer3 It's not nearly as bad as you make it out to be, and acting as if S2 doesn't have crashes and game breaking bugs. Mods crashing mean nothing, that's down to the modders.
I remember first time I played SoC and after going back to Cordon from Garbage, I heard some gunfire in the distance and then nothing, after few minutes of walking I saw a pack of dogs dragging two dead bandits, that was cool af.
I liked the fact that when you died on the old stalker games, you could still see the environment arround you even if you're dead, meaning that the world will still continue.
@@Maske4 I’d also like to see this! At the moment the player model is really messed up in 3rd person but I assume when they make the multiplayer mode in the future all 3rd person animations will be better and then maybe you his could be added
Despite the storyline of SoC going along a Chosen One arc it is the closest game to making you feel like one of thousands of other Stalkers, making ends meet and dying along the way. You die to an anomaly, some Bandit steals your gear and a dog comes along and eats your corpse, life goes on. It’s part of the reason why Anomaly is so popular, it further plays into the “nameless nobody Stalker” roleplay and gameplay. In Anomaly, you are just some guy, whose face is covered by a gas mask or balaclava, and you make a name for yourself through hard work and surviving gunfights.
in addition to what has already been mentioned that mutants drag bodies, in the old games they had a hunger counter. for example, if a pseudo dog is currently full, it will most likely start running away from the player rather than attacking. there is also a morality system, when when most of the pack dies, the rest will run away forgotten technologies of an ancient civilization)
Unfortunately... this is sad... And true, looking by fancy, raytraced Crysis remaster... which downgraded physics... nowaday games don't have much physics and destructible terrain/objects...
Personally I like the new one better as they are more challenging to fight (sort of). But I do not like that they are extremely overused in STALKER 2 compared to the trilogy.
@@strider029 oh for sure, the fun of a bloodsucker encounter was that it wasn’t often, now you can just be roaming the zone and come into contact with like 3
I dont really care about render distances if for the sake of performance, but the "action bubble" is fuckin unforgivable. They better bring this shit up to at least the old AI and ALife levels or just give up on it, release proper power modding tools and let the community work it out.
istg cyberpunk release was better than the stalker 2 release. and cyberpunk got properly patched after 2 months, while stalker still got half the game to patch
@@antwerp-six more like after two years, lol. Almost every patch up to 1.5 had a massive list of bugfixes, and there're still quite a few (luckily mostly cosmetic).
@@LaughingMan44 some and maybe most definitely never worked on the OG trilogy, I would doubt most never played them. But there is just no way you get to work on Stalker 2 that's supposed to have ALIFE 2.0 but somehow not knowing anything about the previous iterations of the system. Failing to implement ALIFE 2.0 properly is one thing, but not even knowing how it works would be the most major form of failure and I doubt GSC is that messed up. ALIFE 2.0's problems are likely due to MS rushing them and maybe console limitations. But what your implying is that GSC is basically an utterly incompetent dev that had no intention and made zero effort to create a working system to begin with.
6:41 i love that they usually say something first before finishing them off. Not a detail that was needed, but someone thought of adding it and this video is just really making me appreciate the old A-life
100 meter despawn range is pretty much gamebreaking for me. What's even the point of having sniper rifles in the game? I guess I'll keep waiting until the game is actually in a release worthy state.
Enemies spawn inside detection range, so they literally spawn, instantly see you and start shooting you. And since they can see through trees/bushes it's basically like a jump scare. You can't scout ahead for it either. Really annoying.
Yeah, I loved using Lynx in Call of Pripyat, but in the Stalker 2 there is almost no reason to carry a sniper rifle over automatic/semi-automatic rifle (almost always you have to take a shotgun as 2nd weapon, because mutants).
I carry a sniper because everyone is tanky af. So far only m701 kills in one or two shots. I play on veteran so I have to eliminate enemies quickly because once they are hit, they return fire with aimbot accuracy and rush aggresively spamming grenades
@@OCinneide yeah man... like the first thing I was dreamin about before playing this game was to get a long range weapon... but I wasn't able to see an enemy before they saw me!!! It's so much bs, it is always them seeing me first and shooting at me even durind the night behind tress.
Thank you for this. I hope they can get back to this level of A Life sooner rather than later. They did say it’s their main priority right now so we’ll see.
I don't think the video was too negative, GCS set themselves a high bar with the previous games. I totally forgot about Bloodsuckers ambushing and drinking blood. It added so much to their creep factor.
I was walking into garbage and saw a bloodsucker just pacing around in the woods. He still attacked, but it would've been cooler/scarier if I didn't it see it hangin out beforehand
@@Validoleech That's why they lied about it. That's why there was a review embargo until the last hour before release. That's why GSC went on Steam and removed all mentions of A-Life from the Stalker 2 Steam Storage Page. They talked up A-Life 2.0 for literally years and put it into trailers and promotional material and documentaries. And it isn't even possible on Unreal Engine 5 or Consoles if you ask me. There will be nothing but a glorified spawn system for this game and I doubt that 100 meter bubble ever increases.
@yakivpopavich it's possible, it just takes good programmers to do it. And Grigorovich always opted on students or outsourcers. That's also the reason 4A Games studio was created, when 4 devs finally found out what is a real game development
True A-Life 2.0 from OLR 3.0 - Every stalker has a goal, be it revenge/getting money/solving the mystery of the Zone/getting to Wish Granter. - If a stalker has accomplished his goal, he leaves the Zone forever. this can be seen in real time, as he goes to the south of Cordon sneak through the military roadblock - Stalkers can trade with merchants or with each other. you can watch how the merchant's/stalker's inventory changes and how much money he has. - If a stalker finds a weapon more powerful than his own, he starts using it. If he finds armor better than his own, he changes it. - Stalkers can find your stashes and steal them. - Stalkers can drive vehicles. They can steal your car. - Stalkers can die of disease, like anthrax/rabies/radiation sickness. - Stalkers can find semi-plot (quest) documents. if necessary, these documents can be redeemed. - If the “Unknown Stalker” lives long enough, he will get a nickname. - you may meet a rookie from Cordon at the end of the game, who became a master, reached Wish Granter, made a wish and died. - if a stalker runs out of ammo, he'll try to run away from the battlefield. and a lot of other things, that's the first thing I can think of.
Funny how S2 has less render Distance for NPCs...... I think SOC had 150 meters for rendered simulation; beyond that, it was an offline simulation. But the most important thing is that most NPCS were persistent. I once had an NPC whom I saved and I met him 3-4 real life hours later bx pure chance. A few maps away he was camping still "friendly" to me. Or just find random loner,bandit bodies case they were fighting while the player was beyond render distance. Not to mention this 95m? render distance makes binoculars useless while in Stalker 1 you could often scout ahead. Sometimes you could stay in the Hub in COP and hear gunfights outside, mutants, etc even if you did nothing. And 98% of the time it was"random A-life". The problem with Stalker 2 it has very bad performance, forced Lumen, and all kinds of UE5 staff that kills performance and makes the game look 10% better. Ideally, Stalker 2 would need like 200-300 meter render.(Some Stalker 1 mods have that). And have an offline simulation. Enemy combat AI should be at least on par with CS and COP...... All mutants could get their"low health" animations as in older Stalkers......
they should add path tracing and ray tracing options. I think they are more stable. Also remember that STALKER 2 is not UE5 5.5 which has brought a lot of useful features. Lumen and nanite get stabler each update, but upgrading would cost time and money.
I think the biggest reason S2 looks "next gen" is the 3d scanned game objects and animations. If you were to put those assets and animations into a modified xray engine it'd look almost as good if not better due to not being a blurry TAA mess
this is why I could spend days continuosly playing old installments, but not with 2, I mean age does take into account but...the Trilogy was just superior
4:22 you madman!! i knew it wasn't just me :D if more people saw this (especially the part of the community advocating that there is an independent offline separate from the online bubble director) damn :O a nice educative video that will help visualize what a-life was in the old stalker games and hopefully will be in its true 2.0 form in stalker 2 in the coming months/years great to see the comparison!
@@NACCOY Thank you man! My dream is to look back on this and see how far it has come, You’re doing great work on Shays living zone mod and I hope you continue way into the future!
@@firefox_tn1815 Well that’s very good, I hope the video has a small impact on the progression of future a life but I couldn’t do it without everyone’s support so thanks to you all
To simplify the things, old games of Stalker seem to be more dynamic , you never predict what will happen. See snork eating corpse of fellow stalkers , next day see the dog drags the one you knew. Some random stalker’s name even stay at Camp for like 3 week then u found them lying dead near Garbage.
The old A-Life system kicks all sort of a$$! I mean, I decided to replay Call of Pripyat lately and the game feels alive. I mean, I can be on one side of the map, and on the other something is happening. And when I get there, I can see that something. For example, dogs chasing Bloodsucker or groups of stalkers duke it out between themselves or against bandits. And some of them are even trying to get artifacts or loot bodies of enemies that they killed. And I did not installed any mods. I just got latest GOG version and it was fun time.
exactly. and Clear sky is also amazing, with fleshed out faction war and NPC squads actually doing their objectives. I was hoping so hard that HoC would have that…
this is what happens when everyone use UE5 and not make their own custom engine. almost all games now are made with UE5 or 4, sure it’s a decent engine but it can’t do everything and it can’t compare to when you make a custom engine for your own needs. the xray engine was amazing for its time. and maybe (i think so at least) today’s programmers are not as good as the older generation. Great video! thank you
@@boomdaddymaxwell I don't recommend not playing due to the state it's in, even with the FPS issues/crashes it's still a fun game. The NPC and mutant AI is genuinely obnoxious with stealth seemingly being impossible with how the AI can spot you even when you can't even see them/hear them. But god is the gunplay (when it's not bullet spongey), artifact hunting, and exploring/atmosphere still so good. Unless you legit cannot play due to the lack of effective/good optimization then I would definitely play it.
@@CelticMexican good AI, stealth, and lack of bullet sponges were why I loved the og games. I'm not going to spend 100 hours playing something that isn't enjoyable to play. If they can iron all that crap out then I'll give it another go
Great video. But as I remember in Call of Pripyat Stalker can't collect artifacts - it's just animation of trying to get them and they will fail all the time. :) But still it's much better than nothing like in S2.
Wandering NPC in stalker 2 are now simply spawned in your vicinity because you're there. Just like in Rage 2. I just started running past them after the 1.3 patch because it became tedious. Thank you for putting effort into this.
I remember looking at the steam forums at the time of release and this theory at the time of A-Life 2.0 not being in the game first came up. I decided at that point that this was basically an Early Access launch and I would wait - until the steam summersale 2025. Flashing forward to now looking this theory been proven true made me switch my expectations to "I get it when it's done". And I do not care how long this takes. meanwhile I can play the og trilogy modded or everything at once as an improved version with GAMMA. I can wait for as long as it takes and still get my Stalker fill. Hopefully this "Stalker 2" game will at one point live up to it's name.
"Stagnant" is putting it mildly. In fact I would falt out call that regression. It's emberessing how og Stalker, Half-LIfe and F.E.A.R. still make current year games look like there is barely any intelligence to the artificial nature to begin with.
@@bazzy5644I still really like people bringing up how much they like F.E.A.R.’s AI when in reality it was never anything special. There was no secret sauce added to them, rather the people behind the AI and the people behind making the maps worked closely together which greatly improved how they felt. They knew the AI’s strengths and would utilize them while also purposely avoiding areas that the AI sucked at in the map design. It seems simple but when you look at your average EA or Ubisoft game you realize that the guys working on AI in those games probably never talked to the mappers while working. This was a similar case with Valve’s approach to games, as early on many devs had multiple jobs such as both animating and art, meaning often different parts of a game’s design were designed in-tandem with the different departments. It was also because Valve was really good at talent scouting, and they set the bar for the amount of playtesters used mid-development. Videos of the cut Combine AI still impress me to this day, seeing them rally and act with tactics in any navmeshed environment is badass. If you are interested and willing to wait probably another 3-5 years I guarantee you when The Indie Stone adds in human AI into Zomboid it will be some of the best AI ever seen in videogames, surpassing the best aspects of all 3 OG Stalker games. It’s going to take them a very long time to do it though, they have a lot on their plate with B42 and 43, then they plan on adding Human AI in Build 44.
I recently played old Stalker games and it really makes me sad when I return to Stalker 2 and see those stupid spawns around me. In older games, everyone was just there, I didn't see any spawns or NPCs going to me out of nowhere. I still don't belive them that there is some offline mode, if it was like that, NPCs would be still traveling thru zone and then just appear when they are close, but it's clear that it doesn't work like that, there are just random spawns. You want proofs? If they were traveling in offline mode, they would not come out of water or out of room with no other door and there would be no WWIII around you. If NPCs were just traveling in offline mode, what probability would be that 20 of them just meet you in the same moment and start shooting to each other? It doesn't make any sense, they are not traveling in offline mode, there are just random spawns. I also noticed that NPCs in Stalker 2 mostly just run to you without using any tactics or covers. Even 20 years old games had better AI. Their explanation that to have more advanced A-life would be too hardware demanding makes no sense, we have totally superior hardware than 15-20 years ago and it worked back in the day. If Unreal Engine 5 can't handle it, it's proof that engine is just terrible and it was a mistake to switch to UE5. A-life was one of things that made Stalker series that unique and it was strictly connected to their X-ray engine, it's clear that they are not able to program it again in other engine. Let's hope in modders, they could bring real a-life in the future after Stalker 2 developers give them proper modding tools. In old games, I was also used to give better equipment to friendly stalkers by just dropping it in front of them and when you later returned, they still have that weapon, that was actual real a-life system, eveony just existed, NPCs were not randomly spawned like in Stalker 2. BTW, when we complain about random spawns in Stalker 2, it's fair to mention that even Clear Sky had random spawns and respawns of NPCs and it was pretty annoying when you destroyed group of bandits and there was a new group behind horizont going to you. This was happening only in Clear Sky, not in SoCH nor CoP. I think I even remember back in the day that developers admited that a-life in Clear Sky was kind of crazy, so they made it normal again in CoP. Now in Stalker 2, some crazyness of Clear Sky is back, so it looks like WWIII everywhere and I don't like it, it's damm zone, there shouldn't be milions of people everywhere shooting at each other, it makes no sense, to meet actual living human should be more rare in zone and each time you meet someone, it should be somehow memorable moment.
I think they have no idea how to program it in Unreal Engine. A-life was one of main things that made their old x-ray engine so special. Yes, game had bugs and it was crashing a lot, but modern games are even more bugged and crash too, so people who say that modern engines are better in this case are totally wrong. Actually I played legaly purchased and fully patched Shadow of Chernobyl recently and I had maybe 3 crashes in 30 hours, it's more stable than Stalker 2 and it was crashing back in the day because of warez.
It's not possible. Unreal Engine 5 was never capable of A-Life. Nor are consoles. That's why they had a review embargo until the final 2 hours before release. It's also why they went on the Steam Store Page for Stalker 2 and removed all mentions of A-Life. They cannot make it right, because it's not technologically possible within the confines of the Unreal 5 Engine. An Engine in which they purchased and didn't make themselves, so they could rush along development. That's on them. They could have made a new X-Ray Engine or improved the old one and modernized it, but nope. That's a lot of work. And GSC and modern games developers aren't a big fan of doing a lot of work. As someone who played the original trilogy and various mods for now over a decade who was waiting so long for this game, I'm both saddened and frustrated by the state of it not only on release but now after multiple patches. Poor performance and optimization. Hard and soft locks due to NPC's and Stashes and certain items not spawning. No A-Life. It's genuinely pathetic and embarrassing to see the comparison of these games.
@@yakivpopavich People who know how to work in UE say that it is totally possible to make proper a-life in UE, especially in UE 5.2 and newer, but I think they just repear Epic's propaganda, we don't see any real games where it would work the same good as in old games. There are also very annoying things in UI like automatical comparison of items where I still can't remember if my equiped item is on left or right, that inventory looks oldschool, but on other hand it has annoying features from modern games, they should go in one or other way, not both together. Another thing that is big WTF for me is that even after 200 GB of updates, we still can't change keys for flashlight, meelee and granade launcher, that looks really weird to me, thise things must be super easy to solve.
I was wondering about this, I never play CS, mainly SoC and CoP, couldn't recall seeing the prone animation. What about the bandit doing the quick-cover while reloading the double barrel shotgun? Don't remember seeing that either.
Stalker 2's fake A-Life is embarrassing and disappointing, events spawning in a mere 100 meters away is laughable. This is what we get with lazy modern game development and Unreal Engine 5 pre-baked engines. A-Life was never really possible on console I bet nor with Unreal 5 Engine, but they advertised it as a key game-play feature and put it into promotional material and trailers and documentaries. Then they deleted all mentions of A-Life from the Steam Store Page right before release, and had a review embargo until the final hour. Deceptive and manipulative marketing and a genuine shame to see from GSC. As someone who has played the original trilogy and mods for well over a decade now and was waiting so long for Stalker 2 I don't see myself purchasing or even downloading this game. It launched with no A-Life, and now all we get is some event spawning system that only works within 100 meters of the player. I don't think there will ever be true A-Life in Stalker 2, more a less " A-Life 2.0 ". It was all just a marketing gimmick they used to fool long time fans like myself.
>statistics, archives The NPC PDA is just a screenshot from one of the trailers, "The Time of Opportunities" where these tabs were in player's PDA. it's cut content. A-Life 2.0 in stalker 2 is just a glorified spawner of random encounters from Far Cry 5, except the developers of FC5 didn't promise how revolutional their spawner will be. BTW, remember how bloodsuckers used to grab and succ you in SoC builds and in vanilla Call of Pripyat? Their model in Stalker2 still has the sticky bits on their tendrils to succ and on their palms to grab you/stick to you - exactly the attacks they don't use in S2, opting for some stupid unga-bunga jumping at you.
It bothers me so much the fact that all mutants have this childish jump attack, and the fact that Bloodsuckers do this childish ooooh spooky rawr is scary :3 when in previous games they were 99% stealthy and silent except for their creepy breathing as they close in on you
Bloodsuckers on stalker 2: "UwU hewooo!!! Can you pick me up like a puppy :3?" Bloodsuckers in stalker 1: "turn of that pda, stalker, and kiss me on my hot mouth, im feeling romantical"
Stalker Anomaly, GAMMA, and EFP are incredibly ambitious games. Every NPC feels alive, living their own lives and interacting with the world around them. They report their discoveries, and if you’re quick, you can engage with what they find. If their friends die, they’ll guard their loot fiercely, even if you’re not hostile, and they’ll warn you off from taking enemies’ loot unless you force a confrontation. What’s even more impressive is that NPCs will loot gear and weapons from the battlefield, so the next time you encounter them, they might be better equipped with stronger gear and weapons. These dynamic and reactive systems are just a few of the things that make these games truly special.
In Oblivion Lost Remake 3.0 the modmaker finalized true build A-life like GSC originally intended -- the NPCs have tasks why they are in the zone, they go across all locations to fulfill those (can be to kill another stalker, find artifact, explore and get to some location, they even compete with player to find quest documents that are inside labs or agroprom then player has to get it from them or buy them out from Snitch). While they travel they engage in all A-life activities -- collect artifacts, loot which they then sell to traders, which those items transfer to the traders and the player can buy them, so after some A-life firefight some loaner will collect weapons and bring to sell to Sidorovich which the player can buy for themselves. Its a very complex and sophisitcated system that makes the whole in-game world feel alive, and what is more impressive is the whole mod was created by one person. Of course its not without its own downsides, being too hardcore at times and having a strange storyline, but it is impressive feat of modmaking nonetheless. BTW the creator of this great mode is called hi_flyer.
I can definitely feel those differences while playing. Stalker 2's world doesn't feel as natural and immersive as the old games. It's like everything is staged around you and npcs don't seem to have an actual purpose : move to this zone, probe this enemy base, retake this stronghold, scientists doing science etc... The factions are pretty shallow and kind of just part of the decor, rather than actual gangs perpetually at war with each other. Npcs seem pretty dumb and harmless, rather than dangerous opportunistic individuals. The older games are far superior in terms of immersion for those reasons in my opinion. But since we'll get all the mods a community can dream of I'm not too worried.
That’s one of a number of huge differences that are frustrating. “Random” stalkers with A-Life had a purpose outside of being friendly and unfriendly combat obsessed loot boxes. They gave random quests; they traveled all over across the entirety of the zone; they could take artifacts from anomalies before you reached them; they had a ranking that impacted how dangerous they were and their individual chance of surviving encounters; the faction system mattered and you would have to scout them out to see if they were friendly or not.
In Stalker 2 I shot a group of mercenaries and some of the corpses were empty, and one of them had a lot of loot, two exoskeletons, I think he was looting them while I was in an ambush. Once I saw a stalker looking for an artifact. But most often I saw them treating the wounded.
Im sure that was no looting, just pre-spawn in inventory. For example, on Varta base I killed a lot of NPC and at least four of them had armor suits in inventory. They couldnt loot it.
The devs have no idea why people like stalker if they really thought this system was fitting for this game.. every gameplay element in this game is static aka hard scripted.. that kills the feeling of the zone
I don't think you are negative, but I also want to tell you that I am modding this files right now, and it's as easy as setting let's say despawn from 250 meters to 500. I have been doing it already and I also increased the spawn distance radius, to make enemies spawn further away from you, so you are not caught off guard. What GSC did, which I truly respect, is giving us ability to edit this ourselves if you know how to unpack a .pak file The issue with A-Life now (objectively), it doesn't fully exist yet, I can see why GSC spent all that time trying to get optimization right with UE5, it is really a tricky situation, that engine is hard to hone imo War in Ukraine is not/was not helping either. In fact, some of the developers of GSC are no longer in human bodies, because they went to war and passed. We lost not just time and resources, we lost a lot of minds behind A-Life War in Ukraine also separated Russian developers from Ukraine who were working under GSC, so you have a lot of Russian region developers no longer present on the project. If you start looking at it deeper, it makes perfect sense why A-Life is not there yet, because they lost people on Ukraine's side and Russia's side of development of Stalker series.
Будем надеяться, что разработчики смогут довести дело до задуманного. Остальное уже за сообществом, а оно игру не бросит, это уж точно :) Кстати, с новым годом! Привет из России! Всем нам мирного неба над головой. Лучше играть в игры ;)
"What GSC did, which I truly respect, is giving us ability to edit this ourselves if you know how to unpack a .pak file" Nice game for $50-70 where we need to rummage in files.
@@doctorzarulem Спасибо, за Мир. И вам того же, эта война нереально затянута. Я надеюсь на лучшее, так как свои люди по всему СНГ, и больно смотреть на это.
@@KryptonIndarius To be honest, we are lucky to see this game come out at all considering all the circumstance, and you once again said same exact thing that other people say that don't realize that they lost like 40% of their development team for different reasons during this war.
From my experience in Call of Pripyat, it can bug some quests, such as when you have to go to bloodsuckers lair with other stalker. He will simply stuck in one place at the elevator. So i won't recommend.
One step forward (graphic quality) several steps back (npc behavior, npc intelligence, render distance, life simulation, offline simulation). I share this video in the steam forums to proof the 'truth believers' that a-life is still isnt there.
@@zoneslug Its going wild on steam forums about my post with this video. Most do not understand the video, claim the opposite of what is shown in the video and do not accept the information and insights that your attempts provide. For many, a-life 2.0 or generally an a-life version is in the game. I would not have thought that so many suffer from mental problems. That really shocked me.
@ Maybe they didn’t watch the video because they would just see i am showing how it is? They might think im just complaining but I actually really like stalker 2 I just miss a life
@@zoneslug I think for them we are automatically haters or trolls as soon as we say or show something they don't like. They don't seem to have the mental capacity to recognize differences or process information in general. It's almost a shame to invest the work and time like you did to find out how the current system works and then show it to others. Fortunately, on youtube you can simply ban such people and hide dislikes to prevent hate waves. I like to get new information, no matter what it looks like. Whether it's negative or positive, it's still knowledge that I want to know.
Yesterday because of A-Life there were 5 Wardens around me, I went into a quick mission into a boat (Sultan briefcase) and when I got outside there were at least 15 Wardens roaming near the boat killing boars. It was totally insane 😂
also so mutant would drag dead bodies off and start eating them including the player, which was amazing, the player death cam was cool how when you died the game world would keep running until you loaded it
They definitely used this as one of the marketing points, it's another cut content Was expecting underground mutants to have a bit different behavior from surface ones
Personally i'd eventually like to see a radiant quest system like in Anomaly. I usually don't like radiant quests but in Anomaly it intersects with A life and all the other dynamic systems in such a way that it creates practically infinite possibilities for unique gameplay which is why Anomaly and GAMMA are so endlessly replayable. Imo they're some of the few games where you can actually create your own story.
@@CKrup there is a radiant quest system but it has nothing to do with alife, example if it is a quest to kill dogs they will never die unless you go and render them in
man Cyberpunk, Starfield, then this game. Biggest slap in the face ever. I bought the old games on xbox to give them a playthrough and i seriously havent enjoyed a game that much since Red Dead 2. It was so disappointing.
Part of me wishes they had stuck to a older less demanding graphics to get Alife on the same level or better BUUUUT the new graphics and FX are really sweet and i dont think emmisions and anomalies would feel as impressive so im fine with this as they are def gonna keep up their hard work.
Happy new year! npc still spawn up my ass or right after I killed of a wave of mutants. there's so much devs need to fix it's insane. a lot of really bad bugs. also I found out that if there is a fight between 2 groups of npcs ( doesn't matter mutant vs human or human vs human ) when you go outside the render bubble they will all be insta killed. also damn do I hate this scripted event thing. Everyone has their path set through me, it is so unnatural how I'm always found by mutants or human npcs wherever I am at
I missed the part, where when you are armed and try to talk to NPC they will point a gun at you and start shouting at you to holster your weapon and if you keep messing with them they can hit you with buttstock of a gun and your gun will fall of your hands. Some times they can even steal your gun 😅
I was mind blown by the amount of NPC dynamics Stalker Clear Sky had. The AI was greatly improved from its predecessor (SOC) and the Zone felt more alive and thriving with Stalkers, it made the player feel insignificant. Which is why I always find Stalker Clear Sky more favourable over other Stalker games. But man, I was genuinely dissapointed with A-Life 2 as they marketed it greatly for Stalker 2 but the results were poor and throughout my gameplay, the zone felt dead and empty with the exception of bases that only gave off 'alive' vibes. I hope they're expanding this 'circle' of A-life or use a different method to bring more life to the zone. Great video btw!
This is a great video, I was wishing someone would make comparison content. You should do some more, I would love to see a comparison between NPC behaviors especially combat behaviors. New dogs vs old dogs is an obvious difference for example.
I once saw a group of stalkers fight 3 bloodsuckers. When 1 bloodsucker died, the other 2 started running away with this super weird sped up human jogging. If you have ever seen a gorilla run on two legs, looking like they are mocking humans, the bloodsuckers looked like that.
And to think that all of this could be done cheaply in terms of CPU time. The NPCs don't need to be spawned in, they don't need to be rendered, they don't even really need to shoot each other etc - it could be simulated and the results tagged to create corpses at that location or spawn a certain faction of NPCs at a POI rather than another when you approach... I think they focused everything on what renders around the player, rather than have a secondary simulated ALife map
I really hope S2 becomes a labor of love - seeing the tremendous success it has had should be enough for them to keep at it with A-Life. Life cycles of games are so much better now with cobtinued massive sales potential for maybe a full decade after release.
Nice! In that case if developer of this game going to buy car, car dealership must sell for him car without air conditioner, for example, or parking sensors for full price. And say - "we will ad it in future".
Mutants like Snorks, Flesh, Boars and Dogs drag corpses of their victims to a more secluded spot before they start eating in the old stalker games-- at least for CoP from what I observed
The thing is I don't understand if AI in pervious games behaved this well without astronomical performance hit why the new AI while being bad hammers the CPU that much.
The previous games use the X-Ray Engine. STALKER 2 uses Unreal Engine 5. Also, this game has one large map, while the previous games have much smaller maps.
@pastichiorocker true but the code for AI should probably run better on newer systems the engine is more for graphics I think, Yeah the map is much much bigger to simulate offline conditions but if we take into account the computation power improvements since then if same code is applied to 4x map size of gamma it should handle it way better.
I hate how they made special mutants in to some big bosses with a lot of HP and stupid abilities like bloodsucker stunning screach, burer ability to fire weapons at you that lie on the ground, controller reanimating corpses... it's just stupid.
On rare occasions NPCs can loot bodies. I'm not sure what triggers it but it is a neat way to get armor you shouldn't be able to get. I managed to get a merc and Spark exosuit that are two sets that aren't available to the player. They don't have player models and the Spark exosuit has incredible stats. I saw this happen a lot in the one Pripyat apartment complex near the library that's a Monolith stronghold. After slowly working my way through the apartment there were so many bodies and for some reason some of them got looted by the other Monolith. I ended up with around 2-3 sets of Ruby and Diamond exosuits. One thing I noticed about them is they seem to be heavier than the versions the player can acquire. (I've been streaming this so if you pop in at some point I could show them to you as well as see about getting some footage. I know I have a good clip somewhere of a Spark member looting a dead comrade who I then killed to get the exosuit off him.)
From what I remember the old A-life could loot including your stash unless you find the personal storages. Stalker 2 seems to have given players one in each camp.
It is clearly visible that A-life is present in STALKER original, and in STALKER 2 there is some kind of stub that cannot even be called A-life. I sincerely do not believe that they will "return" anything there, because there is nothing to return. The current GSC team does not know how it works, and the developer responsible for A-life does not work at GSC. The video is good. It's good that you show the real state of the game and the attitude of the developers towards the players.
I'm much more sceptical about A-Life in the current age anyway. We had more ambitions with much low realisation requirements from players in the 2000s combined with lower numbers of games shared on mass in the 2000s. Naturally devs experimented more and mixed more. Today we have so many genres and they all flourish that if it were me, I would not try to implement the same MMO or multiplayer elements alike in the singles player game even if it is true to the STALKER experience. New times new specialities need to be added.
Thank you for the video, friend. You were not negative at all: you just showed the truth (which is sad, yes). As ambitious as GSC promised stalker 2 should have been it's not even close to the original series by the quality of the gameplay mechanics and AI. It supposed to be a sequel Idealy, not just graphically , trying to replicate the original but ending up being even worse.
on stalker anomaly, you can find NPC going sneaky on you back and if they have a good weapon on their hands they do sneak attacks on you. dunno if stalker anomaly has changed much on the IA life.
I keep telling people that GSC is lying, their "A-Life" isn't even as good as what AMK team gave us for Shadow of Chernobyl's AMK mod back in 2008. I usually get responses ranging from calling me a Russian shill or a "zigger", a troll, or I get told to go play fortnite or something like that. I'm just an original STALKER fan who is telling people to not buy the terrible cashgrab GSC is selling us. Unreal Engine 5 can't even handle proper A-Life functions without massive demand on the system, which is why S2 is over 100gb in size and performs like garbage when Stalker SoC in 2007 was designed to run on slavic potato PC's. Now GSC is lying and telling people S2 has A-Life, or that it was "bugged" and the latest patch "fixed it" when it doesn't even have feature parity with a 17 YEAR OLD MOD? Don't believe the lies, keep your money.
> which is why S2 is over 100gb in size The fact that you think that size comes from engine means you have zero understanding of how games work and should not be speaking on the subject. The game is simply rushed, you can see it everywhere, from balance to economy to the story. Will it be ever fixed? Who tf knows. > was designed to run on slavic potato PC's As someone who actually played the game in 2007 I can assure you it was laggy as hell, demanding as much resources as Crysis (which was released the same year) while clearly behind on graphics quality.
Before A life - loads of enemies out of nowhere After a life - loads of enemies and allies out of nowhere. I literally stopped fighting. Wandering stalkers doing all my job and I just explore
Seems like they bit off more than they can chew with UE5. Having to sacrifice core concepts/mechanics that made your game great just to use the new flashy engine is definitely not worth it. This game has more time in my library collecting dust than play time unfortunately.
Hey the NPC can loot dead body in stalker 2 if you do a silent kill and watch from afar they will loot also when they loot they have 100% to loot the armor and if you are lucky you can get a bugged bread armor that can glitch out when selling 2 of them you can get infinite money 😊 There is unique armor if you let them loot each other and killed the looter
It should be noted that NPCs in CoP could not find artifacts. They played an animation searching but never collected them. Only 2 special NPCs who were Artifact hunters could. All others are just fluff.
You are wrong. In Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat, NPCs pick up artifacts, but only outside the radius of the main character's life zone. If you return to the NPC again after a while and kill him, then an artifact will be in his inventory. In CoP, I picked up artifacts from the inventory of killed stalkers a lot of times.
@@CharcharoExplorer Proof? You're claiming they came into existence with an artefact in their inventory at the start of the game? Or are you claiming they go to an anomaly field, after some time have an artefact spawned in their inventory? Because that's literally what we mean
@@LaughingMan44 I am claiming they do not pick up the artifact (removing it from the field) and that instead, depending on their rank, they can spawn with it. This happened in Basic SOC too btw. Low-tier artifacts had a chance to be found in certain NPC loadouts.
4 дня назад+9
They marketed A-life 2.0, we got A-life 0.2 This confirms A-life 2 probably never existed, they slowly patching it in.
I doubt they will patch it in. I’ll eat my hat if this wasnt their last A life improving patch. Yeah I’m dooming.
2 дня назад+2
@FilipMoncrief i hope not, but its not crazy to think they will eventually give up on it if they can't make it run well in ue 5. GSC has a history leaving their games incomplete for the modding community to finish and fix and im fully expecting the same its gonna happen again. The thing is, most players dont actually know what the og alife system was capable of so anything they manage to do will be enough for them, so i dont expect much backlash.
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
![I.N "HALLUCINATION" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/n5B5q1Hwt_U/mqdefault.jpg)
I hope this didn't come across as too negative, I see this as an opportunity to look at what Stalker 2 could be in the future, we all need to be aware of what we are missing because it is easy to forget after all these years. It's more than nostalgia.
UPDATE: I have since tested and seen that enemies can loot eachother in Stalker 2, its just very rare and seems only enemies do it if they lose aggro on you after a fight, so this situation almost never happens, This is very good beacuse they can fix this easily because the system is already in place!
Thanks and Credit to Shay, flic and wool (Gamma discord) for more info on Stalker 2 spawning.
Hope everyone has a happy new year ♥
Have a good one, too!
thanks for your work, I see it positive, there is always room for improvement.
Stalker 2 is still a good game imho. It was never more pleasant to run through the zone without loading screens.
It's not negative when it's just a fair comparison, more people need to know about this
There are so many newcomers who know nothing of A-Life, and don't even realize what we lost
@ I agree, the more people who are aware the more chance there is that they will update it to the way it was
Imo these are all fair comparisons, not negative. Thanks for the video
It's not negative but I have seen bodies after offline fights; though they might have been fighting just inside bubble range. They loot bodies and inspect corpses of animals, don't take anything just an animation sadly.
damn, you can clearly see how ambitious the old games were. they were and are true gems of gaming.
Best of all the console ports are WAAAAY less buggy and prone to crashes i just hope the next gen update 4 the trilogy dosnt break more stuff and CoP gets the save file bug past THE BASEMENT
Makes me more convinced that X-Ray engine runs on Vodka/Horilka plus Babushka's Black Magic put together with finest Slavic Shed Engineering.
@@arya31ful and still better than UE5
@@LaughingMan44 lol you're joking right? Are we just going to forget Soc at launch? Or the mods that still crashed TILL this day because of X ray? It's an impressive engine in terms of visual and physics but the stability is an absolute nightmare
@@Freedomer3 It's not nearly as bad as you make it out to be, and acting as if S2 doesn't have crashes and game breaking bugs. Mods crashing mean nothing, that's down to the modders.
I miss mutants fleeing when injured or alone. Behaving like real animals.
Me too it added so much immersion
Thanks for the video
@@Dennis-ud2nh You're welcome pal, thank you
Humans never retreat either...all enemies are like freakin' terminators...
@ Yes they all have zombie ai atm 😂
I remember first time I played SoC and after going back to Cordon from Garbage, I heard some gunfire in the distance and then nothing, after few minutes of walking I saw a pack of dogs dragging two dead bandits, that was cool af.
Those moments stay with us
In SoC, I saw that for the first time in front of the Duty base, near the entrance where dogs are. In CoP I saw a flesh carrying a body of a boar.
That's old gaming vs modern gaming, today kids don't know these gaming moments, it's very sad.
I liked the fact that when you died on the old stalker games, you could still see the environment arround you even if you're dead, meaning that the world will still continue.
@@Maske4 I’d also like to see this! At the moment the player model is really messed up in 3rd person but I assume when they make the multiplayer mode in the future all 3rd person animations will be better and then maybe you his could be added
Despite the storyline of SoC going along a Chosen One arc it is the closest game to making you feel like one of thousands of other Stalkers, making ends meet and dying along the way. You die to an anomaly, some Bandit steals your gear and a dog comes along and eats your corpse, life goes on.
It’s part of the reason why Anomaly is so popular, it further plays into the “nameless nobody Stalker” roleplay and gameplay. In Anomaly, you are just some guy, whose face is covered by a gas mask or balaclava, and you make a name for yourself through hard work and surviving gunfights.
in addition to what has already been mentioned that mutants drag bodies, in the old games they had a hunger counter. for example, if a pseudo dog is currently full, it will most likely start running away from the player rather than attacking. there is also a morality system, when when most of the pack dies, the rest will run away
forgotten technologies of an ancient civilization)
@@AggressoRAlice the original game were truly ahead of their time, I hope we can reach that point again
They replaced good AI with temporal anti aliasing
In old stalker dogs also often used to eat corpses or simply try to drag them, this is also an interesting point
"In Call of Pripyat they de-render much farther away."
Yeah, we got consoled.
it's a canncer...
Unfortunately... this is sad...
And true, looking by fancy, raytraced Crysis remaster... which downgraded physics... nowaday games don't have much physics and destructible terrain/objects...
Seriously. Why not just neuter the console version and let PC actually play the game
Current gen console CPUs and GPUs are more than capable of rendering the NPCs at more than 100m away, this isnt 2007 anymore
Devs said that they tried run full a-life but they run to only problems. So they decided release game with braindead version instead.
I also miss the Bloodsuckers eyes being visible when they go invisible
+
Personally I like the new one better as they are more challenging to fight (sort of). But I do not like that they are extremely overused in STALKER 2 compared to the trilogy.
@@strider029 oh for sure, the fun of a bloodsucker encounter was that it wasn’t often, now you can just be roaming the zone and come into contact with like 3
I dont really care about render distances if for the sake of performance, but the "action bubble" is fuckin unforgivable. They better bring this shit up to at least the old AI and ALife levels or just give up on it, release proper power modding tools and let the community work it out.
finally, at least a singe person found that used his head to leave a comment, instead of his ass.
istg cyberpunk release was better than the stalker 2 release. and cyberpunk got properly patched after 2 months, while stalker still got half the game to patch
@@antwerp-six more like after two years, lol. Almost every patch up to 1.5 had a massive list of bugfixes, and there're still quite a few (luckily mostly cosmetic).
@@antwerp-six Cyberpunk wasn’t proper after 2 months…
@IrrationalDelusion at least it was in a better condition than stalker
God I really hope a dev sees this and brings more life to the zone in time. Awesome video!
@@LOL2YOU I appreciate it thanks!
oh yeah because the dev would totally be unaware of the difference between the two unless they watch this video XD
@@unrealsimon93 I think we all have to raise awareness and say this is what we want
@@unrealsimon93 well to be fair, it seems like a lot if not most of the devs working on S2 never worked on or even played the original games
@@LaughingMan44 some and maybe most definitely never worked on the OG trilogy, I would doubt most never played them. But there is just no way you get to work on Stalker 2 that's supposed to have ALIFE 2.0 but somehow not knowing anything about the previous iterations of the system.
Failing to implement ALIFE 2.0 properly is one thing, but not even knowing how it works would be the most major form of failure and I doubt GSC is that messed up. ALIFE 2.0's problems are likely due to MS rushing them and maybe console limitations. But what your implying is that GSC is basically an utterly incompetent dev that had no intention and made zero effort to create a working system to begin with.
6:41 i love that they usually say something first before finishing them off. Not a detail that was needed, but someone thought of adding it and this video is just really making me appreciate the old A-life
I think it’s very realistic and needed.
100 meter despawn range is pretty much gamebreaking for me. What's even the point of having sniper rifles in the game? I guess I'll keep waiting until the game is actually in a release worthy state.
Enemies spawn inside detection range, so they literally spawn, instantly see you and start shooting you. And since they can see through trees/bushes it's basically like a jump scare. You can't scout ahead for it either. Really annoying.
Yeah, I loved using Lynx in Call of Pripyat, but in the Stalker 2 there is almost no reason to carry a sniper rifle over automatic/semi-automatic rifle (almost always you have to take a shotgun as 2nd weapon, because mutants).
Since the update ive yet to be instantly detected this is false
I carry a sniper because everyone is tanky af. So far only m701 kills in one or two shots. I play on veteran so I have to eliminate enemies quickly because once they are hit, they return fire with aimbot accuracy and rush aggresively spamming grenades
@@OCinneide yeah man... like the first thing I was dreamin about before playing this game was to get a long range weapon... but I wasn't able to see an enemy before they saw me!!! It's so much bs, it is always them seeing me first and shooting at me even durind the night behind tress.
on the old games I saw many times mutants like fleshes or dogs draging bodies to eat them further away, very impressive at that time.
Yes I wish I included that also
Thank you for this. I hope they can get back to this level of A Life sooner rather than later. They did say it’s their main priority right now so we’ll see.
I don't think the video was too negative, GCS set themselves a high bar with the previous games. I totally forgot about Bloodsuckers ambushing and drinking blood. It added so much to their creep factor.
@@hetistijmen exactly! There’s nothing more terrifying that knowing a bloodsucker is watching you from the bushes
The bar they set and what they called A-Life 2.0 are not even remotely close.
I was walking into garbage and saw a bloodsucker just pacing around in the woods. He still attacked, but it would've been cooler/scarier if I didn't it see it hangin out beforehand
@@Validoleech That's why they lied about it. That's why there was a review embargo until the last hour before release. That's why GSC went on Steam and removed all mentions of A-Life from the Stalker 2 Steam Storage Page. They talked up A-Life 2.0 for literally years and put it into trailers and promotional material and documentaries. And it isn't even possible on Unreal Engine 5 or Consoles if you ask me. There will be nothing but a glorified spawn system for this game and I doubt that 100 meter bubble ever increases.
@yakivpopavich it's possible, it just takes good programmers to do it. And Grigorovich always opted on students or outsourcers. That's also the reason 4A Games studio was created, when 4 devs finally found out what is a real game development
I was wondering how the old games A-life works in comparison great video.
True A-Life 2.0 from OLR 3.0
- Every stalker has a goal, be it revenge/getting money/solving the mystery of the Zone/getting to Wish Granter.
- If a stalker has accomplished his goal, he leaves the Zone forever. this can be seen in real time, as he goes to the south of Cordon sneak through the military roadblock
- Stalkers can trade with merchants or with each other. you can watch how the merchant's/stalker's inventory changes and how much money he has.
- If a stalker finds a weapon more powerful than his own, he starts using it. If he finds armor better than his own, he changes it.
- Stalkers can find your stashes and steal them.
- Stalkers can drive vehicles. They can steal your car.
- Stalkers can die of disease, like anthrax/rabies/radiation sickness.
- Stalkers can find semi-plot (quest) documents. if necessary, these documents can be redeemed.
- If the “Unknown Stalker” lives long enough, he will get a nickname.
- you may meet a rookie from Cordon at the end of the game, who became a master, reached Wish Granter, made a wish and died.
- if a stalker runs out of ammo, he'll try to run away from the battlefield.
and a lot of other things, that's the first thing I can think of.
one person did for free in ten years what a commercial team couldn't do in 7 years.
Awesome content man ! Keep it up and Happy New Year's ^^
Thank you!
Funny how S2 has less render Distance for NPCs......
I think SOC had 150 meters for rendered simulation; beyond that, it was an offline simulation.
But the most important thing is that most NPCS were persistent.
I once had an NPC whom I saved and I met him 3-4 real life hours later bx pure chance.
A few maps away he was camping still "friendly" to me.
Or just find random loner,bandit bodies case they were fighting while the player was beyond render distance.
Not to mention this 95m? render distance makes binoculars useless while in Stalker 1 you could often scout ahead.
Sometimes you could stay in the Hub in COP and hear gunfights outside, mutants, etc even if you did nothing.
And 98% of the time it was"random A-life".
The problem with Stalker 2 it has very bad performance, forced Lumen, and all kinds of UE5 staff that kills performance and makes the game look 10% better.
Ideally, Stalker 2 would need like 200-300 meter render.(Some Stalker 1 mods have that).
And have an offline simulation.
Enemy combat AI should be at least on par with CS and COP......
All mutants could get their"low health" animations as in older Stalkers......
they should add path tracing and ray tracing options. I think they are more stable. Also remember that STALKER 2 is not UE5 5.5 which has brought a lot of useful features. Lumen and nanite get stabler each update, but upgrading would cost time and money.
I think the biggest reason S2 looks "next gen" is the 3d scanned game objects and animations. If you were to put those assets and animations into a modified xray engine it'd look almost as good if not better due to not being a blurry TAA mess
@@LaughingMan44Haha the texture trailing mess of UE is complete garbage.
@@IrrationalDelusion it's pretty awful
this is why I could spend days continuosly playing old installments, but not with 2, I mean age does take into account but...the Trilogy was just superior
Oh, that's what i've been asking for ^^
Thank you !
In my opinion your channel is one of the best Stalker 2 focused channels
I appreciate that :) you’re welcome
4:22 you madman!! i knew it wasn't just me :D if more people saw this (especially the part of the community advocating that there is an independent offline separate from the online bubble director) damn :O
a nice educative video that will help visualize what a-life was in the old stalker games and hopefully will be in its true 2.0 form in stalker 2 in the coming months/years
great to see the comparison!
@@NACCOY Thank you man! My dream is to look back on this and see how far it has come, You’re doing great work on Shays living zone mod and I hope you continue way into the future!
And that my friends is the benefit of having an own engine VS a shiny looking one like UE5.
Hey man someone in the discord showed the developers your video!!
@@fucstickjones8253 Oh! Did they say anything?
@@zoneslug Probably banned the guy, they don't really like people who voice criticism over there.
@@zoneslugyeah they say that the dev team watched the video and are working on fixes for 2025 .
@@firefox_tn1815 Well that’s very good, I hope the video has a small impact on the progression of future a life but I couldn’t do it without everyone’s support so thanks to you all
@@alquemir "probably banned that guy" Which means "Trust me bro."
To simplify the things, old games of Stalker seem to be more dynamic , you never predict what will happen. See snork eating corpse of fellow stalkers , next day see the dog drags the one you knew. Some random stalker’s name even stay at Camp for like 3 week then u found them lying dead near Garbage.
The old A-Life system kicks all sort of a$$! I mean, I decided to replay Call of Pripyat lately and the game feels alive. I mean, I can be on one side of the map, and on the other something is happening. And when I get there, I can see that something. For example, dogs chasing Bloodsucker or groups of stalkers duke it out between themselves or against bandits. And some of them are even trying to get artifacts or loot bodies of enemies that they killed. And I did not installed any mods. I just got latest GOG version and it was fun time.
exactly. and Clear sky is also amazing, with fleshed out faction war and NPC squads actually doing their objectives. I was hoping so hard that HoC would have that…
@@FilipMoncriefClear Sky is not great for immersion because of constant fighting going on and bad fight balance
this is what happens when everyone use UE5 and not make their own custom engine. almost all games now are made with UE5 or 4, sure it’s a decent engine but it can’t do everything and it can’t compare to when you make a custom engine for your own needs. the xray engine was amazing for its time. and maybe (i think so at least) today’s programmers are not as good as the older generation. Great video! thank you
@@-Belshazzar- Thank you bro!
All entities feel so fake, there is no real NPC tracking, they all are just freshly spawned and then forgotten..
This is grueling...
@@spicydong317 it’s very unfortunate but hopefully it’s temporary, they have stated Alife is a high priority for them
@zoneslug hopefully. It's current state is why I stopped playing
@@boomdaddymaxwell I don't recommend not playing due to the state it's in, even with the FPS issues/crashes it's still a fun game. The NPC and mutant AI is genuinely obnoxious with stealth seemingly being impossible with how the AI can spot you even when you can't even see them/hear them. But god is the gunplay (when it's not bullet spongey), artifact hunting, and exploring/atmosphere still so good. Unless you legit cannot play due to the lack of effective/good optimization then I would definitely play it.
Bland vague wording, what do you mean the "gunplay"?@@CelticMexican
@@CelticMexican good AI, stealth, and lack of bullet sponges were why I loved the og games. I'm not going to spend 100 hours playing something that isn't enjoyable to play. If they can iron all that crap out then I'll give it another go
Great video. But as I remember in Call of Pripyat Stalker can't collect artifacts - it's just animation of trying to get them and they will fail all the time. :) But still it's much better than nothing like in S2.
nope. thay have a +/-5 minute animation of scanning the anomaly, then picking up the artifact without going into it.
a life in the original games is insane, wow. thanks for putting this together. i never realized how insane it was.
No problem!
You forgot the injured monolithians actually blow themselves up just to kill you in the process. All hail Monolith
All hail Monolith
This from mod anomaly, not the base games
@@diogocademar321 really ı remembered wrong then
@@berketaskran8329 or you played Radiophobia instead of original SoC.
Wandering NPC in stalker 2 are now simply spawned in your vicinity because you're there. Just like in Rage 2. I just started running past them after the 1.3 patch because it became tedious.
Thank you for putting effort into this.
The synchronized grenade use proves they are all running on the same combat script
Yes I’ve noticed that ALOT good observation.
I remember looking at the steam forums at the time of release and this theory at the time of A-Life 2.0 not being in the game first came up. I decided at that point that this was basically an Early Access launch and I would wait - until the steam summersale 2025. Flashing forward to now looking this theory been proven true made me switch my expectations to "I get it when it's done". And I do not care how long this takes. meanwhile I can play the og trilogy modded or everything at once as an improved version with GAMMA. I can wait for as long as it takes and still get my Stalker fill. Hopefully this "Stalker 2" game will at one point live up to it's name.
OGs are some of the most immersive games I've ever played. So sad how stagnant AI systems have become in modern games.
"Stagnant" is putting it mildly. In fact I would falt out call that regression. It's emberessing how og Stalker, Half-LIfe and F.E.A.R. still make current year games look like there is barely any intelligence to the artificial nature to begin with.
@@bazzy5644I still really like people bringing up how much they like F.E.A.R.’s AI when in reality it was never anything special. There was no secret sauce added to them, rather the people behind the AI and the people behind making the maps worked closely together which greatly improved how they felt. They knew the AI’s strengths and would utilize them while also purposely avoiding areas that the AI sucked at in the map design. It seems simple but when you look at your average EA or Ubisoft game you realize that the guys working on AI in those games probably never talked to the mappers while working.
This was a similar case with Valve’s approach to games, as early on many devs had multiple jobs such as both animating and art, meaning often different parts of a game’s design were designed in-tandem with the different departments. It was also because Valve was really good at talent scouting, and they set the bar for the amount of playtesters used mid-development. Videos of the cut Combine AI still impress me to this day, seeing them rally and act with tactics in any navmeshed environment is badass.
If you are interested and willing to wait probably another 3-5 years I guarantee you when The Indie Stone adds in human AI into Zomboid it will be some of the best AI ever seen in videogames, surpassing the best aspects of all 3 OG Stalker games. It’s going to take them a very long time to do it though, they have a lot on their plate with B42 and 43, then they plan on adding Human AI in Build 44.
I recently played old Stalker games and it really makes me sad when I return to Stalker 2 and see those stupid spawns around me. In older games, everyone was just there, I didn't see any spawns or NPCs going to me out of nowhere.
I still don't belive them that there is some offline mode, if it was like that, NPCs would be still traveling thru zone and then just appear when they are close, but it's clear that it doesn't work like that, there are just random spawns. You want proofs? If they were traveling in offline mode, they would not come out of water or out of room with no other door and there would be no WWIII around you. If NPCs were just traveling in offline mode, what probability would be that 20 of them just meet you in the same moment and start shooting to each other? It doesn't make any sense, they are not traveling in offline mode, there are just random spawns.
I also noticed that NPCs in Stalker 2 mostly just run to you without using any tactics or covers. Even 20 years old games had better AI.
Their explanation that to have more advanced A-life would be too hardware demanding makes no sense, we have totally superior hardware than 15-20 years ago and it worked back in the day. If Unreal Engine 5 can't handle it, it's proof that engine is just terrible and it was a mistake to switch to UE5. A-life was one of things that made Stalker series that unique and it was strictly connected to their X-ray engine, it's clear that they are not able to program it again in other engine.
Let's hope in modders, they could bring real a-life in the future after Stalker 2 developers give them proper modding tools.
In old games, I was also used to give better equipment to friendly stalkers by just dropping it in front of them and when you later returned, they still have that weapon, that was actual real a-life system, eveony just existed, NPCs were not randomly spawned like in Stalker 2.
BTW, when we complain about random spawns in Stalker 2, it's fair to mention that even Clear Sky had random spawns and respawns of NPCs and it was pretty annoying when you destroyed group of bandits and there was a new group behind horizont going to you. This was happening only in Clear Sky, not in SoCH nor CoP. I think I even remember back in the day that developers admited that a-life in Clear Sky was kind of crazy, so they made it normal again in CoP. Now in Stalker 2, some crazyness of Clear Sky is back, so it looks like WWIII everywhere and I don't like it, it's damm zone, there shouldn't be milions of people everywhere shooting at each other, it makes no sense, to meet actual living human should be more rare in zone and each time you meet someone, it should be somehow memorable moment.
make it right GSC
I think they have no idea how to program it in Unreal Engine. A-life was one of main things that made their old x-ray engine so special. Yes, game had bugs and it was crashing a lot, but modern games are even more bugged and crash too, so people who say that modern engines are better in this case are totally wrong. Actually I played legaly purchased and fully patched Shadow of Chernobyl recently and I had maybe 3 crashes in 30 hours, it's more stable than Stalker 2 and it was crashing back in the day because of warez.
It's not possible. Unreal Engine 5 was never capable of A-Life. Nor are consoles. That's why they had a review embargo until the final 2 hours before release. It's also why they went on the Steam Store Page for Stalker 2 and removed all mentions of A-Life. They cannot make it right, because it's not technologically possible within the confines of the Unreal 5 Engine. An Engine in which they purchased and didn't make themselves, so they could rush along development. That's on them. They could have made a new X-Ray Engine or improved the old one and modernized it, but nope. That's a lot of work. And GSC and modern games developers aren't a big fan of doing a lot of work. As someone who played the original trilogy and various mods for now over a decade who was waiting so long for this game, I'm both saddened and frustrated by the state of it not only on release but now after multiple patches. Poor performance and optimization. Hard and soft locks due to NPC's and Stashes and certain items not spawning. No A-Life. It's genuinely pathetic and embarrassing to see the comparison of these games.
There are no original devs from the old team left
The new ones haven't even played original games
The current devs at GSC are incompetents
@@yakivpopavich People who know how to work in UE say that it is totally possible to make proper a-life in UE, especially in UE 5.2 and newer, but I think they just repear Epic's propaganda, we don't see any real games where it would work the same good as in old games.
There are also very annoying things in UI like automatical comparison of items where I still can't remember if my equiped item is on left or right, that inventory looks oldschool, but on other hand it has annoying features from modern games, they should go in one or other way, not both together.
Another thing that is big WTF for me is that even after 200 GB of updates, we still can't change keys for flashlight, meelee and granade launcher, that looks really weird to me, thise things must be super easy to solve.
The prone animation is exclusive to Clear Sky and to one character, "Ice," in Call of Pripyat.
CS is underrated in regard to AI behavior. They can even vault over obstacles.
Нет, анимация стрельбы лежа также используется НПС у аномалии "Цирк" на Затоне
I think in CoP the first quest in Pripyat there is one guy also going prone. It is sadly scripted.
@themaniomarian Yeah that's Ice the sniper
I was wondering about this, I never play CS, mainly SoC and CoP, couldn't recall seeing the prone animation. What about the bandit doing the quick-cover while reloading the double barrel shotgun? Don't remember seeing that either.
Stalker 2's fake A-Life is embarrassing and disappointing, events spawning in a mere 100 meters away is laughable. This is what we get with lazy modern game development and Unreal Engine 5 pre-baked engines. A-Life was never really possible on console I bet nor with Unreal 5 Engine, but they advertised it as a key game-play feature and put it into promotional material and trailers and documentaries. Then they deleted all mentions of A-Life from the Steam Store Page right before release, and had a review embargo until the final hour. Deceptive and manipulative marketing and a genuine shame to see from GSC. As someone who has played the original trilogy and mods for well over a decade now and was waiting so long for Stalker 2 I don't see myself purchasing or even downloading this game. It launched with no A-Life, and now all we get is some event spawning system that only works within 100 meters of the player. I don't think there will ever be true A-Life in Stalker 2, more a less " A-Life 2.0 ". It was all just a marketing gimmick they used to fool long time fans like myself.
>statistics, archives
The NPC PDA is just a screenshot from one of the trailers, "The Time of Opportunities" where these tabs were in player's PDA. it's cut content.
A-Life 2.0 in stalker 2 is just a glorified spawner of random encounters from Far Cry 5, except the developers of FC5 didn't promise how revolutional their spawner will be.
BTW, remember how bloodsuckers used to grab and succ you in SoC builds and in vanilla Call of Pripyat? Their model in Stalker2 still has the sticky bits on their tendrils to succ and on their palms to grab you/stick to you - exactly the attacks they don't use in S2, opting for some stupid unga-bunga jumping at you.
Yes I should have included the grab attacked, better than being knocked down by everything
It bothers me so much the fact that all mutants have this childish jump attack, and the fact that Bloodsuckers do this childish ooooh spooky rawr is scary :3 when in previous games they were 99% stealthy and silent except for their creepy breathing as they close in on you
Bloodsuckers on stalker 2: "UwU hewooo!!! Can you pick me up like a puppy :3?"
Bloodsuckers in stalker 1: "turn of that pda, stalker, and kiss me on my hot mouth, im feeling romantical"
Also bloodsuckers had different skin color based on their location (whitish on swamps, darkish in cities, etc)
“Other details I miss: *Bloodsuckers used to hide and ambush*”
You know what Old A-Life…
I don’t need that feature back, I don’t mind losing that one
@@seanhoffman8990 we need it! nothing more creepy than a bloodsucker watching you in a bush
3:51 this is the main thing missing from Stalker 2
@@EvilTim1911 Cheeki Breeki
you can see the love and cooperation to make this game even better, more thatn the game, the soul of s.t.a.l.k.e.r resides in his fandom, wholesome.
Stalker Anomaly, GAMMA, and EFP are incredibly ambitious games. Every NPC feels alive, living their own lives and interacting with the world around them. They report their discoveries, and if you’re quick, you can engage with what they find. If their friends die, they’ll guard their loot fiercely, even if you’re not hostile, and they’ll warn you off from taking enemies’ loot unless you force a confrontation. What’s even more impressive is that NPCs will loot gear and weapons from the battlefield, so the next time you encounter them, they might be better equipped with stronger gear and weapons. These dynamic and reactive systems are just a few of the things that make these games truly special.
In Oblivion Lost Remake 3.0 the modmaker finalized true build A-life like GSC originally intended -- the NPCs have tasks why they are in the zone, they go across all locations to fulfill those (can be to kill another stalker, find artifact, explore and get to some location, they even compete with player to find quest documents that are inside labs or agroprom then player has to get it from them or buy them out from Snitch). While they travel they engage in all A-life activities -- collect artifacts, loot which they then sell to traders, which those items transfer to the traders and the player can buy them, so after some A-life firefight some loaner will collect weapons and bring to sell to Sidorovich which the player can buy for themselves. Its a very complex and sophisitcated system that makes the whole in-game world feel alive, and what is more impressive is the whole mod was created by one person. Of course its not without its own downsides, being too hardcore at times and having a strange storyline, but it is impressive feat of modmaking nonetheless. BTW the creator of this great mode is called hi_flyer.
Duuude just like Fallout 4, the lack of visible holstered weapons upsets me, its such a small thing but it feels so wrong when its missing
@@firepots5530 Yes I thought the same thing, why were old games so good and they leave this stuff out like it doesn’t matter
happy new year stalker! You are doing goood work!
@@ForestRaptor thank you, happy new year 🥳
I can definitely feel those differences while playing. Stalker 2's world doesn't feel as natural and immersive as the old games.
It's like everything is staged around you and npcs don't seem to have an actual purpose : move to this zone, probe this enemy base, retake this stronghold, scientists doing science etc...
The factions are pretty shallow and kind of just part of the decor, rather than actual gangs perpetually at war with each other.
Npcs seem pretty dumb and harmless, rather than dangerous opportunistic individuals.
The older games are far superior in terms of immersion for those reasons in my opinion.
But since we'll get all the mods a community can dream of I'm not too worried.
That’s one of a number of huge differences that are frustrating. “Random” stalkers with A-Life had a purpose outside of being friendly and unfriendly combat obsessed loot boxes. They gave random quests; they traveled all over across the entirety of the zone; they could take artifacts from anomalies before you reached them; they had a ranking that impacted how dangerous they were and their individual chance of surviving encounters; the faction system mattered and you would have to scout them out to see if they were friendly or not.
There were never quests from random npcs in original games! 😂 Only in mods.
In Stalker 2 I shot a group of mercenaries and some of the corpses were empty, and one of them had a lot of loot, two exoskeletons, I think he was looting them while I was in an ambush. Once I saw a stalker looking for an artifact. But most often I saw them treating the wounded.
Im sure that was no looting, just pre-spawn in inventory. For example, on Varta base I killed a lot of NPC and at least four of them had armor suits in inventory. They couldnt loot it.
1:48 There's no mercy in the zone.
The devs have no idea why people like stalker if they really thought this system was fitting for this game.. every gameplay element in this game is static aka hard scripted.. that kills the feeling of the zone
I don’t even wanna play until this is working properly in s2
@@Killa-rd6hj I’ll test updates in the future and you can decide
I don't think you are negative, but I also want to tell you that I am modding this files right now, and it's as easy as setting let's say despawn from 250 meters to 500.
I have been doing it already and I also increased the spawn distance radius, to make enemies spawn further away from you, so you are not caught off guard.
What GSC did, which I truly respect, is giving us ability to edit this ourselves if you know how to unpack a .pak file
The issue with A-Life now (objectively), it doesn't fully exist yet, I can see why GSC spent all that time trying to get optimization right with UE5, it is really a tricky situation, that engine is hard to hone imo
War in Ukraine is not/was not helping either.
In fact, some of the developers of GSC are no longer in human bodies, because they went to war and passed. We lost not just time and resources, we lost a lot of minds behind A-Life
War in Ukraine also separated Russian developers from Ukraine who were working under GSC, so you have a lot of Russian region developers no longer present on the project.
If you start looking at it deeper, it makes perfect sense why A-Life is not there yet, because they lost people on Ukraine's side and Russia's side of development of Stalker series.
Будем надеяться, что разработчики смогут довести дело до задуманного. Остальное уже за сообществом, а оно игру не бросит, это уж точно :)
Кстати, с новым годом! Привет из России! Всем нам мирного неба над головой. Лучше играть в игры ;)
"What GSC did, which I truly respect, is giving us ability to edit this ourselves if you know how to unpack a .pak file"
Nice game for $50-70 where we need to rummage in files.
@@doctorzarulem Спасибо, за Мир. И вам того же, эта война нереально затянута. Я надеюсь на лучшее, так как свои люди по всему СНГ, и больно смотреть на это.
@@KryptonIndarius To be honest, we are lucky to see this game come out at all considering all the circumstance, and you once again said same exact thing that other people say that don't realize that they lost like 40% of their development team for different reasons during this war.
awesme work :)
@@fjuraa thank you :)
I do wish A-Life was abit more dynamic. Even after the patch I've had NPC's spawn behind my back.
This seems to either be incompetence, UE5 or both. Nearly every U5 game has this issue.
One thing i saw in stalker 2 and it surprised me. They seems to heal their wounded mate sometimes. But sometimes they totally ignored them
in the x-ray stalkers, there is a parameter switch_distance - you can adjust it
From my experience in Call of Pripyat, it can bug some quests, such as when you have to go to bloodsuckers lair with other stalker. He will simply stuck in one place at the elevator. So i won't recommend.
One step forward (graphic quality) several steps back (npc behavior, npc intelligence, render distance, life simulation, offline simulation). I share this video in the steam forums to proof the 'truth believers' that a-life is still isnt there.
@@GeneticResearch it’s saddening but let’s hope for the future
@@zoneslug Its going wild on steam forums about my post with this video. Most do not understand the video, claim the opposite of what is shown in the video and do not accept the information and insights that your attempts provide. For many, a-life 2.0 or generally an a-life version is in the game. I would not have thought that so many suffer from mental problems. That really shocked me.
@ Maybe they didn’t watch the video because they would just see i am showing how it is? They might think im just complaining but I actually really like stalker 2 I just miss a life
@@zoneslug I think for them we are automatically haters or trolls as soon as we say or show something they don't like. They don't seem to have the mental capacity to recognize differences or process information in general.
It's almost a shame to invest the work and time like you did to find out how the current system works and then show it to others. Fortunately, on youtube you can simply ban such people and hide dislikes to prevent hate waves.
I like to get new information, no matter what it looks like. Whether it's negative or positive, it's still knowledge that I want to know.
@@GeneticResearch I agree thank you, I like feedback because even if I’m wrong I’m learning something and becoming better, that’s my mindset
Good work here. I hope more ppl will see how this game is a major step back, unfortunately :(
@@RaMZes9722 Thank you, don’t let it make you feel bad, the Zone will prevail eventually
great info dude!
Yesterday because of A-Life there were 5 Wardens around me, I went into a quick mission into a boat (Sultan briefcase) and when I got outside there were at least 15 Wardens roaming near the boat killing boars. It was totally insane 😂
also so mutant would drag dead bodies off and start eating them including the player, which was amazing, the player death cam was cool how when you died the game world would keep running until you loaded it
I also miss the mutant variations, like diffrent skins for one mutant type.... GSC said that... maybe a spwan bug?
I miss that too!
They definitely used this as one of the marketing points, it's another cut content
Was expecting underground mutants to have a bit different behavior from surface ones
When did they start doing that? In CoP?
There are different skins of mutants, maybe not many though. I've seen different burers.
@@DemiG0D23 I’m sure I saw a darker more purple flesh at one point but I’m not sure
Personally i'd eventually like to see a radiant quest system like in Anomaly. I usually don't like radiant quests but in Anomaly it intersects with A life and all the other dynamic systems in such a way that it creates practically infinite possibilities for unique gameplay which is why Anomaly and GAMMA are so endlessly replayable. Imo they're some of the few games where you can actually create your own story.
@@CKrup there is a radiant quest system but it has nothing to do with alife, example if it is a quest to kill dogs they will never die unless you go and render them in
man
Cyberpunk, Starfield, then this game. Biggest slap in the face ever. I bought the old games on xbox to give them a playthrough and i seriously havent enjoyed a game that much since Red Dead 2.
It was so disappointing.
Part of me wishes they had stuck to a older less demanding graphics to get Alife on the same level or better BUUUUT the new graphics and FX are really sweet and i dont think emmisions and anomalies would feel as impressive so im fine with this as they are def gonna keep up their hard work.
@@MrMastrmonstr Personally I love the look of the old games too even after all this time, I hope they can optimise it soon
Happy new year!
npc still spawn up my ass or right after I killed of a wave of mutants.
there's so much devs need to fix it's insane. a lot of really bad bugs.
also I found out that if there is a fight between 2 groups of npcs ( doesn't matter mutant vs human or human vs human ) when you go outside the render bubble they will all be insta killed.
also damn do I hate this scripted event thing. Everyone has their path set through me, it is so unnatural how I'm always found by mutants or human npcs wherever I am at
@@asagishin8531 It can be frustrating at the moment because it feels very forced and fake, hopefully in the next patch it can be changed
@@zoneslug exactly
I missed the part, where when you are armed and try to talk to NPC they will point a gun at you and start shouting at you to holster your weapon and if you keep messing with them they can hit you with buttstock of a gun and your gun will fall of your hands. Some times they can even steal your gun 😅
Great video, you got a new sub from me stalker.
@@farhadnjr Thanks for joining me in the zone brother
I was mind blown by the amount of NPC dynamics Stalker Clear Sky had. The AI was greatly improved from its predecessor (SOC) and the Zone felt more alive and thriving with Stalkers, it made the player feel insignificant. Which is why I always find Stalker Clear Sky more favourable over other Stalker games. But man, I was genuinely dissapointed with A-Life 2 as they marketed it greatly for Stalker 2 but the results were poor and throughout my gameplay, the zone felt dead and empty with the exception of bases that only gave off 'alive' vibes. I hope they're expanding this 'circle' of A-life or use a different method to bring more life to the zone.
Great video btw!
@fieldersnl I know the feeling, it wasn’t perfect but clear skys faction system was amazing, even now nothing can do that
This is a great video, I was wishing someone would make comparison content. You should do some more, I would love to see a comparison between NPC behaviors especially combat behaviors. New dogs vs old dogs is an obvious difference for example.
I feel like Stalker 2 is a demo version of stalker CoP with maxed out graphics and without dynamic shadows.
i enjoyed this video.
very informative
Really great video. I love the game but some things just feel so barebones right now.
I once saw a group of stalkers fight 3 bloodsuckers. When 1 bloodsucker died, the other 2 started running away with this super weird sped up human jogging. If you have ever seen a gorilla run on two legs, looking like they are mocking humans, the bloodsuckers looked like that.
And to think that all of this could be done cheaply in terms of CPU time. The NPCs don't need to be spawned in, they don't need to be rendered, they don't even really need to shoot each other etc - it could be simulated and the results tagged to create corpses at that location or spawn a certain faction of NPCs at a POI rather than another when you approach...
I think they focused everything on what renders around the player, rather than have a secondary simulated ALife map
I really hope S2 becomes a labor of love - seeing the tremendous success it has had should be enough for them to keep at it with A-Life. Life cycles of games are so much better now with cobtinued massive sales potential for maybe a full decade after release.
I’m sure it will, the stalker community is the best
To be fair, they did say there will be more massive patches covering A-life later on
Nice! In that case if developer of this game going to buy car, car dealership must sell for him car without air conditioner, for example, or parking sensors for full price. And say - "we will ad it in future".
I swear ai in og stalker could sneak up behind you and stealth attack you
It is.
I don't think GSC will be able to make A-Life work like the original games in Unreal Engine.
@@pastichiorocker I have a dream
Mutants like Snorks, Flesh, Boars and Dogs drag corpses of their victims to a more secluded spot before they start eating in the old stalker games-- at least for CoP from what I observed
Happy New Year!🎉
🎉
The thing is I don't understand if AI in pervious games behaved this well without astronomical performance hit why the new AI while being bad hammers the CPU that much.
The previous games use the X-Ray Engine. STALKER 2 uses Unreal Engine 5. Also, this game has one large map, while the previous games have much smaller maps.
@pastichiorocker true but the code for AI should probably run better on newer systems the engine is more for graphics I think, Yeah the map is much much bigger to simulate offline conditions but if we take into account the computation power improvements since then if same code is applied to 4x map size of gamma it should handle it way better.
I hate how they made special mutants in to some big bosses with a lot of HP and stupid abilities like bloodsucker stunning screach, burer ability to fire weapons at you that lie on the ground, controller reanimating corpses... it's just stupid.
S2. The perfect example of sick and degrading industry.
On rare occasions NPCs can loot bodies. I'm not sure what triggers it but it is a neat way to get armor you shouldn't be able to get. I managed to get a merc and Spark exosuit that are two sets that aren't available to the player. They don't have player models and the Spark exosuit has incredible stats. I saw this happen a lot in the one Pripyat apartment complex near the library that's a Monolith stronghold. After slowly working my way through the apartment there were so many bodies and for some reason some of them got looted by the other Monolith. I ended up with around 2-3 sets of Ruby and Diamond exosuits. One thing I noticed about them is they seem to be heavier than the versions the player can acquire.
(I've been streaming this so if you pop in at some point I could show them to you as well as see about getting some footage. I know I have a good clip somewhere of a Spark member looting a dead comrade who I then killed to get the exosuit off him.)
at least that means the basic functionality for looting exists, just broken/disabled
From what I remember the old A-life could loot including your stash unless you find the personal storages. Stalker 2 seems to have given players one in each camp.
It is clearly visible that A-life is present in STALKER original, and in STALKER 2 there is some kind of stub that cannot even be called A-life. I sincerely do not believe that they will "return" anything there, because there is nothing to return. The current GSC team does not know how it works, and the developer responsible for A-life does not work at GSC. The video is good. It's good that you show the real state of the game and the attitude of the developers towards the players.
I'm much more sceptical about A-Life in the current age anyway. We had more ambitions with much low realisation requirements from players in the 2000s combined with lower numbers of games shared on mass in the 2000s. Naturally devs experimented more and mixed more. Today we have so many genres and they all flourish that if it were me, I would not try to implement the same MMO or multiplayer elements alike in the singles player game even if it is true to the STALKER experience. New times new specialities need to be added.
7:12 никогда не видел чтобы нпс лежали😮
Тысячи часов в Сталкач и я такого тоже не видел. Видимо очень очень редкий ивент.
he uses a mod that restores those animations, probably zrp
Stalker 2 has enough programming to PRETEND it has A-Life, but it’s just for show
I’m beginning to think they never really had an a-life system ready for the S2.
Thank you for the video, friend. You were not negative at all: you just showed the truth (which is sad, yes). As ambitious as GSC promised stalker 2 should have been it's not even close to the original series by the quality of the gameplay mechanics and AI. It supposed to be a sequel Idealy, not just graphically , trying to replicate the original but ending up being even worse.
on stalker anomaly, you can find NPC going sneaky on you back and if they have a good weapon on their hands they do sneak attacks on you.
dunno if stalker anomaly has changed much on the IA life.
it was a while ago in vanila Shadow of Chernobyl
I keep telling people that GSC is lying, their "A-Life" isn't even as good as what AMK team gave us for Shadow of Chernobyl's AMK mod back in 2008. I usually get responses ranging from calling me a Russian shill or a "zigger", a troll, or I get told to go play fortnite or something like that. I'm just an original STALKER fan who is telling people to not buy the terrible cashgrab GSC is selling us. Unreal Engine 5 can't even handle proper A-Life functions without massive demand on the system, which is why S2 is over 100gb in size and performs like garbage when Stalker SoC in 2007 was designed to run on slavic potato PC's. Now GSC is lying and telling people S2 has A-Life, or that it was "bugged" and the latest patch "fixed it" when it doesn't even have feature parity with a 17 YEAR OLD MOD? Don't believe the lies, keep your money.
> which is why S2 is over 100gb in size
The fact that you think that size comes from engine means you have zero understanding of how games work and should not be speaking on the subject.
The game is simply rushed, you can see it everywhere, from balance to economy to the story. Will it be ever fixed? Who tf knows.
> was designed to run on slavic potato PC's
As someone who actually played the game in 2007 I can assure you it was laggy as hell, demanding as much resources as Crysis (which was released the same year) while clearly behind on graphics quality.
@@ye_olde_urizel Wrong
This video had me questioning "If Clear sky actually the best stalker A-life wise?"
@@Sandy_Dust It’s probably the most in depth because of the faction wars system
CoP has overall better A life I think, but it’s missing the faction war aspect, which does a lot
Before A life - loads of enemies out of nowhere
After a life - loads of enemies and allies out of nowhere.
I literally stopped fighting. Wandering stalkers doing all my job and I just explore
Seems like they bit off more than they can chew with UE5. Having to sacrifice core concepts/mechanics that made your game great just to use the new flashy engine is definitely not worth it. This game has more time in my library collecting dust than play time unfortunately.
@@HeyRnold I’m hoping they release mod tools soon
Hey the NPC can loot dead body in stalker 2 if you do a silent kill and watch from afar they will loot also when they loot they have 100% to loot the armor and if you are lucky you can get a bugged bread armor that can glitch out when selling 2 of them you can get infinite money 😊
There is unique armor if you let them loot each other and killed the looter
It should be noted that NPCs in CoP could not find artifacts. They played an animation searching but never collected them.
Only 2 special NPCs who were Artifact hunters could. All others are just fluff.
You are wrong. In Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat, NPCs pick up artifacts, but only outside the radius of the main character's life zone. If you return to the NPC again after a while and kill him, then an artifact will be in his inventory. In CoP, I picked up artifacts from the inventory of killed stalkers a lot of times.
@Gerauchert-ko7mt they spawn with artifacts
Чел прав нпс их подбирают но не имеют анимации подбора.
@@CharcharoExplorer Proof? You're claiming they came into existence with an artefact in their inventory at the start of the game? Or are you claiming they go to an anomaly field, after some time have an artefact spawned in their inventory? Because that's literally what we mean
@@LaughingMan44 I am claiming they do not pick up the artifact (removing it from the field) and that instead, depending on their rank, they can spawn with it.
This happened in Basic SOC too btw. Low-tier artifacts had a chance to be found in certain NPC loadouts.
They marketed A-life 2.0, we got A-life 0.2
This confirms A-life 2 probably never existed, they slowly patching it in.
I doubt they will patch it in. I’ll eat my hat if this wasnt their last A life improving patch. Yeah I’m dooming.
@FilipMoncrief i hope not, but its not crazy to think they will eventually give up on it if they can't make it run well in ue 5. GSC has a history leaving their games incomplete for the modding community to finish and fix and im fully expecting the same its gonna happen again. The thing is, most players dont actually know what the og alife system was capable of so anything they manage to do will be enough for them, so i dont expect much backlash.
I think it reduced FPS 2x to 3x in their implementation. Doubt they would just lie about testing it…