Stalker 2's 1.5 mega-patch just dropped and GSC says A-Life is back, baby

As you may have discovered earlier while reading about its modkit requiring almost a full terabyte of space, Stalker 2 got a pretty gargantuan patch today. GSC is calling it the "Guns and Looting update," which I feel undersells it a little, and the rest of us are calling it patch 1.5. It's a doozy, folks.

The headline item is, uh, the item in the headline: GSC claims that Stalker's A-Life system is more-or-less back in action with this update. If you're not familiar, that's the system that's been the Stalker series' secret sauce since the very first game, Shadow of Chornobyl. It's the name GSC gives to the fact that the Zone's NPCs have lives of their own: they wander around, pursue goals, get in fights, die messily, and it's often you who stumbles across the aftermath or gets swept up in the carnage.

It's the thing that makes the Zone feel alive, in other words, and it's been busted since Stalker 2 dropped as GSC grappled with a billion other bugs and the peculiarities of Unreal Engine 5 (all previous Stalker games were on GSC's own X-Ray Engine).

Now, the studio claims to have cracked it. "Life in the Zone is now simulated for all characters, not just those in the player's view," says item #1 on the Steam patch notes. "Characters continue to live their lives and pursue their goals in the Zone until they meet their end."

Which is also a description of strangers you meet in the real world, but it's huge news to Stalker sickos. As Zone NPCs go about their business, it's now entirely possible for you to meet them at one time, go your separate ways, then run into them somewhere completely different later on down the line, just because both your (actual) goals and their (simulated) goals happened to collide in a particular way.

I've not tried the patched version of the game yet (I had to uninstall Stalker 2 to free up a couple hundred gigs for, you know, the rest of my computer), but if this works as it should then it sounds like Stalker 2 is a proper Stalker game, now.

GSC has also taken a spanner to the issue that was causing NPCs to materialise into existence in the player's line of sight. "Characters will no longer respawn directly in front of the player. When the player clears the mutants' lair, for example, those mutants won't simply reappear moments later," go the notes, adding that "A-Life Director will no longer respawn characters at the edge of visualization. Instead, respawn moved further away from the player, while maintaining the Zone's population."

Which is all great stuff, and that's before you even get into the parts of the patch that make it the "Guns and Looting" update, or the usual enormous bounty of fixed bugs (which you can find in the link above). In addition to the A-Life stuff, patch 1.5 also adds a new rifle and pistol, a new anomaly—the "Water electric tornado"—and the ability to loot parts off of mutants like you could back in the Stalkers of old. Enjoy lugging 20 pseudodog tails back to Sidorovich, stalkers.