Stalker

I’ve just read an interview with the lead designer on Stalker in this month’s Games TM.  I found one piece of information very interesting indeed.

Stalker has this A-Life system which, aparently, is this massively advanced AI system which allows (among other things) the characters in Stalker to move around completely independently and randomly-generated(ly), conversing with each other, trading items, creating and solving missions and so on.

Thing is, this only happens after you’ve completed a level.

They had difficulty getting the story missions to not be messed up by A-Life, so they basically switch A-Life off until you’ve completed an area.  So one of the most fascinating parts of the game happens largely in areas you don’t generally go into.

I may re-install and take a look.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, July 29th, 2007 at 8:53 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Stalker”

1. Toshers:

   § July 30th, 2007 at 10:27 am

   Sounds like they had conflicts with their own concept. The reason you would make something like A-life is that it would interfere with the player in unpredictable ways, thereby making the game more convincing and the player more involved. If their mission structure was conflicting with this… Well what do you ditch, the linear mission system that the player has seen 5000 times before, or the completely unpredictable environment that the player has almost certainly never seen before?

   I’d been reading STALKER previews since they’d first been getting published, and the thing that kept me interested was A-life. Oh well, my computer sucks too badly for me to buy & be dissapointed by the game now.

2. Ian:

   § July 30th, 2007 at 11:31 am

   Yeah, I was certainly dissapointed by the small levels, as opposed to the large open area we were promised. Massive downer for me.

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