I might’ve been a tad too pessimistic in my belief that STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl might have problems maintaining a modding scene. Notably, a recent interview has revealed that GSC has changed up Unreal Engine 5 significantly to support STALKER 2, and A-Life is a part of it.
RadioTimes recently had the opportunity to visit GSC Game World’s Prague office to talk shop with STALKER 2‘s technical producer, Yevhenii Kulyk. According to Kulyk, GSC was basically forced to rework certain aspects of Unreal Engine 5 for it to be able to accommodate STALKER 2‘s sci-fi take on the Exclusion Zone. The game’s build of UE5 is customized to the point that devs refer to it as “5.1 GSC,” apparently, and Kulyk said that his team “had to adapt and [rewrite] and upgrade some tools that were provided by… the basic Unreal Engine to fit our needs to create [this] world.”
STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl May Break the Unreal 5 Modding Curse
This is exciting for a variety of reasons, not in the least because everything suggests GSC might’ve successfully transplanted the impeccable vibes of the STALKER games into Unreal, of all engines. One of the most notable of these changes has to do with A-Life: an oblique and questionably implemented AI system that has, arguably, acted as the main reason for STALKER‘s general popularity.
According to Kulyk, A-Life is present and accounted for in the Unreal-driven STALKER 2. He explained how the game’s AI functions in practice, even when the player isn’t around: “First of all, they have [offline mode]. [Constantly] some events are happening in the back end. So you may notice that during your gameplay. And of course, you may notice [the] results of maybe some firefights or maybe some mutant encounter that was attacked by NPCs or vice versa,” he said.
“So they have their, like, let’s say natural habitat areas, and some of these factions, or some of these monsters may roam around the map and try to catch the players. So there’s constantly life in front of the player, and, of course, [where they aren’t looking].”
For those who aren’t familiar with the old STALKER games’ AI, this is more-or-less exactly how A-Life worked there as well. Of course, mods such as Anomaly and Call of Chernobyl helped amp up A-Life to remarkable levels, but STALKER 2 may deliver something similar by default.
Not that modding is off the table at all, mind. Kulyk suggests that STALKER 2 will have a seriously impressive set of modding tools available from early on: “We’re basically creating and preparing the very big toolkit that will be that will provide the mod makers with basically all necessary tools to create mods from, like the smallest one to, like, big, total conversions,” he told RadioTimes.
As a long, long-time fan of the franchise, A-Life and modding toolkit details were the two last tidbits I needed to kickstart the hype train. Now, let’s just hope GSC delivers the goods.
