Stalker 2 NPCs hide cut features that players have been begging for

GSC Game World’s Stalker 2 has released in an unfinished state, although we still thoroughly enjoyed our time with the survival game. While the game’s launch has resulted in a broken A-Life system, it’s also meant that some features were cut from the title.

However, attentive players scrounging for details within Stalker 2 have noticed that the game’s NPCs actually hide some long-requested features that aren’t present in the sequel, but were in the older games.

Stalker 2 NPCs hide scrapped features

In earlier games in the series, the player’s PDA system is the most useful tool in their arsenal. Alongside tracking quests, locations and more, the older games tracked your player statistics as well as having an “archive” tab for past dialogues.

In the current version of Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl, the PDA completely lacks statistics tracking and the dialogue archive. However, it turns out both of these features were in a previous version of the game, and NPCs have access to them.

One player noticed that NPCs holding PDAs show a fully active screen. On that screen, both the Statistics and Archive tabs are shown, but they’re completely greyed out. This means that GSC Game World was, at one point, planning to add the fields into the PDA system, but cut it sometime during development.

In fact, as players have called out, these tabs were present in marketing materials for the game just a few months ago. In August, the game’s Gamescom 2024 demo included both PDA options for players to use.

With GSC Game World dedicated to fixing the game’s horde of bugs, restoring A-Life support and upgrading the game over time, there’s a hope that these features could be re-introduced in the future. However, there’s no confirmation that these features will ever make their way into the finished product.