During the production of “Grand Theft Auto IV”, former Rockstar technical director Obbe Vermeij revealed that producer Leslie Benzies wanted every NPC in the game to have his own life. They originally planned to give NPCs a fixed residence and daily schedule, drive to work every morning, and make the whole city look like real people were living there. It sounds great, but in practice it quickly becomes a nightmare for the development team.
NPCs have their own lives, and bugs also have their own lives.
Vermeij said that the team had indeed been developing in this direction for a while, but the complete life simulation of NPCs quickly created a lot of bugs. At that time, “Grand Theft Auto IV” had just entered the PS3 and Xbox 360 generations. To have a large number of NPCs in the city move around according to their own schedules at the same time was too burdensome for the hardware and systems at the time. In the end, the team also discovered that although these features sounded real, they did not bring much value to the actual gaming experience.
Players actually don’t care that much about what time NPCs go to work.
More directly, Vermeij himself does not agree with this direction. He believes that players can actually accept that NPCs are a bit “fake” or even superficial, and the game does not necessarily need to make everything to the level of the real world. After all, players play “Grand Theft Auto” mainly to do things, not to study what time the passerby on the street corner clocks in every morning. This philosophy ultimately allowed Rockstar to focus resources on more important game systems.
Sometimes it’s not that fun when it’s too real
This past incident once again reflects that when Rockstar was developing the “Grand Theft Auto” series, it often tried a lot of high-spec systems, and finally cut off those “cool but unnecessary” things. NPCs having complete lives sounds very much in line with the ultimate fantasy of an open world, but if players can’t feel the difference at all and the development team is busy fixing bugs every day, then this sense of reality is really a bit expensive.