npc routines might be more smoke and mirrors than rdr2 style simulation

Been combing through everything since the extended look with release under two months away now. One thing I haven't seen much talk about is how NPCs react to being followed. The IGN interview mentioned they'll notice if you're tailing them and can even get aggressive. As someone who writes code for a living, that detail jumped out at me as a deliberate trick.

RDR2's big flex was NPCs with full lives. Wake up, go to work, lunch break, bar after shift, home, repeat. That was genuinely impressive and nobody else has really matched it since. Rockstar always competes with themselves, so a lot of us assumed GTA 6 would take that and scale it way up.

But Leonida is supposedly three times the size of RDR2's map. You can't write day and night scripts for every single NPC, not even a quarter of them. It would wreck the CPU and take forever to build. So I think they went with a hybrid approach instead.

Here's the idea. Instead of full routines, you get segmented component behaviors for different areas. Say a rooftop bar has a handful of scripted actions. NPCs take selfies, do shots together, a waiter walks table to table taking orders and punches them into a register. Someone gets up to use the bathroom and comes back. Those behaviors get batched and randomized for whoever happens to be in that area. When you're watching, it feels alive. When you're not looking, the game just cycles the next batch.

The smoke and mirrors part is what happens when you try to follow one of those NPCs home. They don't have a home. They might leave the rooftop, step out for a smoke, wander off a bit. But if you keep tailing them, they'll turn around and call you out. That's Rockstar telling you the simulation ends at the edge of the scene. They didn't get lazy, they just spent the budget where players actually look.

I'm honestly fine with that tradeoff if it means the city stays dense and the framerate holds. Full routines for everyone would be cool in theory, but I'd rather have a hundred believable moments than one NPC who walks to a bed I'll never see.

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Source: r/GTA6 · Curated content.