In open world games like GTA 5, what happens to NPCs when no one is around? Do they still “move,” drive, etc?

Question

In open world games like GTA 5, what happens to NPCs when no one is around? Do they still “move,” drive, etc?

In: Technology

Answer 1

In general, NPCs only do things when in the current rendering area. However, there are some cases where they do move around.

Skyrim is a good example of this, there are several npcs where their location is calculated via time of day or time since journey started (for certain follow quests). But these npcs are generally special, I’d say about 90% are either static or randomly generated and cease to exist when outside of the player’s area.

GTA is a pretty good example of random NPC generation. I haven’t experimented, but I would expect for cars on the road or NPCs on the sidewalk to be different each time they’re loaded in. I’ve seen it particularly obvious in other games where there’s a defined spawn point for the tile.