Former Rockstar Games producer Leslie Benzies apparently wanted all of GTA 4’s population to have their own schedules and believable lives, but implementing a feature like that turned out to be both a massive headache for the devs and not that important for players.
The tidbit comes courtesy of Rockstar Game’s ever-chatty, former technical lead Obbe Vermeij, who spoke to Edge Magazine about the open-world game’s development: “Leslie Benzies wanted all the [GTA 4] NPCs to have their own lives. A place to live. A schedule. Every morning, they would drive to work. We worked towards it for a bit, but it ended up being so problematic.”
Rockstar might have been transitioning to a whole new console generation with the PS3 and Xbox 360, but making sure each civilian in its open world had their own inner lives proved to be too much of a hurdle for the then-next-gen hardware.
“There were so many bugs,” Vermeij said of the NPCs’ schedules. The other problem came down to the fact that it didn’t add much to the game, anyway. “I didn’t like the idea [of fully simulated NPCs] because it felt like it didn’t really matter that much,” Vermeij says. “It wasn’t really important that everyone had their own schedule and their own life.”
In fact, the opposite might have been true to Vermeij. “I actually think that, psychologically, players are fine with NPCs being a little fake and shallow,” he explains. “I think what it comes down to is that realism is just not necessarily something to aim for in a game.”
Grand Theft Autos have, historically, been at their most fun when they’re focused on being chaotic sandboxes, rather than realistic city simulations, though I, too, enjoy the thrills of driving responsibly in GTA 5. We’ll if GTA 6 leans one way or the other later this year.