The Witcher 3 is famous for its living world, but the road to that polish ran straight through some genuinely absurd bugs. CDPR's Philipp Weber opened up to Edge Magazine about how shallow the early NPC simulation was, and why villages felt like cardboard cutouts.
According to a summary of the interview by GamesRadar, the team eventually had to teach every NPC how to react believably to the player without breaking immersion. The early results were, famously, terrible.
What happened
- Weber is a quest lead on The Witcher 3 and discussed NPC simulation depth in an Edge Magazine interview.
- Early builds only had enough NPC logic to fake a populated village, not to actually support one.
- A specific bug had mothers swaddling babies dropping their infants when combat started.
- The fix was to give NPCs "spots of interest" and let them pathfind between them dynamically.
- For Novigrad's harbour, the team set up 200 possible spots for 50 active sailors.
What was actually broken
Weber told Edge that early in development, if you asked the team for a Witcher 3 village with eight houses, they could not have delivered one with believable behaviour in anything close to reasonable time. The world looked full. The NPCs underneath that visual layer had very little going on.
The clearest illustration came from the combat-flee routine. Whenever the player drew steel in a settlement, bystanders were scripted to let go of whatever they had in their hands and bolt. That mostly read fine on screen. It also meant that any mother holding a child would let that child fall the moment a sword came out. For weeks during development, every new mother NPC behaved the same way.
How CDPR fixed it
The fix was less about smarter AI and more about giving NPCs something to do in the first place. According to Weber, the team stopped scripting fixed patrol paths and started placing "spots of interest" that NPCs could move between on their own.
The Novigrad harbour example is the cleanest demonstration. For 50 active sailors, they built 200 possible spots of interest. Even with all 50 active at once, every NPC had multiple believable options for what to do next. That spread is what makes a crowd feel like a crowd instead of a script.
Weber also noted that today, that same eight-house Witcher 3 village could be delivered in about two hours. The simulation backbone has come a long way from the days of baby-dropping NPCs.
Our analysis
This is a useful case study in why "immersion" in modern RPGs is mostly a function of how much boring, invisible work the studio did before players ever noticed. The reason The Witcher 3's towns feel populated is not that every NPC has a name. It is that those NPCs have a small library of believable behaviours they can switch between without breaking the player's sense of the world.
CDPR's later framing is also telling. The studio has previously said the quality gap between hand-scripted NPCs and their AI counterparts is "like a canyon," and Cyberpunk 2077's most memorable street moments are usually the ones where designers planted a specific scene rather than relying on the simulation to generate it. The takeaway for any studio working on a living world is that systems and hand-crafting are not competing approaches. They are layered.
For modders, this is also a roadmap. The Witcher 3's mod scene has historically done its best work on quests, balance and visuals, but the underlying NPC behaviour systems are part of why the game keeps getting replayed. A modder who understands how "spots of interest" propagate can build mods that feel native instead of bolted on.
Say you are designing a town for your own RPG
Imagine you are building the first town in your game. You have ten NPCs and a one-block map. The cheapest version is to give every NPC a fixed patrol: walk to spot A, wait, walk to spot B, wait. Players will see the loop within minutes and your town will feel dead.
The CDPR version is to give each NPC three to five spots of interest, give each spot a handful of believable behaviours and let the NPCs pick. Now the same ten characters feel like twenty, and players will assume the world is bigger than it is. The math is the same. The illusion is what changes.
Bottom line
The Witcher 3's world feels real because CDPR did the unglamorous work of making NPCs behave like people instead of props. The baby-dropping bug is funny now, but it is also a perfect example of why immersion is engineered, not magical. Any studio shipping a living world in 2026 needs to budget for that work or risk shipping a beautiful screenshot and a hollow town.
Key takeaways
- Early Witcher 3 NPC logic was shallow enough to cause immersion-breaking bugs, including mothers dropping babies during combat.
- The fix was replacing fixed patrols with "spots of interest" that NPCs pathfind between dynamically.
- Modern RPGs need both simulation and hand-crafted scenes to feel alive.
Frequently asked questions
Why did The Witcher 3 NPCs drop their babies during combat?
Early in development, the combat-flee routine applied to every NPC, and parents holding infants had not yet been given a separate behaviour.
Who is Philipp Weber?
He is a quest lead at CD Projekt Red who worked on The Witcher 3 and discussed NPC simulation depth with Edge Magazine.
How does CDPR make crowds feel believable?
By giving NPCs multiple "spots of interest" and letting them pathfind between them, instead of scripting fixed patrol routes.
Does CDPR prefer hand-crafted or AI-driven NPC behaviour?
The studio has previously said the quality gap between hand-scripted scenes and pure AI is "like a canyon," and uses both approaches layered together.
Could modders use this approach in The Witcher 3?
Yes. Understanding how spots of interest propagate can help modders build encounters that feel native to the game's systems.
Source: pcgamer.com