Assassin’s Creed Unity (2014, PS4, XOne)
In a full simulation, up to 60 NPCs exist within the player’s radius, the rest are puppets, routed and scheduled by Shepherds, without their own AI. But these puppets are built from NPC subsets (separate skin, dress, hat, boots in absolutely any matching color) and the moment you interact with one, the game loads the actual NPC it’s based on in a fraction of a second. Does it really matter who’s moving around or chatting 40 meters away from you? No. And that’s exactly where the design became historic.
There’s no need to simulate every NPC every frame off-screen – a super simple background simulation is enough, with deferred updates to their gameplay states.
Krafton’s market capitalization is 4–5 times higher than Ubisoft’s, it’s not some struggling indie studio, it’s the 9th most valuable company in the industry ($10B) and owner of PUBG (top-5 franchise generating $1.8 billion a year).