Designing Kuttenberg City Around Design Constraints | KCD 2

Kuttenberg became the pressure point for Kingdom Come: Deliverance II’s open-world design, with the city’s scale and population density shaping the rest of the game’s production. The session centers on what it takes to support thousands of NPCs in a historically grounded setting without collapsing performance, readability, or player flow.

That kind of constraint is familiar to anyone building large systemic worlds: once a city becomes the bottleneck, every surrounding feature has to fit its streaming, AI, navigation, and scheduling limits. The practical takeaway is that “more NPCs” is not just a content problem; it ripples into simulation architecture, encounter design, and how much of the world can be active at once.

The talk is part of GDC’s Festival of Gaming and sits alongside a broader session on supporting thousands of NPCs across Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Kingdom Come: Deliverance II. For teams working on dense towns, crowd systems, or simulation-heavy RPGs, it’s a strong reminder that city design and engine constraints need to be solved together, not in sequence.