Supporting Thousands of NPCs in 'Kingdom Come Deliverance' & 'Kingdom Come Deliverance II'

GDC Festival of Gaming details how Warhorse approached NPC simulation across Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, with thousands of characters following their own routines whether or not the player interacts with them. For developers, that immediately raises the usual open-world questions: how to keep crowds believable without turning the game into a pathfinding and AI scheduling bottleneck.

The practical takeaway is less about a single feature than the architecture behind it. Supporting that many autonomous NPCs usually means careful time-slicing, world-state management, and rules that let characters appear persistent without requiring expensive full-fidelity simulation at all times. It’s the sort of problem that touches gameplay, systems, and tools teams at once, especially when quests, crime, schedules, and navigation all have to stay in sync.

The session is framed as a look at both games, so it also offers a chance to compare how the first game’s systems informed the sequel. Even without a full breakdown of implementation details here, the topic is directly relevant to anyone building dense towns, living settlements, or simulation-heavy RPG spaces where the player expects the world to keep moving off-screen.