‘Cyberpunk 2077’ PC Mod Makes Night City’s Residents A Little More Lifelike

One of the more amusing, um, broken things about CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077 is how the public of Night City have a habit of simply vanishing, should you swiftly look the other way from them. Whatever platform you've played the game on, chances are you've seen this happen - and it's not just the people, but the cars, too. One second, there they are. Turn 180. Turn 180 again, and, wow. They're gone.

There's a reason for this: game designer Gareth Damian Martin tweeted about how the disappearing pedestrians are a symptom of poor design rather than simply being a bug. "Cyberpunk is buggy as hell, we all know that, but by expecting and acknowledging this reviewers seem to have turned a blind eye to the massive, often absurd, issues with the game's open world," he wrote, before digging into some of the flaws with the ambitious game's AI. Which is to say: the game's AI is bad.

But where there's a minor headache with any game, a mod is rarely far behind. And thanks to PCGamesN, we're now aware of one that helps the people of Night City act a little more lifelike, and should see them vanishing into thin air a little less.

You can find TemplarGFX's Alternate Crowd Behaviour mod at Nexus Mods, and in a nutshell it "alters how crowds are generated and how they move to try and make them look a little less idiotic". Sounds good to us. Both a 'full' and a 'lite' version of the mod - which isn't actually a mod, but let's not get into those weeds - are available, and PCGN notes that both will be demanding more from you PC, so bear that in mind.

To get into a little more detail - again, thanks to PCGamesN, here - the mod adds greater distance to the Night City population's perception of what's around them. Or in other words, they spot obstacles from further away, including the player character of V. So nobody should be walking right up to your face before pirouetting and wandering off the way they came from.

All NPCs should group together in a more natural manner, too - but should you fire a gun, or drive wildly onto the pavement, they'll still scatter and, ultimately, disappear from the world. The mod also allows for more NPCs to be in a single area, at any one time - so, again, if your PC is already having a hard time with Cyberpunk 2077, maybe think twice before installing this one.

You can find our review of Cyberpunk 2077 for the PlayStation 4 - played on PlayStation 5 - here. The game also (just about) made it into our top 40 of 2020 - though please, enough with the 'where's Ghost of Tsushima" comments. We've been very clear as to why the games that are there, are there. Repeating ourselves is getting boring.

Topics: Cyberpunk 2077