When it comes to city builders and simulation games, it can often feel as though the player operates like a god with little true care or necessity to cater to the needs of the inhabitants. For the folks over at Untold Games, this was an area in which they saw potential to set their title City 20 apart from competitors, by designing NPCs with real needs and personalities.
On this topic, we recently spoke with co-founder Elisa Di Lorenzo during our time at London Games Fest's New Game Plus event, where we got to learn a little more about this major focus on creating authentic and charismatic NPCs.
"We currently have, I think, around 80 NPCs in the game and they're entirely simulated. So they have basically to live and survive exactly like the player. So they have their own needs, routines, jobs and stuff like that. And what they do also depends... I mean, they're driven by desires. So they do things because they want to do specific things."
Di Lorenzo then gave an example of how this can work in-game, explaining: "In many games NPCs are just there for you. You do your things and, you know, like, oh... the shop is open, the shop will have the things I need and so on. But if a character is not there, that character is not going to be at home necessarily. They might be doing something else. There's some characters that like specific things, like mushrooms, and then the guy that likes mushrooms will be looking for mushrooms in the woods when they're not working, you know, that sort of thing."
This naturally posed a few challenges for Untold Games in a balancing perspective, with Di Lorenzo adding: "It's also a challenging thing for us in terms of balancing the game as well because while the player has needs, but also the NPCs have needs. Sometimes you find yourself competing with NPCs for resources. I may need to go to the blacksmith and buy some stuff, and maybe it's out of stock because the inventory is not just simply replenished every now and then. The blacksmith needs to build everything. So they will need resources and that sort of thing.
"We think it's interesting and challenging a bit. And also because the way you can potentially have an impact on the NPCs because of how you can help them or sabotage them in a way. So you have an impact on the actual life of the NPCs as well, depending on what you do."
City 20 is currently in Early Access on PC and most recently launched its 0.9 update. It's unclear when Untold expects the full launch to happen, but Di Lorenzo did express to us that the aim is to debut in 2027. Check out the full interview below.
