Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General BG3 interactable NPC count

As mentioned in the wiki, interactable NPCS are Non-playable characters that can be interacted, more or less, with and appears in the game. NPCs are characters/creatures/monsters that add contrast to the game's lore where they provide information, some are categorized as quest givers, while others are categorized as Merchants whom you can trade with or request for certain services.

There are currently just over 100 for act 1 of BG3.

As a loose contrast, there are over 800 in BG2 (base game, without counting in mods...).

I really hope things quick up a notch for the next acts! Quality is great. But I wouldn't mind simpler NPCs here and there to make the world feel more alive.

We play in the bupkis country for act 1. Act 2 is expected to be played in a city.

Also I believe that act 1 includes the Risen Road and the Mountain Pass and maybe even the Moonrise Towers. There´s a lot of act 1 we don´t know yet, which means a lot of new NPCS coming. XD.

Personally, I really like the fact that everyone we meet is a named individual usually with something unique to say rather than loads of generic peasants and townspeople who all have pretty much the same chat, and within reasonable limits am more than happy to forego quantity for quality. I can see it might be tricky to successfully maintain this approach and yet make population centres feel alive and busy enough, though, but I have my fingers crossed Larian will find a way to manage it without compromising this particular aspect of their vision.

Same feeling here. NPCs for the sake of having NPCs lead to games like Daggerfall where everything is a chore to do. Later TES games shifted away from this and proved that only adding less but only meaningful NPCs is the way to go.

I think so far the amount of NPCs is fine given where we are, but I think there's a potential problem with this approach once we get to Baldur's gate. After all its a city, not everyone there is going to matter to the story, and more importantly they shouldn't matter. Sometimes the purpose of NPCs are to populate the world, to make it feel full and that's all that's needed from them. Here it makes sense that everyone is someone because there's so few people around relatively speaking. It's an isolated area. But a bustling city? Sometimes quantity IS quality. The peasants all have the same chat because they're not there to be spoken to, they're there to fill out the world in a particular way. That's their purpose and its still a valuable one. They're like extras in a play or a movie, they exist because it would be weird if they didn't.

Also after a point these characters do still have the same single chat, they just force us into an unnecessary cut scene to say it.

I am really curious on how Larrian will design and populate the cities with NPCs. Low count but with close up short dialogues or high count with top-down "banters". Mix of both would be great.