A former designer on The Witcher 3 has revealed the lengths CD Projekt Red went to in order to convince players that its NPCs were truly alive, admitting that early attempts at simulation sometimes resulted in mothers dropping their babies. Speaking to PC Gamer, Philipp Weber said that convincing players the game's villages were not "just fakery" was a persistent challenge.

Weber told PC Gamer that players would scrutinise even small settlements, wanting to see if the inhabitants had genuine routines. "If a village only has eight houses, people will want to see if the people truly exist in the world or if it's just fakery," he said. "Lots of people nowadays are interested in those kinds of details, and it really came to haunt us." He noted that while building such a village now would take just two hours, the underlying simulation was initially shallow.

One memorable bug saw NPCs programmed to drop whatever they were holding and flee when the player drew a weapon. "For a few weeks, women were just dropping their babies, left and right," Weber recalled. To improve believability, the team gave NPCs unpredictable cycles of appropriate activities rather than fixed paths, allowing them to pathfind to "spots of interest" on their own.

The challenge of simulating believable worlds echoes across the industry. IGN recently reported on Disney's live-action Tangled remake, a project that will rely on convincing digital environments. Meanwhile, DualShockers noted in its Madden NFL 27 review that even sports games struggle with NPC behaviour. GamesRadar+ explored how unintended emergent behaviours, like wallbouncing in Gears of War, can define a game's legacy. Nintendo Life questioned whether players still engage with Drag x Drive's physics-based world a year on, showing that the battle for player belief never truly ends.

• Philipp Weber told [[PC Gamer]] that players would test whether NPCs in The Witcher 3 were genuinely simulated or just "fakery."
• An early bug caused mothers to drop their babies when the player drew a weapon, as all NPCs were programmed to flee.
• The team later gave NPCs unpredictable activity cycles and autonomous pathfinding to improve immersion.

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