Street NPCs repetitive appearance

[Scaletho]

Ok, I understand that Cyberpunk has its time since release but honestly it would be nice if the "street walking" NPCs had better variations on appearance and style in order to avoid a repetition of the same NPC (clothes and way of walk) in sequence.

At some point, as my character was walking in Japantown, I saw the SAME NPC passing by 9 TIMES (could be more, I gave up after the ninth) one after another! And usually it's easy to see 2 or 3 examples of the same NPC walking together.

The game is outstanding, no doubt. Walking in Night City is an amazing experience, but it could be nice if CDproj came up with a nice solution to avoid such breaking of immersion "exactly same NPC" repetition.

 

[Neuronin]

You'll just have to wait for Cyberpunk 2. It's probably going to be a substantial upgrade as it relates to crowd density and variety.

 

[northwold]

If I remember correctly NPC clones are more of an issue the lower the performance of your machine (I think it has to do with how fast Cyberpunk needs to stream the world for everything to run as it needs to and prioritising what's most important). Changes to the game accompanying Phantom Liberty made it even more demanding.

 

[Scaletho]

If I remember correctly NPC clones are more of an issue the lower the performance of your machine (I think it has to do with how fast Cyberpunk needs to stream the world for everything to run as it needs to and prioritising what's most important). Changes to the game accompanying Phantom Liberty made it even more demanding.

Well, I have a RTX 4070 Super 12GB and very good AMD... but maybe its not enough. Anyway, I guess I must get used to it.

 

[DonLuzolvaz]

Well, I have a RTX 4070 Super 12GB and very good AMD... but maybe its not enough. Anyway, I guess I must get used to it.

This has NOTHING to do with your GPU and CPU, so you listing them in your comment is pointless. Are you running the game on an SDD or have you turned on the HDD mode in the utilities tab of the settings menu by accident?

 

[Guest 4802528]

Kinda works for me ngl, makes me feel less guilty when I kill them

 

[Bearded_Geek]

Running a 4070, max crowd settings on an SSD. The number of clones are definitely worse than they used to be before 2.3. No mods.
These two screenshots are from the same market place at the same time. The "twins" arguing 10 meters away from the "Clone Highschool" at the tables.

 

[Delilah_]

Weird, as someone with a 5400RPM HDD i rarely get clones, thanks to HDD Mode, my issues are only worse when travelling at high speed and the HDD not feeding enough data to the GPU to render. interesting.

 

[wilczajagoda]

That clone highschool is both hilarious and creepy. What is weird is that I've run into such gatherings in badlands, which are otherwise not crowded, and yet the game is cloning npcs.

 

[Wrongweigh]

I think it's time we retired the term "trash" when it comes to NPCs

Post automatically merged: Mar 9, 2026

I just finished my first playthrough & crowd density as multiple sames in close proximity was my number one immersion breaker.

 

[SigilFey]

It's bound to happen sooner or later, as part of it is just random chance. But it should not be happening on a regular basis.

If that's the case, it's likely down to available RAM / VRAM. The game can only create as many differences as it has memory addresses both available and recognized by the game. Higher, overall, more demanding settings will increase the frequency of cloned NPCs, especially when the system is under load.

Options:
1.) Be certain that "Slow HDD mode" is off if the game is on an SSD. You will see clones in crowds regularly if this is on.
2.) Decrease the heaviest-load graphical settings. Giving CPU/GPU more overhead also means more available RAM/VRAM. Dropping your resolution from 2K/4K down to 1440p or 1080p will probably have a huge effect.
3.) Limit your FPS to 120 or less. The need to generate more frames each second will limit the other calculations that can be done.
4.) Decrease crowd size. Fewer instances will obviously result in fewer clones. (If you're on an HDD and need to use Slow HDD mode, then big crowd sizes are all but guaranteed to create clones.)

 

[Wrongweigh]

I just think there might be better ways of implementing density that only a few studios appear to implementing

 

[Kasili]

I don’t think this is just “random chance” when people are spotting chains of identical NPCs in the same small area. A bit of repetition is understandable, but 5–10 copies of the same person in sequence is clearly a crowd generation issue, not just bad luck.

What makes it worse is that it hurts immersion most in the exact places where the city is supposed to feel most alive. Night City looks fantastic, so the clone effect stands out even more.

Checking HDD mode / crowd settings / VRAM is fair advice, but this also feels like something CDPR could improve on their side by adding stronger anti-duplication rules for nearby NPC spawns. Even if overall variety stays the same, just preventing obvious duplicates from appearing right next to each other would already help a lot.

 

[northwold]

I don’t think this is just “random chance” when people are spotting chains of identical NPCs in the same small area. A bit of repetition is understandable, but 5–10 copies of the same person in sequence is clearly a crowd generation issue, not just bad luck.

What makes it worse is that it hurts immersion most in the exact places where the city is supposed to feel most alive. Night City looks fantastic, so the clone effect stands out even more.

Checking HDD mode / crowd settings / VRAM is fair advice, but this also feels like something CDPR could improve on their side by adding stronger anti-duplication rules for nearby NPC spawns. Even if overall variety stays the same, just preventing obvious duplicates from appearing right next to each other would already help a lot.

Duplicates are created when the system can't produce distinct people fast enough. It's not clear if you're asking for fewer people to be generated, or for the performance issue to not exist (which seems rather futile). The game became noticeably more intensive after Phantom Liberty. Up to that point I had never seen a duplicate. Thereafter I might see two or three in very crowded areas like the centre during rush hour. But ultimately it depends on the performance of your machine and your settings.

 

[-Nailes-]

This was before Phantom Liberty, the number of duplicates in this instance is off the charts. Several are duplicated up to 10 times.
I have serious doubts about performance being the culprit, even with a 4090 and SSD I still regularly see duplicates.

 

[northwold]

This was before Phantom Liberty, the number of duplicates in this instance is off the charts. Several are duplicated up to 10 times.
I have serious doubts about performance being the culprit, even with a 4090 and SSD I still regularly see duplicates.
View attachment 11432452

Don't know what to tell you other than that I've never seen anything like this. Pre Phantom Liberty I was at 1080p on a 3070, after I've been at 1440 on a 4070 ti super, both with frame rates capped below 60, max settings, running from a nvme drive (no mods).

 

[Spockprime]

Early in the game's life cycle, I saw duplicates all the time. In the current build, I don't see them enough to even notice it most of the time. As usual, if somebody is on PC, there are mods available to alter gameplay. For random NPCs, there are mods that impose specific conditions to minimize duplicates.

 

[-Nailes-]

Its especially interesting that its always "static" NPCs.
I drive around Corpo center, where its very busy with people on the pavement(its literally packed) but very few duplicates. But then you walk around a place like Kabuki, with fewer NPCS than Corpo center and thats where you see the duplicates, standing in one spot(as if they are talking to eachother).

 

[SigilFey]

AI duplicates will result from a lack of memory addresses to assign for new NPC randomization. In order to figure out if there's a bug with a certain location, area of the city, perhaps a particular NPC design, etc., we can't just aimlessly say, "But there's this and this and this, as well." We need to systematically exclude what we know to be the case already.

0.) Mods. Always a given. If you're not in a 100% vanilla playthrough on a clean installation, you'll almost certainly wind up with results that can't be confirmed or reproduced.

1.) RAM. If you have anything under 16 GB of system RAM, you will likely see duplicates regularly if you increase the crowd size.

2.) VRAM. If you have less than 8GB of VRAM, same as above. What I definitely know: VRAM is directly linked to the engine's ability to populate crowds quickly and completely (at least on Nvidia cards.) I have personally tracked the activity and confirmed that having 12 GB of VRAM drastically increases the variety and performance of large crowds. However, the occassional dupe is still there. (What I definitely do not know: Are there areas that have smaller lists of NPC variables overall, resulting in a necessity to create dupes in those spots, because there are no other options to choose from? Possiblly. I think so. Especially with a few indoor locations, it seems there are more dupes than other places.

3.) Your system overhead. If your hardware has reached its limits, that's all you get. To free up more, these are the settings options you can change, in order of most-impactful to least-impactful:

1. Lower your system resolution to 1440p or 1080p. This drastically decreases load for every other conceivable hardware function. There is no single change you can make that will have a more decided effect on freeing up CPU/GPU cycles, amount of RAM/VRAM used at any one point, swap file usage, etc.
2. Do not use Upscaling -- either draw at the selected resolution or even better, use DLSS/FSR/XeSS.
3. Turn off Ray Tracing.
4. Decrease LoD distance.
5. Decrease Cascade Shadow distance.
6. Decrease Volumentric Fog detail.
7. Lastly, if all else fails, decrease Crowd Density.

Importantly: this is to systematically experiment with the system. Your mileage will vary. Will the game ever unfailingly produce crowds with zero duplicates? No. That would require an infinite number of combinations and therefore infinite system resources. There will be limits no matter what.