Cyberpunk 2077 mod makes Night City’s pedestrians less stupid

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If you’ve been wandering around Night City in Cyberpunk 2077, you’ll probably have noticed that the open-world game’s pedestrians seem a bit oblivious to what’s going on around them. They’re surprised when you bump into them, and often don’t seem to be aware of things happening just ahead. Well, thanks to a handy new mod, you can sharpen their situational awareness and have them behave more like real people who are trying not to get hit by cars.

The Alternate Crowd Behavior mod by TemplarGFX isn’t a full-on mod, it’s instead a tweaked .ini file that changes some of the distance thresholds for Cyberpunk 2077 NPCs. Specifically, the mod increases the distances that pedestrians will notice obstacles in their path, and that includes V – so you should see people turning to avoid plowing into you sooner with this tweak installed.

The mod makes a few more changes, too – NPCs will need less ‘personal space’ while walking, meaning they’ll cluster up more naturally, and they’ll be less likely to vanish into thin air while you aren’t looking at them (they’ll still disappear if you do something that scares them, however). The tweak also increases the number of NPCs allowed in a scene at one time – which is an interesting reversal of the mods that turn Night City into a ghost town by removing all the cars and pedestrians, which use the same kind of .ini file tweaks as this alternate behaviour hack does.

Here it is in action. Footage of the modified behavior starts at the 1:30 mark:

If you want to try it out, head to Nexus Mods and download the files. You’ll find two files in the compressed archive, one named altcrowdsfull.ini and one called altcrowdslite.ini. These are the ‘full’ and ‘lite’ versions of the tweak, respectively, and it’s important to note that installing either of them will increase the load on your PC’s CPU – as you can imagine, keeping track of more NPC behaviour means more work for your computer’s processor.

Select which version of the tweak you want to use, and drop the corresponding file into the folder Cyberpunk2077engineconfigplatformpc . Once that’s done, you’re ready to go mingle in a Night City full of people who aren’t quite as sleepy any more.