Dragon Dogma 2’s performance problems in towns are due to NPCs who think too much, say developers.

I still enjoy my time with Dragon's Dogma 2 - it's a great RPG, if you can look past the weird microtransactions of day one (that didn't give you much good), and one that breeds emergent chaos. For example, your pawns blowing up your car because you were so stupid to equip them with certain spells before a goblin attack.

The performance issues in the town are baffling. It's not that the game looks bad, but I never understood why 10 peasants walking around in a wood with particle effects flying all over would cause my framerate to plummet.

Capcom has the answer: The NPCs were overthinking. This is according to a Famitsu article in the wake a recent patch that fixed some performance issues (thanks Automaton for the translation).

Dragon's Dogma 2 allocates CPU power to processing the thoughts of NPCs and the effects on character physics. In scenes where there are many NPCs at once, such as in towns, the CPU load can be extremely high. This can affect the frame rate.

This means that yes, the psychic noise made by the NPCs as they went about their daily lives in the game was the culprit. Capcom told IGN in March that the NPCs were to blame, but the idea that the internal lives of the rich characters was the cause is new.

The team has been "reworking the way NPCs' thought processes are processed, and making small tweaks including changing the order of processes that are executed" in an effort to calm things down. This is a small merci.

It's fascinating to learn that these thought patterns are so intense that they can cause problems. I'm sure that DD2 NPCs have their own little routines but that tech has been around since Oblivion. I can't stop wondering what the mysterious differences are between Dragon Dogma 2 and its seemingly galaxy-brained side character. Maybe Frog Nasty has been a genius for a long time.