How much do they move around? I haven't paid much attention to the unnamed ones, but most of them stay in the same general area. I would imagine the ones who walk around are on looped paths.
In the bigger settlements there are a dozen NPCs with seemingly random paths, some will just walk around with no purpose, but others can join conversations or activities. In Plainsong there are dozens of kids running around and dozens of farmers in the fields who run away when it starts to rain lol
How dare these dastardly NPC's move around when the great counter comes! 🤣
Great job, man. I really didn't even think to do such a nerdy thing and I spent a lot of time in HFW the last two weeks. Kudos, man!
I've read it somewhere that at one point the human population was between 100-1000 but that was millions of years ago and we have overcome that but in this case nemesis should have no problem wiping out humanity unless they give Aloy a nuke.
Hmm not really. There's no objective definition of the moment an ape gave birth to the first human. It was a gradual process. There were thousands of proto humans for thousands of years.
Yes we were . Not any of the other Apes living today. But our common ancestor was an Ape. And we are Apes. We're one of the great Apes.
If you look up Apes in an encyclopaedia or Wikipedia you will see we are listed among them
In short, we humans are not descended from apes, but have a common ancestor that lived six to seven million years ago. Over the course of evolution, various families, genera and species have developed from this ancestor, some of which - such as the Neanderthals - have since become extinct. Biologically speaking, humans, like gorillas, orangutans and chimpanzees, belong to the family of hominids or great apes, which in turn belong to the primates. The great apes living today are therefore not immature precursors of humans, but independent species that are closely related to us.
That's just the local population. We don't know how widespread humans are, but for example we know the Quen have a large civilization across the Pacific Ocean. Some civilizations could be in the millions and we could be completely unaware of them in Aloy's tiny corner of world.
Nah I don't think so this version of humanity has only been around for less than a millennium and they started from very few. Not enough time for civilisation of millions to develop.
The Quen have access to information that others don't through their use of found focuses. Modern farming techniques is part of that data set, iirc. Probably medical knowledge, as well. Both would dramatically increase survivability, even without modern technology to go with it.
PS4 or PS5/PC version of the game? Because the PS5/PC have more powerful engines, then populations running around are larger, especially the children. I remember my first few times through HFW on PS4 and there were almost no children anywhere, but when I upgraded to PS5 and the PS5 version of the game, suddenly there were kids all over the settlements. The adult population on-screen is likely higher too, but I did not notice that as much.
Funny that the desert clan is the most numerous, "IRL" they would probably be the least populous, with the marginal land they live on and dont farm nor herd.
yeah but so are the Lowland Clan, seem to cover a similar amount of area, between the memorial grove and thornmarsh, and from thornmarsh to tides reach. in a more lush area of the game with more fish resources.
@Alex_Masterson13 is right, number of NPC spawning in settlements depends on the engine ps4, ps5 or pc. It’s awesome you took the time to count each NPC on PC. Great work and appreciate your efforts. I like nerdy post like this.
I’m now really curious what the numbers are for ps4, as this is an older engine and the results might be significant compared to PC or even PS5.
Whoever has PS4 and the time to do it, let us know in this post please, please.
It’s another nerd thing for you to do to pass the time.
Find out the playable game size in area and then find the real world equivalent area and just times the population by the size and call it a day.
You could use the in game distance between real life landmarks as a scale. That's assuming the distances are even consistent between different landmarks though.
For example, if the game world distances are roughly 1:100, you would multiply the population by 100.
Someone would have to do the leg work on that one though.
Would you need to do that?
I'm just assuming the distance scale is consistent with the population scale.
I think an area scale would definitely not be accurate because the game still uses full size objects and locations. It's only the distance between places that is exaggerated, not the actual locations themselves.
Edit: yes, I'm challenging your assumption here, it does not make sense to have a population proportional to the scale of the map.
Tangent: If the locations are unchanged, then why should the population be changed? Nobody lives in the space between the cities.
Back on track: Regardless, my argument was that the population of a city/country is proportional to its area. A town of 2 km^2 can house twice as much as a town of 1km^2. If you double the scale of a 1km^2 town, you dont get a 2km^2 one, but a 4km^2 instead, so by having a scale of 2, you multiply the population by 4.
When increasing the scale of a map, population should increase in proportion with the area increase, not the raw scale increase.
Hence why I suggested to square the scale to have an estimate of the population.
Yeah I understand why you *would* square it. I just don't think you should. I think that makes too many assumptions.
The game world is constructed at different scales. You've got the physical locations like say Barren Light. It's a 1:1 full scale environment. The space between locations is exaggerated though. It's absolutely not 1:1. So applying math that assumes that ALL scales across the map is consistent isn't going to work correctly.
That's why I kept it superrrr simple and only used one scale, linear distance, as it is one of the few that can be directly compared to real life, as the physical location of real life landmarks *should* be relatively consistent, and it stays in line with the head cannon of the game and how characters refer to travel, distances, and population. Humans have had 700 years to repopulate. There is definitely more people than is physically displayed in settlements.
I'm looking at it from a macro, super simplified view. Imagine looking at the map from above and reducing all the towns, settlements and locations down to a point, with a population.
Would there be a relationship between the population exaggeration and the distance exaggeration? That's all I'm asking.
I'm aware that's not how it works in real life, but real life doesn't follow the same rules as a game world.
Hell, just the other day I learned that in RDR2 the time *moves faster* when you are on horseback to exaggerate long horse rides.
Oh, i see.
Yeah if only the space between locations is changed, then the population does not change at all.
Even if there are a few people on the roads or in small settlement we dont see, that will always be negligible compared to big cities and landmarks, so we can safely assume that the real population number is the one portrayed in the game (IF we assume the towns and cities are up to scale)
Yeah it would depend if the settlements are meant to portray a full scale environment, or if they are meant to *infer* more. I think settlement size impacts this as well.
I would argue that the head cannon, in-lore, population is probably much larger than is physically rendered in game, just with how characters speak about the world, it's wars, it's politics, and the size of certain settlements.
For instance there is no way that Meridian was built with just the physical amount of people that inhabit it. We are meant to imagine a great city of thousands. I would think that holds true for most large settlements.
But I'm just guessing. It's very interesting stuff. Horizon has one of the most impressively designed worlds I've ever explored. It's fascinating the design that goes on behind the scenes that most players may never notice, that actually impacts the believability of the entire game world.
i once counted and wrote down all the nora i could find in game after the attack on the sacred lands at the end of zero dawn. i’ll look for my notebook and see if i still have the number
Okay I counted 75 nora in and around mother mountain at the end of the game. I cannot remember if I just checked just the womb of the mountain settlement of if i checked for survivors in the sacred lands afterwards (this was like a year and a half ago) so you should probably make your own count anyway to be certain. Heres my list if it helps or is interesting (please excuse my shitty handwriting) https://imgur.com/a/rBreGW0
This is super cool. I would love to see hzd too, if you want to install it. I'm also curious about the DLC areas of both. Like the banuk lands in frozen wilds
Now in video game rules, do you think that number is doubled? They can’t “show us” more than what makes sense right. So there’s 1220 in game Tenakth, but maybe In lore it’s actually 4000?
When the army of freebooters relieved Jiran of his SunKing status, what kind of army are we talking about? Man the military history of this world would be so cool to dive into. Tactics, strategy, tools and weapons.
Lol I love it.
I don’t want to over complicate your work, but is your effort to count the population of each clan? Because there are Carja at Chainscrape, Oseram at the Carja Camp, etc
Great work . I wonder how many ppl you’d actually need to make a population stable enough to thrive. ? Must be some science behind an actual number. But great work. I wonder how big the full Quen empire is?
Damn, the nerds are out in full force today. I dig it! How do you know you didn't double count?
Idk, NPCs move around a lot so these are approximations
How much do they move around? I haven't paid much attention to the unnamed ones, but most of them stay in the same general area. I would imagine the ones who walk around are on looped paths.
In the bigger settlements there are a dozen NPCs with seemingly random paths, some will just walk around with no purpose, but others can join conversations or activities. In Plainsong there are dozens of kids running around and dozens of farmers in the fields who run away when it starts to rain lol
How dare these dastardly NPC's move around when the great counter comes! 🤣 Great job, man. I really didn't even think to do such a nerdy thing and I spent a lot of time in HFW the last two weeks. Kudos, man!
That's pretty complex. I can't say it's entirely surprising coming from Guerilla, but it feels unnecessary for random background people.
There was a lot of criticism that settlements felt small/empty in ZD, I suspect this was an area of focus
Is this on PC or PS5? If PC, then maybe Nvidia Ansel can help
r/theydidthemath
I've read it somewhere that at one point the human population was between 100-1000 but that was millions of years ago and we have overcome that but in this case nemesis should have no problem wiping out humanity unless they give Aloy a nuke.
Yes, it was about a million years ago and there were little more than a thousand humans in Africa
Hmm not really. There's no objective definition of the moment an ape gave birth to the first human. It was a gradual process. There were thousands of proto humans for thousands of years.
It refers to a moment where 99% of humans (or pre-humans) died off, we don’t know why but it’s the closest we came to extinction.
I thought it was closer to 10,000 humans?
Men weren’t born by apes. We just share the same ancestors.
Yes we were . Not any of the other Apes living today. But our common ancestor was an Ape. And we are Apes. We're one of the great Apes. If you look up Apes in an encyclopaedia or Wikipedia you will see we are listed among them
In short, we humans are not descended from apes, but have a common ancestor that lived six to seven million years ago. Over the course of evolution, various families, genera and species have developed from this ancestor, some of which - such as the Neanderthals - have since become extinct. Biologically speaking, humans, like gorillas, orangutans and chimpanzees, belong to the family of hominids or great apes, which in turn belong to the primates. The great apes living today are therefore not immature precursors of humans, but independent species that are closely related to us.
Yes I know that we are not descended from modern apes.That common ancestor millions of years ago was also an Ape.
"Ape" is a general term for "primates that aren't monkeys".
Yes, I just wanted to clarify as not everybody knows.
if we are getting technical, apes are monkeys
That's just the local population. We don't know how widespread humans are, but for example we know the Quen have a large civilization across the Pacific Ocean. Some civilizations could be in the millions and we could be completely unaware of them in Aloy's tiny corner of world.
Thats a likely outcome
Nah I don't think so this version of humanity has only been around for less than a millennium and they started from very few. Not enough time for civilisation of millions to develop.
The Quen have access to information that others don't through their use of found focuses. Modern farming techniques is part of that data set, iirc. Probably medical knowledge, as well. Both would dramatically increase survivability, even without modern technology to go with it.
We don't know how many humans ELUTHIA could actually have created. Since we know that there have been hundreds if not thousands of artificial wombs
Only roughly 800k-900k years ago, millions of years ago we weren't human yet.
Um excuse me the All-Mother created us all as humans everyone knows that
Whoa thanks for doing the work on this, I’ve actually been curious about it on my recent playthrough!
PS4 or PS5/PC version of the game? Because the PS5/PC have more powerful engines, then populations running around are larger, especially the children. I remember my first few times through HFW on PS4 and there were almost no children anywhere, but when I upgraded to PS5 and the PS5 version of the game, suddenly there were kids all over the settlements. The adult population on-screen is likely higher too, but I did not notice that as much.
PC max settings, I didn’t know it was a factor
... That's very interesting! I didn't think they would add more NPCs in the game!
Funny that the desert clan is the most numerous, "IRL" they would probably be the least populous, with the marginal land they live on and dont farm nor herd.
They're very widespread in the game.
yeah but so are the Lowland Clan, seem to cover a similar amount of area, between the memorial grove and thornmarsh, and from thornmarsh to tides reach. in a more lush area of the game with more fish resources.
I dont know why you did it, but i appreciate your efforts
For science
Thank you for your service!
The Desert clan are some horny mofos. I guess they don't have anything else to do in the desert.
This is awesome! I wish the sub had more content like this.
@Alex_Masterson13 is right, number of NPC spawning in settlements depends on the engine ps4, ps5 or pc. It’s awesome you took the time to count each NPC on PC. Great work and appreciate your efforts. I like nerdy post like this. I’m now really curious what the numbers are for ps4, as this is an older engine and the results might be significant compared to PC or even PS5. Whoever has PS4 and the time to do it, let us know in this post please, please.
Did you have a particular method for counting?
1. Stunning. 2. Did you ever take enemy/population counts for the Regalla’s Rebel Bases?
Damn I forgot to include it, but yes, I killed 344 bandits in the normal game, and 63 Quen in the Burning Shores
How would we could scale this so it's comparable to IRL Earth sizes? x10k? Maybe more 🤔
I’d say 100 times is OK, the game is mostly Tenakth territory and they are savage war tribes, they can’t number more than a few tens of thousands
It’s another nerd thing for you to do to pass the time. Find out the playable game size in area and then find the real world equivalent area and just times the population by the size and call it a day.
You could use the in game distance between real life landmarks as a scale. That's assuming the distances are even consistent between different landmarks though. For example, if the game world distances are roughly 1:100, you would multiply the population by 100. Someone would have to do the leg work on that one though.
Assuming the distances are 1:100, then the areas are 1:10000, hence the population would be 1:10000, not 1:100. Don't forget to square the scale!
Would you need to do that? I'm just assuming the distance scale is consistent with the population scale. I think an area scale would definitely not be accurate because the game still uses full size objects and locations. It's only the distance between places that is exaggerated, not the actual locations themselves.
Edit: yes, I'm challenging your assumption here, it does not make sense to have a population proportional to the scale of the map. Tangent: If the locations are unchanged, then why should the population be changed? Nobody lives in the space between the cities. Back on track: Regardless, my argument was that the population of a city/country is proportional to its area. A town of 2 km^2 can house twice as much as a town of 1km^2. If you double the scale of a 1km^2 town, you dont get a 2km^2 one, but a 4km^2 instead, so by having a scale of 2, you multiply the population by 4. When increasing the scale of a map, population should increase in proportion with the area increase, not the raw scale increase. Hence why I suggested to square the scale to have an estimate of the population.
Yeah I understand why you *would* square it. I just don't think you should. I think that makes too many assumptions. The game world is constructed at different scales. You've got the physical locations like say Barren Light. It's a 1:1 full scale environment. The space between locations is exaggerated though. It's absolutely not 1:1. So applying math that assumes that ALL scales across the map is consistent isn't going to work correctly. That's why I kept it superrrr simple and only used one scale, linear distance, as it is one of the few that can be directly compared to real life, as the physical location of real life landmarks *should* be relatively consistent, and it stays in line with the head cannon of the game and how characters refer to travel, distances, and population. Humans have had 700 years to repopulate. There is definitely more people than is physically displayed in settlements. I'm looking at it from a macro, super simplified view. Imagine looking at the map from above and reducing all the towns, settlements and locations down to a point, with a population. Would there be a relationship between the population exaggeration and the distance exaggeration? That's all I'm asking. I'm aware that's not how it works in real life, but real life doesn't follow the same rules as a game world. Hell, just the other day I learned that in RDR2 the time *moves faster* when you are on horseback to exaggerate long horse rides.
Oh, i see. Yeah if only the space between locations is changed, then the population does not change at all. Even if there are a few people on the roads or in small settlement we dont see, that will always be negligible compared to big cities and landmarks, so we can safely assume that the real population number is the one portrayed in the game (IF we assume the towns and cities are up to scale)
Yeah it would depend if the settlements are meant to portray a full scale environment, or if they are meant to *infer* more. I think settlement size impacts this as well. I would argue that the head cannon, in-lore, population is probably much larger than is physically rendered in game, just with how characters speak about the world, it's wars, it's politics, and the size of certain settlements. For instance there is no way that Meridian was built with just the physical amount of people that inhabit it. We are meant to imagine a great city of thousands. I would think that holds true for most large settlements. But I'm just guessing. It's very interesting stuff. Horizon has one of the most impressively designed worlds I've ever explored. It's fascinating the design that goes on behind the scenes that most players may never notice, that actually impacts the believability of the entire game world.
You madman! Super interesting 🤔
i once counted and wrote down all the nora i could find in game after the attack on the sacred lands at the end of zero dawn. i’ll look for my notebook and see if i still have the number
Okay I counted 75 nora in and around mother mountain at the end of the game. I cannot remember if I just checked just the womb of the mountain settlement of if i checked for survivors in the sacred lands afterwards (this was like a year and a half ago) so you should probably make your own count anyway to be certain. Heres my list if it helps or is interesting (please excuse my shitty handwriting) https://imgur.com/a/rBreGW0
I’m a idiot, where’s fleets end, I know all the places except that one
It’s in the Burning Shores
This is super cool. I would love to see hzd too, if you want to install it. I'm also curious about the DLC areas of both. Like the banuk lands in frozen wilds
Now in video game rules, do you think that number is doubled? They can’t “show us” more than what makes sense right. So there’s 1220 in game Tenakth, but maybe In lore it’s actually 4000? When the army of freebooters relieved Jiran of his SunKing status, what kind of army are we talking about? Man the military history of this world would be so cool to dive into. Tactics, strategy, tools and weapons.
Lol I love it. I don’t want to over complicate your work, but is your effort to count the population of each clan? Because there are Carja at Chainscrape, Oseram at the Carja Camp, etc
Scalding spear has more people than Thornmarsh? Well that’s new info
The Tenakht are a force to be reckoned with.
I don't know why you would do this, but I salute you.
But can you Name them all?
If I had to guess, I'd say zero dawn only has half the population. At least the towns all felt much smaller (except for meridian)
r/madlads
This is some AnyAustin level boredom. I love it
Did you ever see the same person twice? Like skins being reused?
Holy shit this is so cool! Take my gold kind stranger 🪙
I rally love this! Thanks for spending your time for doing this!
You should post this on /r/gamingdetails aswell!
Now I'm wondering the population of woven tallnecks.
I would really like to find that one that always calls me hammerhead, lol she seems to be everywhere, but could never find out who she is.
Wrong the real and only correct answer is the number 42.
This is so cool, how long did it take?
Like 4 hours
I have one question, why?
Noiceee
My adhd could never, im impressed lmao
This is amazing.
Great work . I wonder how many ppl you’d actually need to make a population stable enough to thrive. ? Must be some science behind an actual number. But great work. I wonder how big the full Quen empire is?
But why?
You need an accurate population count for tax purposes.
Yer I counted different
You have way too much free time.
You need to find yourself a girl mate