Ideally we’d like to create NPC characters that are completely unique and modeled specifically for that character, but that approach is too cost prohibitive for us in terms of time and manpower. The Pirates of the Burning Sea look and feel demands that we populate our world with tons of colorful characters who also don’t tax your video card too much, so we needed to come up with an approach that would allow variety and quantity without being too constraining (in other words, NPC characters who are not too generic). Working with the devs we devised a technique that enables rapid NPC character creation with variety, while keeping memory usage economical.