I know a lot of people are ragging on the visuals, which fine, it's definitely a 'current-gen' game on the visual front. It's also a quintessentially Ubisoft open world with regards stiff animations, AI and gunplay, but the concept still hasn't lost its lustre to me and the illusion of 'you can play as anyone' seems to be genuinely real. I'm just baffled by just how many actors and voice lines they must have recorded to round out the roster of playable characters. Plenty of impressions videos have mentioned that their randomly selected characters had genuine personalities, specific lines to NPCs about their own lives/backstories, and were far from a blank shell of a character; the work required to fill them all out must have been insane.

From what I can tell there's a few different variables with them;

• Age and gender are very much deciders for full animation movesets (this is common in all games with NPCs and you can mod GTA to play as a grandpa on the street but you'll notice that they basically only have walking and running animations and anything else like jumping will default to Michael/Trevor/Franklin's animations- the grannies in this game seem to have distinct animations for everything a player might do from combat, stealth, parkour and emotes). Women in high heels will have their own movesets, and the regular-aged foot soldiers have several distinct movesets too.

• In a roughly similar way, voice lines and scripts are assigned by age/gender, though there were a few funny instances I saw where young women were given the 'granny' voice for their whole script- will be interesting to see how much overlap there is between characters and how many of them have the same voice or start repeating the exact same lines/backstories about themselves. Seems inevitable with a city of thousands of unique NPCs.

• 'Recruitment' missions seem to be procedurally generated which makes sense; I can definitely see these getting old as hell but they seem to be broken into several 'types', from rescues to robberies to assassinations to destroying evidence. Each NPC presumably has a bottled sob story to win you over regarding a kidnapped relative or incriminating evidence they want rid of, and the game will put together the location and mission type in one of the enemy outposts from there.

• Occupation determines certain 'perks' and equipment, and also large parts of the moveset in combat- the assassin has the John Wick gun takedowns, the football hooligan has a headbutt knockout, and the granny has a taser. Everyone seems to have a takedown, a weapon, a passive perk, an active ability and a unique emote.

I'm fascinated to see just how wide the range of characters is and whether the 'simulation' falls apart at any point and if you start seeing the cracks and copies of certain characters, because I still haven't been disappointed and I'm still not convinced it's possible to pull off the amount of work it should've taken to flesh the whole mechanic out.