"0.63 is the perfect default delay": Bungie, Respawn and Firaxis game developers talk NPC barks, grenade timing and other questions of craft

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 14:40:38 +0000

Much of the time, using social media is like fondling a wasp's nest, but sometimes, sometimes, social media is Nice. For example, Firaxis narrative director Cat Manning recently started a Bluesky thread "of small practical pieces of advice developers just starting out or unfamiliar with a genre might not know". The replies and quote-posts include thoughts from people with credits on fairly big games.

Inevitably, they run the gamut of approachability. At one end of the spectrum, you have Apex Legends engineer Jay Stevens jauntily observing that "a navmesh is a very handy thing to have, even in a multiplayer game without NPCs", which I maybe half-understand, and sounds like it could be the opening to a Broadway song of some kind. More digestibly, you have former Marvel's Avengers and current Legacy of Orsinium developer Keano Raubun commenting that the "biggest bang for buck in (open world RPG) game writing will always be NPCs having funny ambient conversations amongst themselves".

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"0.63 is the perfect default delay": Bungie, Respawn and Firaxis game developers talk NPC barks, grenade timing and other questions of craft