The Strange Case of the Murder Free City
Imagine building a dark sci fi detective sim full of killers, weapons, and grim late night crimes. Then discovering that in practice almost nobody is getting murdered. That is exactly what happened during the development of Shadows of Doubt.
Lead writer Stark Holborn shared the story in a talk on procedural generation at AdventureX. During testing, the team noticed something really weird. Murders simply were not happening. The game was built so that crimes are not just scripted events. They are the natural result of AI citizens living their lives in a simulated city. People go to work, shop, sleep, and yes, use the bathroom. Somewhere in that mix, killers are supposed to buy weapons, stalk targets, and commit crimes.
On paper it all worked. In practice, the city was strangely peaceful. No murder cases for players to solve. No crime scenes. Just a whole lot of NPCs quietly existing.
So the team started digging into the simulation. Where were the killers going wrong? Was the AI broken? Were the conditions for murder too strict?
Eventually they found the culprit. Or rather, the lack of one. The ultimate crime stopper turned out to be a toilet.
One building stayed open late at night and had a bathroom. It also happened to be the illegal weapon seller. Because of the city simulation, every AI citizen with a late night bathroom emergency started flocking there. The bathroom queue got so intense that the would be killer could not reach the weapon dealer. Their murder plan stalled out because they literally could not get in the door.
The result was an accidental utopia. A city where murder never happened because everyone needed to pee.
For Holborn, this was the perfect example of how procedural systems can surprise even the people who build them. The rules made sense individually. Citizens need toilets. The weapon seller has a toilet. People use the nearest one. But when all of those systems interacted, they created a weird and amazing story the team never predicted. A crime wave prevented by a bathroom bottleneck.
Why Procedural Stories Still Need Human Control
This toilet saga leads into a bigger point about how Shadows of Doubt tells its stories. The game is full of procedural and systemic design. Citizens have lives, routines, and needs. Crimes are not pre written quests but things that actually unfold in the city. You investigate what really happened rather than what a script says happened.
Holborn describes this as the game making its own stories. You are not just being told a tale. You are stepping into a living system that can produce bizarre, memorable moments simply by running its rules and watching what emerges.
At the same time, she is clear that this kind of emergent storytelling does not mean handing everything over to an artificial intelligence free for all. Outside the games world, when people hear the term AI they often jump straight to generative models and chatbots. Holborn says that when she talks about AI and procedural generation, many assume she wants to plug tools like ChatGPT directly into the game.
Her response was shown as a gif of Murder She Wrote legend Jessica Fletcher looking horrified.
Holborn laid out why that reaction is more than just a joke. In a detective game, information needs to be reliable. Every note, every line of dialogue, every entry in a case file can send players off in a new direction. If an AI text generator has a strange moment and outputs something off topic or contradictory, it is not just a funny glitch. It can ruin an entire investigation.
Imagine chasing a suspect for hours because an AI invented a fake clue. Or discovering that your careful deductions do not matter because a random line was completely wrong. That is not mystery storytelling. That is just noise.
For Shadows of Doubt, data integrity is absolutely critical. The simulation can be surprising and strange, like the killer blocked by the toilet queue, but it is still running on rules carefully designed by humans. Writers and designers decide what NPCs know, what they can say, and how they behave. The systems are flexible but not chaotic.
Holborn argues that this is what allows procedural stories to work. The game can generate unique cases for each player precisely because so much of it has been tightly structured by hand. The city feels alive not because a chatbot is spitting out random flavor text, but because humans have built systems that interact in interesting ways.
Procedural Generation Is Not A Shortcut
There is a wider lesson here for anyone interested in game design. It can be tempting to think of procedural generation and modern AI as magical tools that create content for free. Why write thousands of lines of dialogue when you could just let a model generate them on the fly? Why hand craft quests when a system could remix them forever?
Holborn’s talk is a reminder that this mindset can backfire, especially in genres that rely on player trust. In a detective game, every piece of information carries weight. Players assume the world is internally consistent. They are trying to solve a puzzle the developers have laid out, even if it is hidden behind layers of simulation.
That does not mean procedural systems are bad. In fact, they are exactly what make Shadows of Doubt feel special. The fact that a pileup at the only midnight toilet can reshape the entire murder rate is the kind of emergent story players remember for years.
But those stories emerge because developers like Holborn carefully design the rules. They decide what an NPC wants, where they go, what shops exist, and when they open. They set up the conditions so that when things collide, they collide in interesting ways.
If you are into games that tell stories through systems rather than cutscenes, Shadows of Doubt is a fascinating case study. It shows how much personality and chaos can come from a well built simulation. It also shows why blindly dropping generative AI into that mix could easily break the spell.
In other words, sometimes the smartest thing a narrative designer can do is not to add more AI but to place a single well positioned toilet and watch the city take care of the rest.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/adventure/the-worlds-busiest-toilet-temporarily-made-detective-sim-shadows-of-doubt-a-murder-free-zone-you-cant-always-legislate-for-the-fact-that-everyones-going-to-need-a-wee-at-midnight/
