Re: Worlds of Kingdom Hearts - What worlds do you want to see in KH3?
I also fully believe KH's empty worlds are a design choice by the team. Almost every part of the maps double as a battlefield, having NPCs in such places would be more detrimental than anything (notice how in FFXII in particular, a game without separate battle screens similar to KH, you don't actually ever fight in the sprawling cities). I also personally think there's something about the team not wanting to add generics into Disney worlds, we know at least they had no trouble adequately populating Twilight Town (though again, much of it is not a battleground). Only exception I can think of rn is Olympus, there is no reason for the Colosseum being empty when at least some people came to watch us play Struggle.
That said, I don't expect KH3 to make much of a difference regarding this.
Considering they
did have a crowd cheering for Mulan in one cutscene during the Land of Dragons, it most likely
is done by choice.
Land of Dragons also had three to four generic Chinese Soldiers (in the village and the throne room of the Emperor) running around, although I think they too use all the same model.
The notion of normally adding no generics to Disney worlds might be nonetheless correct though as they would have to create and texture extra generic models for each single Disney world based on their respective theme and
artstyle (ancient greeks for Olympus, programs for Tron, medieval frenchmen and gypsies for Hunchback, arabians for Agrabah etc.) which they obviously do not want to put the effort into.
I mean, they didn't even put in the effort to make younger models for main characters Terra, Aqua and Ventus for the flashback scenes in BBS that take place four years before BBS itself (the only difference being with Ven not having his crossing straps and the shoulder armor in his "flashback"-model), so I can see why they don't bother with extra eye candy-generics that would only stand around and do nothing which would have to be individualized for each world.
Twilight Town, Traverse and Radiant Garden being original worlds is what makes the difference as to why they sometimes have generics, since for these worlds they can just create three or four generic models and then work with palette swaps and different textures.
Sure it was excuseable because most of the time its been on weaker hardware or systems, but now times have changed.
Quoting myself:
Not having generic NPCs was never really a hardware issue (except maybe in the original GBA-CoM and the original DS titles), as PS2-games like FFX (Dream Zanarkand, Luca, Bevelle) or FF XII (Rabanastre, Bujerba, Archades) had whole cities filled to the brim with generics who apart from the occassional sidequest were just there for eye candy.
Hardware and systems have nothing to do with it. Nomura and the other members of the dev team simply do not have this issue on their radar.
It's even possible that they do not even consider this thing to even
be an issue in the first place and instead of being very low on their priority list it is not on their list of things to do at all.