Ever felt that the towns and cities of oblivion needed more life? but somemods out there like Crowded Cities is just too much for people like us to handle. Which leads us to this suggestion.

Why not have static NPCs? NPCs that don't talk much, have limited AI, and numerous, Like the people in Assassins Creed. Low Performance impact and quality at the same time!

They wouldn't really be static if they moved around alot. And unless you want for people to have a huge set track that they should follow, they would be NPCs anyway that require schedules with AI. Besides, to make it more realistic, there would need to be extra housing for these low-impact NPCs somewhere in the city. Besides, Assassin's Creed people don't have such complex schedules as Cyrodillian citizens do. If you haven't noticed, there isn't as much of a day-night cycle in Assassin's Creed as there is in Oblivion, nor set days of the week. Everything is divided into set memories.

The problem is that most of the time, it isn't the AI that causes the slow down, but the rendering of the NPCs, their collision, their shadows. You could have a handful of NPCs spawned, with their AI turned off, and still have performance loss because of them just being there.

As far as toning down the AI goes, There are really only 3 settings for the AI; off, high, and full. Both high and full require the same amount of processing when the player is in the area. the only difference between them is that within "high" their AI doesn't do anything when they aren't loaded. Even if you give them only a wander package they still have the same internal workings of any other NPC. This is why the arena made use of animated statics.

what about things like the arena spectators? they're static.

They also look like crap when you get close to them. Again, it's the rendering issue. You can't have a full detail person standing there. And if you did, it would just seem really wierd that they don't do anything.

maybe have places in cities that you can't go, and then place those people in the distance

You mean like on the walls/roofs? Seems to me that would turn out incredibly weirdly...

no like if you place them in the distance and put them as kind of like a close LOD with animated meshes

In the distance inside towns? How does that work? No town is large enough to be able to make use of that, and almost everywhere within the town is reachable. Not quite sure how that would work. Go to the arena, use TCL to go take a look at the people in the audience. Even at a fairly long distance they look pretty bad. The other part is that the more diverse you have even these "static NPCs" the more likely you will still lose performance since you are still loading additional models and textures. There's an old mod that increased the amount of spectators in the arena, and even though they were all the same, once there were more of them, they caused some performance loss. Even animated statics can slow the game down, the game still needs to process the animations for each one.