Imagine a game like “the sims” where you can adjust how autonomous the sims you control are. I could see Ai being used to control that.
Or having an elder scroll game were you just respond however you want and the npc adapts to it.
Have you not seen Where Winds Meet? It’s exactly this. They clearly used AI pretty heavily in translation and filling in all the corners of the world and NPCs.
I’d hate it if it weren’t so amazing.
And it’s not good for the one thing I actually want to see. When you talk to an NPC, you literally talk to them and they respond through generative output. They’re not always accurate about the info they give you, and if you try hard enough you can get them to entirely break the 4th wall. They do not seem more believable, since in the end they all end up having the exact same personality and have no guarantees that they will even be useful when they give you info about the quests you’re asking about.
You know what’s more reliable? The messages other players leave and the comments there in.
I think the Where Winds Meet tried this, right? The NPCs ended up saying anachronistic things and making travel itineraries for Beijing or something.
Nah, they work fine in the game. Most can just be skipped by spamming “go on”
It would need to be cloud-based, or otherwise require a lot of RAM
Are you willing to put in an API key and pay money for interactions with an LLM?
It’s not really a one time cost. And I don’t know if devs really want to take on that expense.
Is an API key necessary? Pretty sure there are local LLMs.
They would increase requirements significantly and be generally pretty bad and repetitive. It’s going to take some time before that happens.
Would it? Game developers can run anything on their own servers.
That would be crazy expensive for the studios. LLM companies are selling their services at a loss at the moment.
crazy expensive
Citation missing, so unconvincing. We’re not talking about a general purpose LLM here. Are pretrained, domain-specific LLMs or SLMs “crazy expensive” to run?
It would suck.
What value would it add to the game?
- LLMs are computationally expensive
- Replacing voice actors with AI means making dialogue worse
- Replacing writers with AI means making the story worse
At the end of the day AI is mostly a marketing term for LLMs and LLMs just aren’t that useful in most games, they just average out a dataset to autocomplete a response, that autocompletion is worse than what a human would have written.
We saw with procedurally generated worlds that it takes a lot of effort to prune what is generated to make the game interesting.
There are particular subgenres of games and applications where LLMs might be useful though.
Have you ever talked with an AI? It sucks.
I’ve talked to them often. So I don’t bore my family with my wild ideas lol
Those wild ideas would be good for someone
You would have to design the game around an LLM, not just drop one into existing games.
It might be cute for the guards in Skyrim to have unique dialogue, until one of them denies the Holocaust or says feminism is cancer.
First of all, I’m going to replace AI with LLM, since that’s probably what you meant.
There are 2 distinct questions asked in this post:
- Why not use LLMs to provide different levels of automation? (Like, manual, medium, auto)
Answer: you don’t need LLMs for that. You can just code it in like any other feature. It’s not particularly hard, game developers know how to do it since they are used to programming automation for NPCs.
- Why not use LLMs to procedurally generate NPC dialogue?
Answer: games are primarily a form of art. NPC dialogues are written with a purpose. Different characters have different personalities. Some dialogues are meant to drive the plot. Other dialogues are meant to teach the player how to play. Others are meant to show the player things that they may have missed, or things that are interesting.
Procedural dialogues removes all the control from artists. They would all be generic npc n#473, with the “personality” of the LLM, maybe slightly varied if the developer writes a different prompt for each character.
Procedural dialogues would have the same issues as procedural world generation or photorealistic graphics, it would just not be interesting.
There is a practically infinite amount of Minecraft worlds, yet they all feel the same way. The thing that differentiates a Minecraft world from another is that which the player has built. The only part of the world that wasn’t procedurally generated.
There is a great amount of photorealistic games. And they all look very similar. You may only distinguish one from another by looking at their handcrafted worlds or their handcrafted characters. But not by staring at a wall. You can stare at a wall in non-photoreslistic games and know what game it is.
So if you put procedurally generated dialogues, no one will read them, since you’ll be bored by the time you read the same thing being said by 5 different NPCs from 5 different games.
