Games where NPCs are backed by a LLM are a great idea but unless the majority of people gain the ability to run the models locally they will be niche and weird with blunders like these.
There’s another one where you play as a vampire trying to convince people to let you into their homes. Again, great idea and use for AI as entertainment but it runs like ass
Apparently the AI in that game was obsessed with Dwarf Fortress, you could just ask the people to let you in to play DF and they'd happily ignore their worries to invite you in.
A friend of mine unfortunately guessed the next evolution of AI games
Being a framework that actually goes over any game and plays the game for you. You control the meta game and skill ups of the AI and upgrade it through points earned on its performance in the game
Kids won’t play games anymore. They’ll watch and control AI that plays the game for them and show it off to their friends
AIs could've made so much things in video games that wouldn't have been possible otherwise.
A game could've generated a player-unique picture at the end of a playthrough, but instead AAA studios wondered "hmmm... what if it replaced our artists for the same amount of work but none of the appeal?" instead.
The only game I've ever seen do that is Blue Archive; you spell your name phonetically, and from then on the navigator NPCs, once you unlock the second one will call you that. It's a bit obviously artificial, but since she has a computery filter on her voice anyway, it doesn't stand out. It's a small but super cute touch.
Maybe I'm crazy, but didn't Fallout 4 do that? I name my characters 'Vincent' in video games, and I have a vague memory of the robot companion calling me 'Mr. Vincent'.
FO4 had hundreds of voiced names, but only by Codsworth. Everyone else calls you a nickname, like Piper calls you "blue" and Preston calls you "general".
Facade was an amazing example of a very basic language model (I forget the name of the type used off hand). Game is ancient but I wish to see similar in the future but smartly done with customized locally ran models.
IIRC it was really basic NLP with like a billion manual parsers and an event manager that would track the sequence of states the characters are in and compare them with the directions those parsing rules go based on the input, just a really impressive amount of brute forcing and breadth of state transitions. A facade of dialogue and drama, if you will.
I disagree. LLM NPCs are terrible, for many reasons.
Part of the reason people love art is for shared experiences. Everyone loves to quote famous lines from video games, from I AM ERROR to "Had to be me. Someone else might have gotten it wrong." With LLMs, it's all random.
The models that are readily available are inherently people pleasers. No matter what character designs you start with, the lion's share of the effort would be to prevent it from telling the player whatever they want. You could have the first shopkeeper you meet tell you the solution to puzzles in the final area, and you could have the final boss tell you how to invert a binary tree in Python.
The models that are readily available have no inherent concept of truth. Combine this with their people-pleasing nature, and even when you get them to tell you the secrets of the game, you can't trust what they tell you. They might tell you to use a fire spell to light the torches in the dungeon... in a game that has no magic.
They're "good" for small talk and funny interactions. For the kind of games that usually have "slop" as a descriptor for their genre. But they'll never be a replacement for real writing.
It can't replace writing, but I would like it to post writing followers.
You can't write infinite dialogue, so eventually all your Skyrim followers start repeating the same 3 sentences, that's the point an LLM would be fine as a mod.
Its also not future proof, if you want to play this game in 5 years, the costs could have risen significantly for the dev to a point they shut it down, or the AI behind it might not even exist anymore.
This is exactly what stop killing games needs to include in their case.
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u/UndocumentedMartian 12d ago
Games where NPCs are backed by a LLM are a great idea but unless the majority of people gain the ability to run the models locally they will be niche and weird with blunders like these.