Comment by chefandy
3 months ago
I can't see anything that Gen AI NPCs would add unless maybe you're talking about a Sims kind of game where the interactions are the point, and they don't have to adhere to a defined progression. Other than that, it's a chat bot. We already have chatbots and having them in the context of a video game doesn't seem like it would add anything revolutionary to that product. And would that fundamentally stand a chance of being as compelling to socially-focused role-playing gamers as online games?
This is my field so I'm always looking for the angle that new tech will take. I still rank this lower than VR— with all of its problems— for potential to significantly change player interactions. Tooling to make games is a different story, but for actual use in games? I don't see it yet.
Sandbox games are probably where they will shine. Imagine being able to play Minecraft, and tell a prompt to generate a world that resembles Tatooine, or a vampire-themed mansion. Expectations are lower with sandbox games, so there's no risk of breaking immersion like would happen with an LLM Elder Scrolls game when someone tricks in NPC into solving problems in python.
Granted, I'm certain there will be copyrights issues associated with this capability, which is why I don't think it will be established game companies who first take a crack at this approach.
The problem is what it takes to implement that. I've seen companies currently trying to do exactly that, and their demos go like this "ok, give me a prompt for the environment" and if they're lucky, they can cherry pick some stuff the crowd says and if they're not, they sheepishly ask for a prompt that would visit indicate one of 5 environment types they've worked on and include several of the dozen premade textured meshes they've made, and in reality you've got a really really expensive procedural map with asset placement that's worse than if it was done using traditional semi-pre-baked approaches. A deceptive amount of work goes into the nitty gritty of making environments, and even with all of the incredible tooling that's around now, we are not even close to automating that. It's worth noting that my alma mater has game environment art degree programs. Unless you're making these things, you can't easily see how much finesse and artistic sensibility it takes to make beautiful compositions with complementary lighting and nice atmospheric progression. It's not just that nobody has really given it a go— it's really difficult. When you have tooling that uses AI controlled by an artist that knows these things, that's one thing. When they need to make great results every time so players keep coming back? That's a very different task. I've never met anyone that thought it was remotely currently feasible without lacking knowledge of generative AI, game development, or both.
Automating the tools so a smaller workforce can make more worlds and more possibilities? We're already there— but it's a very large leap to remove the human creative and technical intermediaries.
What are the actual claims and/or arguments?
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As someone who has tried a lot of role-play models, I think there is definitely value in what LLMs (or similar tech) can add to NPCs, it's just most people don't know how to prompt for it.
Using the RP models, over time I've found certain things that can guide them to creating better stories; an agent system is much easier to use but even using single character cards it's not hard to stuff them with a narrator and several individual characters in one go. I recently switched from kunoichi (8b, decent) to an Aria derivative (13b, much better).
In the majority of role-play stories I do now, it's super easy to refine the prompt so that characters don't necessarily provide pointless details + avoid all the common tropes, especially with newer models.
Maybe I should make a PoC, would be a fun project. But yeah I agree that chatting to an NPC about its day doesn't necessarily make for great gameplay - but it's relatively easy now to guide it into interesting scenarios/experiences, which _does_ make for great gameplay.
Ie the wife of the hunter you murdered in a fantasy game; normally we just think that we killed a character in a game - but when the hunter's wife decides in the background to train with a sword so that she can avenge her husband, then finally comes to find you and calls you out for murdering her husband - suddenly it's murder, and a revenge story. It's not too hard to prevent a decent model from injecting fluff (like where she bought her sword and how much for) into it.
Edit: just tested this to see what would happen; I first walked into a cottage, grandfather and his young granddaughter, stabbed him in front of her and ran away (spent the next 2 years of "game time" in a forest hiding away). Character motivations updates for the granddaughter were essentially: distraught, vowing revenge, travelling around to hone her skills, speaking with unsavoury types in taverns to find my whereabouts, finding & confronting me, killing me. I was able to query it for "3 dialogue options/actions with percent chances and distinct outcomes in JSON format" which it gave, the chance of her forgiving me was 0.01% which I suppose is fair enough. It did fail to create nice JSON tho, the model is not fine-tuned for that at all.
But it's definitely possibly with multiple loras/prompts/queries to extract dynamic dialogue options, actions, stats, percent chances for plot/story paths etc. LLMs in games definitely need to be managed by a traditional rules based framework, LLM should only be used for the creative bits. Stats/player skill will always determine who wins a fight, but the fight starting because of dialogue or past events could totally be LLM driven.
I’m specifically talking about non-text-based games. You’re still limited by the game assets, animations (including hair, clothes, weapon movements, etc,) environments, and characters that are the waypoints for the plot— so you’ve already got a finite number of possibilities. You can’t create a new class of weapon on the fly, or a new character, or new plot with current assets and maintaining story stability unless it’s really really restricted, right? So what do you get aside from variability in dialog that you can’t get from a random number generator? And when it comes down to it, does that unpredictability, and all of the effort it takes to wrangle it make the game better than having a professional writer make a handful of variations on a bunch of lines?
I can’t think of a scenario within the limitations of real games with visual assets that have progressive plots and characters for which that would yield a better game than having people craft it. Players are going to be no more tolerant of bugs, slowdowns, bad dialog, plot holes, misleading information, and annoyance just because an LLM is the source rather than substandard design or QA.
Maybe I’m not quite grasping what you’re proposing?