Comment by fennecfoxy
3 months ago
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?