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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
Per item 2: Have you heard of Dwarf Fortress? That’s the kind of game that actually might benefit from an LLM generating dialogue on the fly over anything pre-written. The game is already a mad-lib of tons of randomized little parts. You kinda have to use your imagination to truly understand the dialogue when talking to another character in Adventure mode or the log in Fortress mode because it’s NOT written in advance, but still conveys everything you need to understand what is going on.
It would be nice if that already randomly generated dialogue based on actual in-game information that is also randomly generated had a bit more flavor to it and came along more naturally.
It would not be good for every game, and telling an actual story would still work better the traditional way. But for games like Dwarf Fortress or Rogue or anything like that, where nothing is written by a human except for the individual pieces that the game eventually stitches together itself, it would be pretty cool.