> 1. Imagine a video game like Red Dead Redemption where each NPC is voiced by AI and can respond to you in a convincingly human fashion. Their responses and even the plot of the whole game can change based on your interactions with NPC's.

Have you ever gone exploring in Minecraft, or No Man's Sky? Those games are effectively infinite, but I find they run out of interesting generated content after maybe 10 or 20 hours.

The problem is, once you see the outlines of the world generation, your brain kind of fills in the space between. I've seen blue grass, and I've seen purple oceans, so blue grass next to a purple ocean isn't uniquely interesting.

Or another example would be the radiant AI from Skyrim that could automatically generate quests for the players.

I think that using an LLM to model NPCs runs into the same problem(s). In the end, there are two cases: either the behavior is constrained enough to keep the game on the rails, and thus the randomness in the dialogue only ads some flavor but there isn't enough freedom to generate new quests and directions for the story. In that case, the added space to explore really doesn't change the nature of the game or add much.

In the second case, you let the model go off the rails and have a harness around it that generates a world matching the hallucinated responses, which would allow an LLM to dynamically generate quests and such, but then the design of your game is subject to being compromised by the randomness of an LLM. E.g. it's not just Red Dead Redemption 3.0 with some funny characters, sometimes it's a historical game and other times aliens show up.

Maybe that's compelling to some people but I've done acid before and really don't need all my media to recreate that sensation of reality drifting.

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mdemare 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Honesty, in any game quests feel artificial, whether they've been generated by humans or AI.

	▲	YeGoblynQueenne 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Try Rain World: https://rainworldgame.com/ Not an RPG and no quests but it has some of the most well-done game AI in any game I have ever played. Basically every mob in the game has its own goals and goes about fulfilling them regardless of what the player is doing, and where the player is etc. It's more like a simulated environment and the game drops you in the middle of it and you have to learn how the world works, navigate and survive it. It's not even any kind of advanced technology, just how fun game AI can be if a developer gives it sufficient attention, instead of basically bodging together some behaviour trees and calling it a day while spending all the compute and development budget for graphics. That's one reason why game AI sucks so much most of the time. Another reason is that players themselves don't want convincing enemies in a convincing environment. I always recall a review of Rain World where the game critic threw his controller because he thought the enemies respawn randomly when the player dies, thus depriving the game critic from the opportunity to memorise their "patterns". In truth, the enemies don't "respawn" they just go about their business while the player is regenerating and so they're not always where you last left them when you return at the spot you died. The world keeps turning when you're gone. So you do have to learn their "patterns" except those patterns are not trivial patrol cycles but actual, you know, behaviours. But, no. That won't do. Give us a game where we can memorise every telegraphed attack so we know when to press which button with millisecond precision like a mindless automaton. Sorry, little rant there. I'm saying that many gamers and many devs don't actually want decent, convincing game AI.