Even writers haven’t heard of the word ‘fewer’?
If you think about it, this makes perfect sense. You need these NPCs to fit the world, you don’t want a medieval world filled with talk of tech and cell phones. And similarly, you can’t have a married NPC talking about how they lament being single.
Meaning the NPCs will need backstory, and honestly likely a lot of it to make sure things roll properly. They will likely also need history with other NPCs, understanding of their past to an extent, and more. And that’s just for the background characters.
I’m looking forward to games that really do take advantage of AI effectively. Having almost infinite variations of characters and plots would make each play through a new experience. I reckon some interesting games will be coming out in the next few years.
The first thing that came to mind when AI language models first hit the scene is how it could be used to make NPCs so much better.
I’m picturing games where you talk to them through the mic and they actually respond with a relevant reply. You could still do prerecorded lines, but being able to respond to what they’re saying with anything you want – even things the developers didn’t intend – would go a long way towards feeling less like playing a game and more like being immersed in another world. Can’t wait for someone to actually implement this in a game.
It would be nice to never be forced to choose between n options that I hate. Though it might open up possibilities to break plots. Like if an NPC is a secret spy, what happens if you tell everyone about it before the reveal is supposed to happen in the plot?
There are already a few games that do this. Though they have practically zero production value since they’re more proof of concept type dealies. They are pretty cool regardless, but there are some flaws in the ones I’ve tried where it has to construct a logical mystery to solve. It doesn’t always follow logic.
But a lot of NPCs one-lines, when done correctly, delivers valuable plot. I’m thinking classic RPGs.
A lot of open worlds made it shitty with garbage like, “Looks like rain today” or “I need a vacation”, which honestly I could do without.
But isn’t that what they’re saying they’re trying to address?
Imagine if the stray looks like rain today actually preceeded rain? Or you could ask them follow-up questions about how they know, which could lead to vital information about their family history of wizardry and a location of a lost item or something.
For me, I love immersive open world games and this is the most exciting potential ai use-case.
Or you could ask them follow-up questions about how they know, which could lead to vital information about their family history of wizardry and a location of a lost item or something.
Imagine AI suddenly giving backstory that was not at all related to the story the developers were trying to tell. The quest to defeat the Demon lord, and this AI creates unrelated lore?
Sounds like a major mistake.
You would need a properly layered engine. The full lore is baked into the global engine. Each NPC gets their own biasing in the engine. A subset of knowledge they have, as well as things they explicitly do or don’t know.
Generating the underlying knowledge set, in a way that is easy to work with will be the challenge. It’s ok for AI to fill in the gaps, but the story designers will need an easy way to get them to behave properly.
There will also be a lot of unintended consequences. A good team would be able to do amazing things with this. A bad team would produce a complete mess.
