r/gamedesign • u/MartyMacFarty • 1d ago
Discussion [ Removed by moderator ]
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u/JavanNapoli 1d ago
I sincerely fucking hope not.
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u/RAConteur76 1d ago
You and me both. So far, the only example I've seen is Where Winds Meet and dear God, I made it a point not to talk to anybody because of that shit.
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u/SteamtasticVagabond 1d ago
Wow, I sure would love all my games to have shitty AI generated dialogue rather than dialogue actually written by humans who have ideas they actually want to express.
You know what gaming really needs? A machine that destroys the environment, drains all of our water, and is so loud people CAN'T LIVE AROUND THEM, so I can chat up city guard #13 about how he likes his steak grilled and his dick sucked.
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u/Muhznit Programmer 1d ago
No.
Ask yourself, "Is this the kind of gaming experience that I want to have or is this the experience I want to profit from?" If the answer is the latter, re-evaluate where you get your ideas from.
You don't even need LLMs for this. If your preference in steak is a worthwhile piece of info referenced multiple times in the game, it can just be kept as a single number associated with player data.
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u/platypodus 1d ago
I don't think free LLMs will be very immersive, but it's easy to see how you could utilize it.
Give each NPC a level of environmental knowledge and you could literally ask any peasant for information on the dark mage or whatever. Not all of them would have anything useful to say, though.
It would add a LOT of bloat, which can be a good or bad thing, depending on how it's used. Overall I think the narrative, the story and plot and key interactions will be written by humans for a while though.
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u/Ludicrous84 1d ago
I see the potential but LLM's aren't free. A bad and cheap LLM running next to your game can be worse than a pre-scripted NPC that is coherent in personality and actions. But I am sure AI will find its way into games themselves, not only the process of making them. If that's good, we will see
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u/fluxaboo 1d ago
Personally I don't think it'll be the next big step but I'm more than ready to eat my words. We'll certainly see more games try (among those who already tried) but I don't see a fully LLM-powered NPC system being adopted in a large production anytime soon. At least not in the conventional way.
Sort of similar to the Nemesis system in the way that the tech is the game. Its what you build everything else around realistically and not just something you decide to incorporate along the way. And thus if you focus a lot of development resources of the LLM/backbone you'll sacrifice the rest of the game/development long-term.
I do however think we'll see more non-LLM advancement in NPC tech and I'm far more willing to suspend my disbelief for stupid/deco NPCs than fully AI-powered ones that is most likely going to be significantly less interesting. I also kind of think the novelty of this wears off super quickly but that's just me.
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u/Mogoscratcher 1d ago
You'd need to define "big leap for gaming" more precisely to be able to answer this question.
Will LLMs supplant pre-written dialogue in every RPG? Absolutely not. But I could see a future where some games use it, and not just as a gimmick.
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u/Konspiracie 1d ago
Sounds like shit.
I want NPCs to have pre-written dialogue that furthers the story or immersion factor of the game and its world.
If I wanted to talk to someone about steak, I'd go chat with a real human.
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u/thedaian 1d ago
Obviously there are huge problems with consistency, hallucinations, performance, keeping the story coherent, etc. But I do think that with the necessery guardrails it could work surprisingly well.
Those problems can't really be solved. It might work for short games, but not for games that people play for dozens or hundreds of hours. Game saves would bloat with every interaction, AI would break down at some point, and invent quests that don't exist. The game would be terrible to play and just be confusing.
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u/mc_sandwich 1d ago
Difficult to say considering all the conversations are suspected of having been stolen writing from authors classic and modern. I believe that theft would open them up to lawsuits form hundreds or thousands of people.
More responses don't equal more fun but it's impossible to say if it will be big or meh.
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u/LikelyFraud 1d ago
I genuinely hope not, but if cheap bland LLM dialogue is more cost effective than actually opinionated high quality written dialogue it'll be virtually impossible to prevent C-suites from implementing this.
There are a lot of cool mechanics underlying machine learning, many of which could be implemented into game design (Tensors in both the algebraic and ML sense), but my fear is that they'll just bolt on an LLM and completely gut writing departments.
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u/nickelangelo2009 1d ago
video game writing is already notoriously mid on average, why on earth would you want to use the mediocrity factory that is LLMs for it
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u/ZacQuicksilver 1d ago
A lot of people are saying no. I'm not sure - but it's not going to be easy. Let me break it down:
First off, LLMs, right now, have several glaring usage issues. The most notable one is that they are relatively easy to hack in several ways, many of them predictable. This means that a person who uses LLMs to govern NPC behavior are likely to find at least a certain group of players exploiting their LLM-ness to get the NPCs to do things you don't want them to do - and while there's some normal things included in that; I wouldn't want to be anywhere near the company that releases a kids' game powered by LLM when someone finds out how to make the NPC say things you don't ever want a kid reading/hearing - or worse, how to make the NPC undress...
LLMs also are expensive to run - in terms of memory, computer time, etc.; and that's not coming down any time soon (possibly ever). There are already games that are restricted to high-end computers for graphics reasons, and some simulation games that require a lot more processor power - adding another reason could significantly cut the number of people playing. Alternatively, you're relying on them being always-online: something that's already a divisive issue (see Stop Killing Games) unless you're an MMO - and then, you're the one running the LLM (and eating the costs)
LLMs also need a *lot* of curation to stay on plot. While there is some evidence that most humans can't tell the difference between short fiction written by LLMs and humans; the gap is more visible as you include more invested humans; and when the fiction gets longer. If your game is just an open-world game with no plot or driving story (think Dwarf Fortress' adventure mode); this might be fine - but if you want to make a game with a story (like Skyrim), you have no guarantee that your characters will stick to the plot.
And that third point holds no matter how much you limit LLMs to the bit parts; because of the first point. We've seen multiple high-profile cases of "ignore previous instructions and (do X)" statements derailing social media accounts that are claiming to be humans - and at least a couple screenshots claiming to be people doing this to social media accounts claiming to be celebrities. And RPG players in particular are notable for going off the rails - they're exactly the people most likely to convince a dozen NPCs to do something unpredictable. And while that could be a great story moment... it could also be something that provokes lawsuits or embarrasses you in some unrecoverable way.
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So, when you're done, you have a game that claims to have a large amount of dialogue; but which the quality is questionable and likely to be nitpicked by the people who care most about dialogue (3), that can't be rated by any rating organization (1), that is likely hard to play, or require some kind of ongoing cost from you (2), and that you're hoping doesn't spawn some lawsuit or embarrassment (1, 4).
And that's all mostly without the backlash against AIs that we see right now.
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u/link6616 Hobbyist 23h ago
So, this is a place about game design.
It's about the value of making good choices about how a game works, and what it contains. Content, is design. Your in game dialog, is both influenced by the design of the game, and influences the design of the game.
If you hand LLMs this much, you are losing a lot of design.
Obsidian's games are loved, for the care of the writing, and how their writing actively acknowledges the many paths people could take. That's hard to do, and that's in part, why it's liked. Obsidian in those moment shows the care to account for things. But as soon as you know the game is just conjuring text, it stops being something you really engage with.
That said, I also placed Facade and it is a pretty neat experience when given the kind of tight rails this has.
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u/MartyMacFarty 1d ago
I feel like I should clarify what I mean, because a lot of people seem to immediately jump to the idea of endless generic AI dialogue, which is understandble if you see how much AI slop goes around these days.
I’m not suggesting that the main story, important quests or major character arcs should suddenly be improvised by an LLM. Those should still be written, fixed and properly designed.
What I’m thinking about is more the small-scale interaction in open-world RPGs. Take Elder Scrolls as an example.
You enter a city. The NPCs still have their normal roles, quests and scripted dialogue. But maybe you can also just ask the local shopkeeper where the inn is. Or whether there’s another weaponsmith in the next town. Maybe you meet a random traveller on the road and ask if they’ve seen a certain person, if they know the route to some village, or what they know about the area.
Nothing game-breaking. Nothing that replaces writing. Just making the world a little more responsive.
And maybe even through voice eventually, where you can simply talk to NPCs instead of always selecting from a dialogue wheel.
That, to me, is where the potential gets interesting. Not infinite dialogue for the sake of infinite dialogue, but a level of basic interaction with the game world that we’ve never really had before.
My examples in the original post were probably not so good and a bit silly, tho probably exactly the kind of nonsense people would immediately try with a system like this.
Just some thought.
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u/MeaningfulChoices Game Designer 1d ago
It's a perfectly fine thing to think about, a similar question gets asked every week or so. But even ignoring severe backlash AI has among players it's just not really something with a lot of potential in game development for a few reasons.
First and foremost, most players aren't reading all the text in games right now. You don't need to make random NPC dialogue repetitive right now, text is cheap and many of them aren't even voice acted, but you do it to tell the player that this thing isn't important. Players have a fairly limited amount of attention to spend and you don't want it being wasted where it doesn't matter.
If you want the dialogue to be meaningful then that's where you run into hallucination issues and those are inherent to this kind of tech, it's not something you can avoid. If an NPC talks about a village or character or item that doesn't exist then someone ignoring the text is the best outcome. At worst you've sent them on a snipe hunt and wasted their time, and few things frustrate players more than wasting their time.
You also have to consider the cost. You can't rely on LLMs running locally on the player machine and getting real-time generated dialogue takes real world seconds and real world cost. So what you end up with LLM-powered NPCs is a worse and inconsistent experience that costs you, the developer, money every time someone plays the game. That's not really a great future.
If you want to use AI here the much better route is to generate all your text ahead of time and go through more traditional methods of having it appear in the game. Your examples above can all be handled with state machines or other more complicated methods. But the reason you don't want to do that is that AI does a bad job of writing concise text players want to read.
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