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.
https://youtu.be/sOdaSAMi3Pk watch this to see an implementation of your idea.
What value would it add to the game?
- LLMs are computationally expensive
- Replacing voice actors with AI means making dialogue worse
- Replacing writers with AI means making the story worse
At the end of the day AI is mostly a marketing term for LLMs and LLMs just aren’t that useful in most games, they just average out a dataset to autocomplete a response, that autocompletion is worse than what a human would have written.
We saw with procedurally generated worlds that it takes a lot of effort to prune what is generated to make the game interesting.
There are particular subgenres of games and applications where LLMs might be useful though.
I am a fan of using LLMs specifically to imitate the VAs on demand to pronounce character names. They’re generally good enough that a single word can blend in, and you have a couple minutes during the opening cutscene to run the computation. Just having all of the characters never say the custom player name and instead address them in the second person or with a title is a bit jarring
Have you not seen Where Winds Meet? It’s exactly this. They clearly used AI pretty heavily in translation and filling in all the corners of the world and NPCs.
I’d hate it if it weren’t so amazing.
AI in games (using code for entities to make non-player decisions) is about being good enough, cheap enough. It’s just like how games determine their physics. The existence of large scale “black box” AI like OpenAI does not reflect what’s good or cheap. It can’t play chess. You think it’s going to understand The Sims and make reasonable choices in that system?
They’ve already created well tuned system to give your Sims in obtaining their needs. It leads to you having to manage the chaos, and that’s what the fun is. To better hone that is to have the AI play the game for you. And even that, if efficiency of play is the goal, is better done by TASbot and machine learning.
That generic black box style of AI like popular LLMS is like creating a hammer. Now everyone is treating every problem like nails. AI decisions making in games is like washing windows; don’t use a hammer.
The problem is that “AI” is a poorly defined, very vague, and widely used term. Most people here have assumed you meant LLMs because everyone pitches those as ways to solve everything. “Oh, irer up an agent, give it instructions, and let it make requests that are context dependent”. Then, like everyone says here, that usually turns into people testing boundaries and breaking your game. So that makes it both “not good enough” and “not cheap enough”.
Now, look at AI with the term “machine learning” in mind and it’s different. Games like ARC Raiders use machine learning to teach NPCs movement behavior, and to train AI voices like Siri so they can’t add things without further paying people. They think that up-front investment is worthwhile. But those are both far cries from “uploading it to Claude or ChatGPT and see what happens”. Especially when you would have to teach that black box AI your system anyway, for it to use it. And you’re already doing that with current “good enough, cheap enough” bespoke methods, for much cheaper, and they’re good enough.
I saw someone mod Skyrim to have Lydia do that, looked pretty promising. There’s also a series where AI Lara Croft is playing old tomb raider games with commentary in her voice and everything, though I heard it’s not 100% AI
I have heard of some people experimenting with it, e.g in a stardew valley mod to allow you to have actual conversations with the characters.
While that sounds like fun. It also sounds like something that is fun for 10 minutes.
Agreed, I don’t think the NPCs are the best thing about the game. What I like best about SDV is that it’s essentially an industrial collectathon game.
If we could get complex conversations in games (e.g an adventure game where you’re not limited to 3 conversation options) I think it would be awesome. Might mean we waste more time playing the game, though.
i have watched some videos where its used on skyrim npcs, it seems to work surprisingly well.
I think the Where Winds Meet tried this, right? The NPCs ended up saying anachronistic things and making travel itineraries for Beijing or something.
Do they? I’ve talked to several NPCs, never happened to me. At most, they get completely confused on what you are saying. Eg, one kid thought he was rich enough to buy a house. Trying to tell him he’s not and he thinks I took his money (and started crying, but also became friends?). In another a guqin player wondered if anyone could tell how sad she was from her playing. Instead, we’re keeping secrets? (No idea how that came about).
And before anyone points out, I dropped the game due to quests requiring MC drinking alcohol (can’t stand games like that. Just a me issue). Sad because I loved the everything else too :(
I haven’t actually played it (wont play any game that used or uses LLM software), so I can only tell you what I’ve read.
Shame, it looked interesting
one kid thought he was rich enough to buy a house. Trying to tell him he’s not and he thinks I took his money (and started crying, but also became friends?).
I don’t know about confused, have you ever talked to a toddler?
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.
So, Inzoi?
Because fuck AI, that’s why.
Yah but OP is talking about AI in gaming, not generative AI that makes propaganda out of stolen art or turns your family photos into porn, there’s a big difference. You’ve been playing with AI in gaming for years, and probably have complained about it because it always sucks. Enemies walk predictable patterns, they see you kill twenty of their friends and then resume their patrol and say “it must have been the wind.”
Lets not mindlessly rage at terms without understanding the context, then you’re just becoming MAGA.
Because its not good enough.
You would have to design the game around an LLM, not just drop one into existing games.
It might be cute for the guards in Skyrim to have unique dialogue, until one of them denies the Holocaust or says feminism is cancer.
There actually is a semi-working system for Skyrim/Fallout https://art-from-the-machine.github.io/Mantella/
Also not all LLMs are Nazi machines, I almost exclusively use abilerated models and I’ve never once had it go on a nazi tirade.
Though I mostly use it for Linux/code or random home assistant projects, not as a conversation.
I tried this as a side project and it’s such a pain in the ass to get the bots to actually behave like they’re in a world and not be overly eager losers.
You have to do so much prompting to get them to behave and, as others who have to work with these full time know, prompting can only go so far.
They’re not as autonomous and general usage as companies want to make you think they are.
Ah, but then you get to stab the Nazi in the head.
Despite being free/cheap to use right now, AI is expensive to run in terms of things like water and electricity. The companies that own the datacenters that perform the AI operations are running at a loss because they want to capture public trust and market share. Hence, no one wants to power a game with AI, when the people playing the game would just see it as a seamless advancement in game mechanics.
Also, no one wants to appeal to gamers directly, because they aren’t a good demographic to have singing the praises of your product. Steve the fortune 500 CEO, and Maria the director of the state DMV, will not be enthralled by Caleb the racist 14 year old’s product endorsement.
Finally, we’ve found that it us really hard to put effective guardrails on LLMs. So any company that did this would be risking Caleb posting a video online where their game is used to display or discuss lewd sexual acts, leading to bad PR.
We do use AI in videogames, and have for multiple decades (with varying levels of sophistication).
Indeed! Seems like people have forgotten that AI is not just LLMs.
Have you ever talked with an AI? It sucks.
I’ve talked to them often. So I don’t bore my family with my wild ideas lol
Those wild ideas would be good for someone
It would need to be cloud-based, or otherwise require a lot of RAM
