* NPCs that don’t want to speak and usually offer a dismissive comment or a single repeating phrase. Fine candidates to LLM so long as this pattern doesn’t change. But also, who really cares?
* important NPCs with specific written dialogue. Don’t even THINK about gambling with your story’s self consistency by giving these guys agency
* the limited townsfolk type that has a small bit of something say. Like a typical Baldurs gate NPC. These people are fun to talk to because they “might” have something relevant or fun to say. Usually you don’t have to say anything. They just want to share things with you. It would be very tedious to chat with these people if they were infinite wells of lore and nothingness to be probed with written language.
Game devs will still provide structure, "this big baddie is trying to do X, there's this mysterious treasure over here". But the guard rails will be gone, and there will be a real world to explore, not just cutscenes to sit through.
You can’t unlock the guard rails without making the general story completely arbitrary. It’s just not possible.
That's the exact promise. BotW has a main story, but it's not where the real fun is. The game devs will still write some overarching plot for people that want that, but you can just ignore that and live your own story.
There will also be a lot of fun in seeing how far you can stretch the original story to its breaking point, like how people enjoy breaking Skyrim with too many mods. Testing the limits is the fun. "What if I defeated Ganon by taming an army of crabs?"
BotW’s appeal is not the story. It’s definitely not the dialogue. It’s about exploring a carefully planned world full of goodies. Not a shitty LLM procedurally generated one that goes forever. And DEFINITELY not a run time generated one.
This is such a stupidly thought out vision. BotW is a beautiful game that emphasizes minimalism and simplicity and you’re wanting to cram shit like this in.
You can’t do those things because that’s not what the game is about. And if you could do those things, it would be a different fucking game, and the magicalness of the world and the ingenuity of its game mechanics would become nothing compared to your “limitless player narrative agency”
I think your takes suck and have no basis in the reality of plausible to implement technology but this one really crosses the line of just being irritating to imagine asking for. This is the polar opposite of BotW’s design thesis and I hate you for tainting it.
LOL, calm down mate. Fwiw, I've read your back and forth with the GP and I'm much more excited with their vision than yours.
Anyone with any imagination can see that LLMs are the future of story telling.
You can rage all you want, but progress will march on without you.
Giving a chatbot brain to an NPC who would otherwise only get a single generic line to say creates an infinite amount of negative possibility space. A player can waste a literally infinite amount of time probing a chatbot NPC for narratively interesting details, and all they'll get is chatbot slop. Now it doesn't matter if you put something interesting at the end of the hallway: You've wasted so much of the player's time now that they no longer trust you to. They assume you're just wasting their time. You teach your players to be cynical and incurious and to engage with your work as little as possible, because in their experience it's mostly meaningless.
For this reason, I consider the integration of chatbots into video games to fundamentally anti-artistic. It actively pushes players away from the work such that they get less out of it. Nobody wants this, actually. It sucks.
I would phrase that as "A player can have an infinite amount of fun creating an immersive world with the LLM". Any details you want will be narratively interesting, because the LLM will work them into the narrative as necessary.
There's no end of the hallway, the hallway leads to everything. The ultimate sandbox game.
It’s main draw is also typically sharing YOUR creations with other people.
There will also be extensive structure and curation to these games. It will just be elements that you can play with as you see fit, much like Minecraft.
Here's why Minecraft works: It's an ecosystem full of carefully-designed areas and resources (biomes fine-tuned to generate specific types of landscape, enemies with focus-tested behaviours, items with particular abilities) which combine to form a sandbox where players can exercise ingenuity and build projects that satisfy their creative vision.
Where does generative AI fit into this? Should it be generating an infinite variety of dull and unoriginal items that don't do anything cool? Should it be building derivative-looking houses for players to ignore or burn down so that they can build their own houses in their place?
LLM-generated slop has no place in games. It is an obstacle to having a good time.
LLMs won't generate items or houses (or at least be the primary source). They'll give the world agency, in a way that's straight up impossible now.
Like, maybe you screw someone over and they dedicate their lives to destroying you. Maybe you're just running around doing your thing and discover that the world has become embroiled in war all on their own. You can choose to join and fight, or play both sides, or just ignore it and keep adventuring. Maybe you're tired of adventuring and open up a flower shop, working your way up to creating a ruthless floral version of Standard Oil. Maybe you decide to kill the king and take his place, playing a game of cut-throat politics where people are constantly trying to backstab you. Then you decide, "Hey, I want to play as this other character and backstab my old self" and the LLM takes over your old character as you gleefully kill them off.
If none of that sounds interesting to you, then there's lots of other games to play and I'm sure you'll have fun. Those are all things that I can't wait to see happen.
People absolutely were complaining about this, with basically the same argument ("It's too much freedom! Players will get lost! They'll never get to the "goal" the artist sets!" etc)
Of course, that turned out to be silly
Before Minecraft came out, I played Nethack. No, I was never principally opposed to procgen games. However, there is such a thing as procedurally-generated slop. Good procgen games use a very fine-tuned algorithm to create engaging environments. Minecraft caves aren't fun to explore by accident; the algorithm was designed and tuned to consistently produce novel and fun layouts. Items and mobs were designed to specifically interact with those environments to lead to fun gameplay.
You're missing the insight that games featuring procedural generation are still designed. Bad design will lead to a bad game where the algorithm produces unfun gameplay. LLMs are not independently capable of good design. Games where LLMs are given agency over the player's experience won't be fun.
> maybe you screw someone over and they dedicate their lives to destroying you
And maybe it's really annoying and unpleasant, because the game is doing a bad job of telling that story. You're assuming it'll be good, but LLMs aren't smart enough to tell stories well or to understand what kind of gameplay will be enjoyable.
Best example of this is Spelunky, and this book goes into good detail: https://bossfightbooks.com/products/spelunky-by-derek-yu
Gist is that Derek designed these playable mini rooms which were ultimately randomly stitched together.
Anything interesting will have to be provided by the player (as in a sandbox game) or by the designer (as in a conventional game), and at that point you've just ruined a perfectly good game by introducing an LLM to slather boring slop all over the interesting stuff the player or the designer has tried to do.
This can be said about all NPCs, yet we bother to script them, and I would hope nobody would suggest we just remove NPC dialogue.