- SimCity where you can read a newspaper about what's happening in your city that actually reflects the events that have occurred with interesting perspectives from the residents.
- Dwarf Fortress, but carvings, artwork, demons, forbidden beasts, etc get illustrations dynamically generated via stable diffusion (in the style of crude sketches to imply a dwarf made it perhaps?)
- Dwarf Fortress, again, but the elaborate in-game combat comes with a "narrative summary" which conveys first hand experiences of a unit in the combat log, which while detailed, can be otherwise hard to follow.
- Any fantasy RPG, but with a minstrel companion who follows you around and writes about what you do in a silly judgy way. The core dialogue could be baked in by the developers but the stories this minstrel writes could be dynamically generated based on the players actions. Example: "He was a whimsical one, who decided to take detour from his urgent hostage rescue mission to hop up and down several hundred times in the woods while trying on various hats he had collected. I have no idea what goes through this mans mind..."
I'm not sure if there is a word for it, but the kernel here is that everything is indirectly being dictated by the players actions and the games existing systems. The LLM/AI stuff isn't in charge of coming up with novel stories, and content, they are in charge of making the game more immersive and helping with the roleplay. I think this is the area they can thrive the most.
I'd say AAA games have been on track of "less fun" for at least half a decade. So this sounds like a natural next step.
OTOH, lots of games come with DLC that add new stories with the same mechanics. There might be some additions or changes, but if you really like the mechanics, you can try it with a different plot. Remnant II has sucked a ton of my time because of that.
How so?
I could totally see generative AI add a ton more variety to crowds, random ambient sentences by NPCs (that are often notoriously just a rotation of a handful of canned lines that get repetitive soon), terrain etc., while still being guided by a human-created high level narrative.
Imagine being able to actually talk your way out of a tricky situation in an RPG with a guard, rather than selecting one out of a few canned dialogue options. In the background, the LLM could still be prompted by "there's three routes this interaction can take; see which one is the best fit for what the player says and then guide them to it and call this function".
Worst case, you get a soulless, poorly written game with very eloquent but ultimately uninteresting characters. Some games are already that today – minus the realistic dialogue.
Yes, sure, but that's not what I was responding to. AI adding detail, not infinite quest lines, is possibly a good use case.
> Worst case, you get a soulless, poorly written game with very eloquent but ultimately uninteresting characters. Some games are already that today – minus the realistic dialogue.
Some games, yes... why do we want more of those? Anyway, that's not the worst case. Worst case is incomprehensible dialogue.
By definition, an infinite game is as boring as real life. To make it interesting, the engine must be able to search for a good story based on player actions. You can see this today already. Many games will guide the player into one or a few predefined stories. A better game would not have them predefined, but generated on-the-fly based on player actions.
The better you make this infinite narrative generator, the more complicated the world gets and the less compelling it gets to actually interact with any one story.
Stories thrive by setting their own context. They should feel important to the viewer. An open world with infinite stories can't make every story feel meaningful to the player. So how does it make any story feel meaningful? I suppose the story would have to be global, in which case, it crowds out the potential for fractal infinite storylines - eventually, all or at least most are going to have to tie back to the Big Bad Guy in order to feel meaningful.
Local stories would just feel mostly pointless. In Minecraft, all (overworld) locales are equally unimportant. Much like on Earth, why should you care about the random place you appeared in the world? The difference is that on Earth you tend to develop community as you grow and builds connections to the place you live, which can build loyalty. In addition, you only have one shot, and you have real needs that you must fulfill or you die forever. So you develop some otherwise arbitrary loyalties in order to feel security in your needs.
In Minecraft there's zero pressure to develop loyalty to a place except for your own real-life time. And when that becomes a driving factor, why wouldn't you pick a game designed to respect your time with a self-contained story? (Not that infinite games like Minecraft are bad, but they aren't story-driven for a good reason).
Now, a game like Dwarf Fortress is different because you build the community, the infrastructure, the things that make you care about a place. But it already has infinite story generation without AI and I'm not sure AI would improve on that model.