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.
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.
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
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 :(
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?
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
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.
And it’s not good for the one thing I actually want to see. When you talk to an NPC, you literally talk to them and they respond through generative output. They’re not always accurate about the info they give you, and if you try hard enough you can get them to entirely break the 4th wall. They do not seem more believable, since in the end they all end up having the exact same personality and have no guarantees that they will even be useful when they give you info about the quests you’re asking about.
You know what’s more reliable? The messages other players leave and the comments there in.
Yeah, the NPC chat feature is an obvious miss on their part. It’s all the other ai in there that’s impressive really. The stuff you didn’t notice enough to complain about.
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
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.
Are you willing to put in an API key and pay money for interactions with an LLM?
It’s not really a one time cost. And I don’t know if devs really want to take on that expense.
I’d figure that small models could be run locally and even incorporated into the local game code without needing to use a big company’s API, if they wanted to.
Is an API key necessary? Pretty sure there are local LLMs.
They would increase requirements significantly and be generally pretty bad and repetitive. It’s going to take some time before that happens.
Would it? Game developers can run anything on their own servers.
That would be crazy expensive for the studios. LLM companies are selling their services at a loss at the moment.
crazy expensive
Citation missing, so unconvincing. We’re not talking about a general purpose LLM here. Are pretrained, domain-specific LLMs or SLMs “crazy expensive” to run?
First of all, I’m going to replace AI with LLM, since that’s probably what you meant.
There are 2 distinct questions asked in this post:
- Why not use LLMs to provide different levels of automation? (Like, manual, medium, auto)
Answer: you don’t need LLMs for that. You can just code it in like any other feature. It’s not particularly hard, game developers know how to do it since they are used to programming automation for NPCs.
- Why not use LLMs to procedurally generate NPC dialogue?
Answer: games are primarily a form of art. NPC dialogues are written with a purpose. Different characters have different personalities. Some dialogues are meant to drive the plot. Other dialogues are meant to teach the player how to play. Others are meant to show the player things that they may have missed, or things that are interesting.
Procedural dialogues removes all the control from artists. They would all be generic npc n#473, with the “personality” of the LLM, maybe slightly varied if the developer writes a different prompt for each character.
Procedural dialogues would have the same issues as procedural world generation or photorealistic graphics, it would just not be interesting.
There is a practically infinite amount of Minecraft worlds, yet they all feel the same way. The thing that differentiates a Minecraft world from another is that which the player has built. The only part of the world that wasn’t procedurally generated.
There is a great amount of photorealistic games. And they all look very similar. You may only distinguish one from another by looking at their handcrafted worlds or their handcrafted characters. But not by staring at a wall. You can stare at a wall in non-photoreslistic games and know what game it is.
So if you put procedurally generated dialogues, no one will read them, since you’ll be bored by the time you read the same thing being said by 5 different NPCs from 5 different games.
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.
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
Why would we?
Why anything? Sorry but I don’t accept that as an any. “Why do that “ why get out of bed? That’s above my pay grade.
Why would “all this talk of AI not being profitable” be what triggers discussion about LLM use in games? I would think making games fun and interesting should be what triggers any discussion about using anything in games. Are you Satya Nadella trying to find some way to make LLMs profitable? All this ignores that people have actually been talking about exactly what you described for 2 years already.
You got me. I’m satya nadella. I would have gotten away with it too if it wasnt for you meddling kids and you’re dog.
Because the kind of Genrative AIs which would be worth puting in a game (smaller ones) have two drawbacks for the hype train :
-you can’t promise an AGI which would justify the govt putting mbillions in your company in order to stay “competitive”
You can’t create a feedback loop of finance with nvidia and the like because your company wouldn’t need such computational power then.
I’m pretty sure no one is going to think an in-game npc is real
Do it: modify Minecraft so a villager gives investment advice. No one could be dumb enough to expect that to be real, right?
No one could be dumb enough to expect that to be real, right?
Oh, my sweet, summer child…
There might have been a missunderstanding,
What i meant is that as an ai company, to service so many clients at once, you would have to downscale your ai models quite a lot.
In doing so, you limit your claims that you can “make an AGI, i swear bro just one more server farm”. This means that the government/investors are less likely to jump on the hype train.
All the while, downscaled model require way less trainign time and data scraping meaning you won’t get to buy all of nvidia for them to buy all of you for your market value to explode for your money to go stonks.
As far as i’m aware, this is the reason why you don’t see AIs as npc (at least yet, maybe when we get a little bit more reasonable, we can try to do it inteligently)
Please pardon me if i missunderstood your comment/post
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.
Some chap invested a lot of time into making the Skyrim experience nicer. I recommend you check out CHIM :)
Quite a lovely project, but you will have to spend some time to set things up. For example, if you have a good GPU available, you can set up TTS for NPCs, STT for yourself, and then a decent LLM to handle the world interactions. The NPCs then can listen to you talk, follow you, do stuff you tell them (like attack someone, or pick something off the floor), etc. It’s something quite revolutionary, if you can spend the time to get it to work. If you’re looking for some LLM provider on the cheap, nano-gpt has an 8 dollar per month tier that gives you “fair-use unlimited” access to open source models. Worth a shot!
Note: You won’t be able to run all the models and the game on the same computer. The CHIM wiki has some suggestions on the amount of compute needed, and alternatives for the services so that you don’t have to run everything locally.
I saw someone play this game, Ai2U on a livestream recently.
You wake up in a cute girl’s home who’s eager to keep you by her side! Engage with thematic stories, puzzles, and unique AI NPCs who’ll go to any lengths to protect you—even when it means contradicting themselves. Bask in meet-cutes or brace for chaos if you try to escape.
Basically, you have to vocally speak with this AI anime girl that is obsessed with you. She has you basically trapped and you some how have to convince or trick her into letting you leave.
The whole game is unhinged but it’s a pretty fun example of an LLM being used in a game.
