this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2025
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Do you think it is likely that we will start to see Large Language Models integrated in to major video games? If so, are there some examples within gaming already?

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 4 months ago (6 children)

I think using LLMs to provide the dialog for NPCs in a RPG is a use case that's just begging to happen. Ie townsfolk that don't just give the same few replies every time, and who react to things you've done in the past beyond just whatever prewritten options the developer thought of.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 4 months ago (4 children)

For those that haven't seen it, this produces hilarious results.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=vWMLVZF3pGc

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 months ago

Even with the annoying YouTuber trying to make silly content out of it I'd say it actually kept into the roleplay pretty well

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago

Wow, even with its flaws, that went way smoother than I expected

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

That is...actually far better than I thought it would be. It's clearly not ready yet, but I could see the potential.

The AI model is too happy to serve the whims of the player, but if there was a better model that could actually be hooked in to me hanics like personality scores or reputation, I could see that as an interesting gameplay system. It also needs more checks on what they are and aren't supposed to know (e.g. why would a Skyrim NPC associate the name Batman with heroism, or why would they know who Gandalf is?).

A (digital) setup like Westworld is probably in the cards someday. Hopefully with more checks in place to keep the AI from rising up though!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for sharing, this set me off down the rabbit hole, and it seems this is now a popular and viable skyrim mod for organic dialogue with NPCs: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/98631

Pretty mind blowing!!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Awesome find!

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (1 children)

They did this in Free City, and one of the bank tellers became indistinguishable from a player.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

What is Free City? I can't figure it out from what I found in my searches.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I feel like if an NPC doesn't have something meaningful to say, then they may as well not exist. Otherwise they just serve to waste the players time.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago

"How dare there be an active world in my murder hobo wankfest?"

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

It is called "flavour"

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

A challenge game developers have talked about with integrating LLMs is keeping the dialogue matched to the game world, e.g. you don't want a Skyrim NPC mentioning a cell phone.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

If the feature actually worked as intended I could see myself ignoring the rest of the game and just chatting with the townsfolk.

In reality, I imagine the NPC would totally forget what we were talking about after a certain amount of messages pass. Limited context windows and all that jazz.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

This is my number one request for being AI to games, it would be so awesome for immersion like you say

[–] [email protected] 33 points 4 months ago (1 children)

We won't see large language models. We will likely see a stripped down version like a small language model (or Domain Specific models if you want the fancy marketing wank term) because a NPC in a fantasy game doesn't need to know about 13th century Europe or 19th century Asia.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

Yes, LLMs are too costly for this and require a cloud service, smaller models could run on the client. The main difficulty is getting the training data and preparing it for machine learning.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Not anytime soon. Nvidia tried, and nobody liked it. LLMs still suck at creative writing and need a ton of RAM/VRAM just to work. They also often get confused or trail off in any discussion/roleplay.

The only game that sort of made it work was Suck Up!, where you're a vampire that has to convince an AI to let you in their house so you can suck their blood. It's a fun concept but even that game gets repetitive quick and the LLM is very stupid and random.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (2 children)

NVIDIA not just tried, but still doing it, and apparently soon you'll play with these NVIDIA ACE NPCs in PUBG and a few other games.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEKUSMqrbzQ

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

I don't know what sounds more robotic, the AI or the script read for the player.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

They don't need a ton of ram if you use a tiny LLM customized for the game's use cases, and that's what games would be doing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The downside is the tinier the model the stupider it will be

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Tiny models only get stupid like that because you're taking a general purpose model that knows everything in the world and compressing all that knowledge too much. If you start with a model that only knows basic english and info about a few hundred things in the game, it can be much smaller.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Do I think it’ll happen? Yes, even if it’s not good, because AAA companies are cheap and have no taste. They thrive on just spewing out more content than a smaller studio could make, quality be damned.

That said, whether or not it COULD be useful in the future I think depends on the context and how well you could tune the models.

I think it has absolutely no place in a narrative game where intentional authorship is what people come for. Even if it’s passable, I want to know that what I’m hearing or reading was something SOMEONE wanted to say.

But I think it could be interesting in more open ended, replayable sim games where you want to be able to try a wide variety of approaches and have different experiences each time, but it would be impractical for a dev to implement all those possibilities to the point where players would feel like the game adequately responds to their actions. However, I don’t think you could just drop a copy of chat gpt in there and call it a day. You want different NPCs to be different and you want some consistent reality that they all exist in and respond to. So you’d probably need to put in some constraints based on some hidden file describing a particular world gen’s state. A basic example would be the NPC knowing that the town you asked about is to their north or perhaps an existing relationship between 2 characters.

Idk how technically feasible this would be, but it’d be a cool tool in the right context if done right. I think the key here is it can be good when it enhances what you want to do and you put in the effort to make it work vs just using it as a lazy shortcut.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Thanks for sharing.

I did a bit of browsing online and it seems modders are progressing a lot in terms of technical feasibility in an open ended setting:

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/98631

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/126330

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

A good fit would be random background NPCs. For example, pedestrians in a GTA like game. Can potentially increase the variety in the things they can say, and maybe even talk about things the player has just done.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

Don't know if it qualifies, but some time ago I saw a VTuber play "Suck Up!": you play as a vampire and you have to actually talk to try and convince NPCs to let you in so you can suck their blood. The "thinking" isn't done on your PC though, you push-to-talk your line and the answer is elaborated by their servers.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (3 children)

I think the PC vs. console divide is relevant here. I'm not sure how advanced text entry on consoles is these days, but I imagine PCs have the advantage with keyboards. Maybe if they use voice recognition on the consoles? But AAA games usually target both, and if interacting with the model is clunky for a big chunk of your market then the big developers might not use the technology.
Of course, indie devs that only target PC can go wild.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

AI could also generate dialogie options for players, though. It could operate as traditional dialogue, with AI generating responses and possible doalogue paths ahead of time so you get a "normal" experience that just changes every time

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

Not sure about Switch, but PS5/Xbox support mouse and keyboard inputs if a game is designed for them.

Voice recognition seems more likely to me, though. PS5 already has an advantage there because every Dualsense controller has a mic in it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Whisper from OpenAI is pretty solid for speech recognition (at least English), and it is small enough to deploy on mobile devices. If I recall correctly, both PS and Xbox controllers have mics built-in, so input device is covered.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I think so. New GPUs will be able to handle AI models running locally before too long. I think this will be used for NPC behavior as a replacement for procedural quest / dialogue generation. I have seen a lot of mobile games leveraging this but they don't seem very good yet. Models need to be trained more specifically for each game I think

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

You can run language models on consumer cards right now. The only thing is depending on the size of the model and the amount of VRAM on your card, you might not be able to do much else.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

Yeah there is likely still a ways to go before we can run high end modern games plus a local model, but newer nvidia cards are pretty crazy. It's probably closer than I think

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The voice actors for The Finals are completely made with AI, there is no real actor behind the scenes they started from.

That's not really what you had in mind, you're probably imagining a live-response model, but it is something that's happening now.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Yeah, I'm generally not fond of using AI, but that clip where June goes fucking crazy convinced me that it might actually be viable. Not to that level of craziness, but having them go on like SC2 casters throughout the entire game would fit in so much.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Are you asking if company is willing to risk all their reputation to add software that generates random text based on user input, that can be exploited or just faked as hate, racists or whatever you could think of evil is ?

I don't think so. Maybe it could be used to generate some large dialogue loops but putting random text generator to the actual game if it's not your first game, you have nothing to lose or you want to feel the AI hype ? I don't think so.