…contextually appropriate responses that reflect the character’s personality…
Can any of the chatbots really emulate a fictional character’s personality? Not just some catch-phrases or word choices, but attitudes about concepts outside the source material?
Yuck. No one wants this stupid shit.
Think about it, you would have infinite variations of “oh my god, he’s driving his car on the sidewalk!”
Can I have a mod that makes every NPC pedestrian line the stereotypical gay guy voice already recorded for the game, instead?
Only if they call the mod “The Barrage of Gay Tonys”.
I was actually kinda upset that Gay Tony wasn’t the player character in that. I don’t think Louis was even gay.
allowing players to speak directly with NPCs and receive responses in their original, AI-cloned voices.
That part I do not approve of at all.
This is so weird. I wonder if the NPCs have any sense of their identity and place in the world? Can you ask them about your current mission and have them respond appropriately?
AI has NO ability to do any of that what so ever. It’s a word predictor, not actual intelligence.
You could instantly gaslight one into thinking they’re a cop or a fellow bad guy, but I guarantee you this mod cannot actually control the NPCs, meaning even if you did, all they’d do is say stupid shit and do nothing different.
Actual intelligence isn’t required, you just have to fake it convincingly. Like games always do. In the past that was always done with dialog and movement scripting to create a believable NPC. Now maybe new tools can take that further and make conversations and actions more natural and dynamic. Still without underlying intelligence, just predictive algorithms.
Unless it’s fed to them via their context window (text) no. Likely they’ll get randomly assigned one of few template personalities, maybe can remark on things that happen in the immediate area around them (game events that can be read and fed to them via text) and that’d be it. I’ve seen similar mods (though a while ago) for other open world games. It become pretty clear quickly that they’re only giving generic responses outside their pre-supplied info. The only exception could be story important NPCs that you could create a unique personality for that the LLM could reference for responses.
Like asking a random shopkeeper in Skyrim if they know about a specific character you’re looking for. The NPCs have their essential status, schedules, their dialogue options and inventory. They don’t have any stat for “knows this character” or “is former X guild member” for example. If they’re married it’d be made apparent through dialogue to the player only.
Yeah that’s pretty much how I was thinking it worked. But couldn’t you also record a file of sorts that tracks your game progress that all the NPC personas could access? I feel like that’s all it would really take for them to be able to comment somewhat on your narrative as a player. “Hey hero, I heard you killed that nasty dragon” kind of thing that’s traditionally been scripted, but the convo could be more dynamic. “Did it really take over 700 arrows to do the job?”. Probably not super hard if you track weapon type and number of strikes.
It’s potentially possible but becomes way more complex for the modder. They would also still have to write some sort of text/prompt addition for every quest end flag that was triggered. You’d also have to determine which flags would be “global” game world knowledge. Like you assisinate a specific gang leader for the FIB undetected in a covert mission. It would be weird for a random NPC to then be like “good job sniping John McCrimeboss in that job for the government”.
Did it really take over 700 arrows to do the job?". Probably not super hard if you track weapon type and number of strikes.
Again on paper, sounds easy but unless the game tracks that already, the modder would have to build these systems themselves which would potentially be beyond the ability/effort of vibe coders. Skyrim for example, why would the devs code in tracking how many weapon strikes, and of which particularly weapon it took to kill something if it doesn’t serve a game mechanic? So that would have to be built.
The only game I’ve seen it somewhat work for is stalker, because of the game already having the PDA mechanic in it. So a lot of the game world events/triggers had corresponding text entries/details so they could be printed to the screen as message. E.g. when you shoot and kill a bandit with a SPAS12; “I just saw Joe stalker shoot a bandit with a shotgun, that guy owed me money” would sometimes be printed in the game global chat from an NPC. The only part that comes the game world/events is <player Name> and <Weapon type>, the rest is a template. So all the the modder to had to code was the LLM to be fed the printed message and occasionally generate a response based on it.
One day soon, someone is going to build a compelling game around an LLM. But not today.
They already have. It’s called, “Let’s Crash the Economy!”.
