Gradine
🏳️⚧️ (she/her) 🇵🇸
Look, all I want is a remaster of Lost Odyssey, and Vagrant Story. That really shouldn't be too much to ask for.
Video Games You Wish Existed
- Thread starter Reynard
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Paul Farquhar
Legend
BG3 gives you a choice about how "written" your PC is.
Some PCs are a lot more written than they pretend to be though. Cyberpunk's V has a lot of inbuilt attitudes, and as for Commander Shepard, whatever dialogue you choose, it comes out as badass.
How intrusive vs immersive it is depends on to what extent you relate to the written personality. I found V an irritating butt-pain with whom I didn't share values.
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Ruin Explorer
Legend
All PCs are more written than they pretend to be, zero exceptions.
Even if we look at games lauded by people for having PCs who are supposedly blank slates, we find that the dialogue offered tends to be pretty narrow and specific, often not offering as many choices or as much nuance as supposedly heavily-written PCs. Again the Oblivion Remaster helps bring this into focus, as does Starfield. Neither has a PC who is really a blank slate, they're just limited and inconsistent in a way that's every bit as "unimmersive" as most heavily-written PCs. Often you can easily see the hand of the specific quest writer because in one quest you'll have a bunch of gentle/empathetic and curious question options, and the next you'll have only a couple of options, both of which are rude and snarky and where you can't ask "why?" or the like at all. More heavily-written RPGs tend to avoid that specific pitfall at least.
The most successful RPGs, immersion-wise, I would argue are ones where the PC is at least somewhat established, but not locked down. Also where the personality of the PC and their role in the story align - Commander Shepard is a good example here - they're a badass as you say but that fits perfectly with the story and setting, and still leaves a lot of room for manuever. I would argue Hawke was by far the most effective the DA protagonists for similar reasons (and some more complex ones). Grey Warden suffered from a bad case of quest-based-personality syndrome, Inquisitor had some of the blandest and most contrived dialogue in RPG history, and Veilguard has a specific personality but one that isn't well aligned with the story in quite a complicated way (it also suffers from a failure to kill your darlings, writing-wise, but again there's more to say there).
BG3's PC choices are pretty good in Act 1 but increasingly devolve into quest-based-personality syndrome as the game goes into Act 2 and especially Act 3, which illustrates the sheer difficulty of managing that approach. The specific backgrounds vary wildly in quality (showing they were learning as they went), and have some really bizarre holes in them (again especially in Act 2/3).
I am almost certain we will see chatbots/LLMs incorporated into games to allow for more natural dialogue with NPCs, rather than just the scripted trees.
It's already being done. Look up some videos of Darth Vader in Fortnite.
But are those modders or is Fortnite already implementing?
Vader is an interesting one, too, because I believe I read that JEJ licensed his voice for the character in perpetuity.
It's not a mod, it's a direct implementation of AI by Fortnite. He can join your party as an NPC and responds to voice chat.
Edit: Just for the heck of it, some examples:
Vader giving a sick burn: *NEW* AI Darth Vader Tells Jokes In Fortnite!
Vader doing poetry: Asking Fortnite Darth Vader AI how he FEELS ABOUT SAND
Huh?: TikTok - Make Your Day
Also, if you ask him too many questions about Padme he'll turn on you, leave the party, and try to kill you.
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Ruin Explorer
Legend
It's absolutely being looked into and will continue to be until someone tries it seriously and succeeds/fails (there have been small attempts already but rather unserious), but I think there are two major problems there:
1) Current LLMs/chatbots aren't anywhere near good enough to do this yet outside a present-day setting (c.f. all "historical figure" chatbots and so on), they're just totally incapable of staying in-character and in-period. There's no reason to believe they're going to improve here in the next few years, either - though eventually I think people will get good at writing "guardrails" (the trouble with current models is it's all in the prompt, and it's kind of a black box beyond that, you need to access at a deeper level to put proper guardrails). An SLM might well actually a better job, if it was liked trained solely on more appropriate and focused material, it kinda couldn't deviate.
2) LLMs are extremely expensive to run, and cannot be run locally - they have to "outsource" to huge datacenters. They also can't react in real time to complex inputs involving memory which you'd need for RPGs (Darth Vader is keeping it simple and snappy, just basically "reaction dialogue") - they can be fast, real fast, but not enough to be natural, and if the datacenters were in a specific country, not worldwide, this is going to be made worse. But the main issue is cost - in a subscription-based MMORPG, this might only bump up the monthly sub (and maybe not even by a lot), but with single-player games or other games that don't continuously charge? You, the publisher or developer, are eating significant ongoing costs, especially if you want fast responses, and especially if you're not the actual owner of the datacenters (meaning only Microsoft of all the gaming companies could get this reasonably cheaply for themselves). Success might even be a curse in this scenario - probably the ideal is people play your game once and forget about it, but if people loved it and kept replaying it and so on, your costs are going to be sky-high (assuming a typical usage-based contract - and I doubt you could get much else in this scenario unless you're Microsoft or Amazon, but Amazon keep shutting down their games division lol). I do think that an SLM, especially if they went less hard on the graphics and instead used modern GPUs (which have stuff that could be used for this) to process all the AI stuff might be able to respond fast enough to seem natural and wouldn't lead to ongoing costs.
You'd also face the uphill battle of adoption - most gamers are pretty opposed to AI generated content in games, and with good reason so far. So you'd need a true "killer app" - and a lot of products/devices/approaches just never find that, or are still looking for it (c.f. VR - sims aren't it, Alyx wasn't it). I think there's no way we see an LLM-based game out from anyone but MS or Amazon (more likely MS). SLM I think could from almost anywhere, and I think because it doesn't rely on what is popularly regarded as stealing (which all extant LLMs do), and perhaps more importantly doesn't cost the company a lot of money over time, meaning it's much better for single-player games, and doesn't have to be shut down after a few years.
I honestly don't think this opposition will last. When this stuff gets really good, people will stop asking and eventually stop noticing. I think the same is true in the TTRPG space, but will probably take longer.
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