Video games, AI and Better NPC Dialogue Options

[TaranTheWanderer]

I recently decided to start playing Skyrim again and often, when you're speaking with NPCs, you're strapped with dialogue options that you dislike.

Example: NPCs wife is missing. You go look for her only to find our she's now a bandit leader. You talk to her and she gives you her wedding ring. You go back to the husband and you only have two options: 1. Give the ring and tell him she's dead; 2. Tell him you never found her.

Where is option 3?: Tell him she's alive and doesn't want anything to do with him anymore.

This seems like a great example of where you can leverage Chat Bots to make a game better. Option 3 opens the ability to type in your questions/answers and have the bot respond.

Is this already in practice? If not, do you think it would work? If so, what are the logistics to this?

 

[trappedslider]

Is this already in practice? If not, do you think it would work? If so, what are the logistics to this?

Well Nexus mods put this out https://www.nexusmods.com/news/14850

there's this mod https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/44184

And an adult mod site already has a number of AI voiced mods from my understanding

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inworld.ai

Then on the flip side before any else can point it out

There's this https://www.pcgamer.com/anger-from-...s-to-replicate-their-voices-this-is-not-okay/ from last year

EDIT: Also AI bad evil juju burn it

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Even if they were to solve the ethics of duplicating voice actors using AI, from a design perspective, this sort of thing would bloat the size of a game and the development hours required (training an AI is no simple thing) enormously. The former, I suppose you could mitigate by using a cloud-hosted, always online component.

Will we see this eventually? Probably. But I think, under present technological conditions, in the form of a small game where you can interact with a one or two NPCs rather than Skyirm: The Say Anything Edition.

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

Even if they were to solve the ethics of duplicating voice actors using AI, from a design perspective, this sort of thing would bloat the size of a game and the development hours required (training an AI is no simple thing) enormously. The former, I suppose you could mitigate by using a cloud-hosted, always online component.

Will we see this eventually? Probably. But I think, under present technological conditions, in the form of a small game where you can interact with a one or two NPCs rather than Skyirm: The Say Anything Edition.

I wasn't specifically talking about Skyrim. There's lots of games that have drop-down menus or dialogue boxes that force you to pick a response to an NPC.

I'd never thought about the voice actor issue although, if you are designing a game from scratch that uses AI for NPCs, you would bake that into a voice actor's contract. And maybe, on top of having lines, they just say common phrases and words with different inflections that the AI can access..

As far as bloat, I have no idea how much actual data it takes to train an AI or even have one as part of a game. Once it's trained, though, a company could use it for many of its games. They could do it for a single NPC or follower as an experiment.

EDIT: Also AI bad evil juju burn it

I don't really think it is. Maybe, how it's being used currently it is but, I think, if it's used in a way to enrich humanity as opposed to doing what a lot of corporations are using it for and replacing people all together, then I don't think it's too bad. Not that I want to talk about the ethics of AI as there's piles of threads for that.

 

[MarkB]

There's a lot more to it than just using AI NPCs, though. An individual NPC might be able to come up with responses to non-standard player choices, but the game as a whole can't restructure itself to accommodate them.

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

There's a lot more to it than just using AI NPCs, though. An individual NPC might be able to come up with responses to non-standard player choices, but the game as a whole can't restructure itself to accommodate them.

True. It would only be able to answer things within the parameters of the 'quest'.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

As far as bloat, I have no idea how much actual data it takes to train an AI or even have one as part of a game. Once it's trained, though, a company could use it for many of its games. They could do it for a single NPC or follower as an experiment.

Unless you want all your NPCs to answer dialog the same way, it would require significant modeling for each one. As far as the amount of data it would take, my understanding is that it can be quite significant, far beyond current gaming console's storage. And that's not even getting into processing power.

I think this is eventually coming, but technology needs to advance a bit more first.

 

[Clint_L]

I've played around with using ChatGPT3.5 to run an adventure for me, but it took a lot of coaching. However, folks have been experimenting with Chat4 and the improvement is astonishing:

 

[GMMichael]

Even if they were to solve the ethics of duplicating voice actors using AI, from a design perspective, this sort of thing would bloat the size of a game and the development hours required (training an AI is no simple thing) enormously.

I think this is eventually coming, but technology needs to advance a bit more first.

Why do you think Elder Scrolls 6 is taking so long?

And do we think Microsoft's acquisition of Bethesda Softworks is related?

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Why do you think Elder Scrolls 6 is taking so long?

And do we think Microsoft's acquisition of Bethesda Softworks is related?

Microsoft certainly has the resources to invest in solving the training and size issues, and their AI product, Copilot, was released just last year.