Video games, AI and Better NPC Dialogue Options

[Ruin Explorer]

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?

It won't work because of the logistics and because of interacting with game systems.

A) Here's the logistics problem - chat bots don't run locally.

They run on distant servers, and furthermore, they take up really surprising amounts of processing and power and energy, especially if you want responses that aren't delayed.

And it costs money, significant money, to run them. A lot of companies are running them as loss-leader or alongside adverts or trying to convert people to subscriptions of microtransactions. Microsoft might be willing to temporarily run a videogame using copilot AI or the like on their subscription service (Game Pass), but you can bet two things:

1) They won't let you purchase the game and play it outside the subscription service. Certainly not on Steam or the like.

2) At some point they will turn off copilot AI for that game, and the NPCs will revert to being non-AI-boosted, or they might even just stop the game from being playable.

B) There's the interacting problem - how do you hook game systems into AI-based chat?

No-one has an answer for this yet, but it's a non-trivial problem, and not possible to dismiss. Let's look at the scenario you outlined. Yes, copilot or ChatGPT or the like might well let you tell the NPC that, and even let them NPC verbally respond, but would it be able to do anything else? Would it register the quest finished? If so how do you prevent the PC accidentally triggering that sort of thing by the saying the wrong thing?

You'd basically have to design the entire game around AI chat and not pre-determined responses, and have NPCs be less fixed and have more of just a wide set of actions they could perform, and you're have to structure them so that they basically made sense most of the time. People are willing to accept quite a lot of jank, but not too much jank. There are already games experimenting with this, but it's pretty much a car crash in all cases.

So we have these two problems - if you want a game to be AI driven, it probably has to be essentially wholly AI driven, without much in the way of fixed dialogue or the like, it's not going to work as just a bolt on, and that AI is being processed on a server somewhere else, using up a ton of energy, costing someone money, using up water for cooling, and will inevitably be turned off at some point.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

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

I know exactly why it is. Bethesda is run by a bunch of fossils who haven't updated their approach to making games in literally 25 years, and have never managed to expand their team enough to work on more than one game at once, so have to work on games entirely sequentially, and as a result, work on Elder Scrolls 6 still hasn't started in earnest, because they're working on various DLC for Starfield.

Once work starts on Elder Scrolls 6, given that it's likely to be a large-scale open-world game, it'll likely take a dead minimum of 4 years, and more like 5-7 years to be finished. Starfield took 7 years and look at that! An utterly bland and mediocre space game that isn't anywhere near as clever as No Man's Sky, doesn't have a story anywhere near as compelling or well told as even, say Mass Effect from 2007 (let alone stuff Cyberpunk 2077 - especially Phantom Liberty or Baldur's Gate 3), and is full of half-consider cheap tropes like "Cowboy Planet".

It certainly has nothing to do with AI.

That said, Bethesda's writing is so weak relative to the rest of the industry, that if they could someone give an AI a really good grasp on the Elder Scrolls lore (and a way to limit what individual characters know), and find some good ways to draw bounds around what an LLM would be willing to do/say in-game, then I feel like an Elder Scrolls game would be damaged far less by having semi-nonsensical AI chatbots in it than say, a Mass Effect game.

 

[GMMichael]

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:

Psh. AI is clearly too far behind for role-playing. Everyone knows:

• Gather Information isn't a 5e skill,
• Players can't announce their own investigation checks, and
• a giant riding lizard costs more than a warhorse!

I'll see the rest of you DMs in the unemployment line...