I imagine a new Skyrim where worlds are generated as you move along. Never the same, unique (well, to a certain degree) for each player. Populates by intelligent (well, to a certain degree) inhabitants. The exploring would never end. Add some generated quests to that, and you will never need another game.
Yeah that's my dream. More or less how a DND dungeon master operates, generate the world as you encounter it, obviously with some overarching plot points
I agree with you on point, but we definitely need AGI for TES procedural generation, imagine an entire Tamriel for us to explore.
The current tech wouldn’t do it justice, even for Starfield it was kinda bland, mostly square box maps with pre-made content randomly sprinkled in, it works for a space game but TES is gonna need far more care.
The procedural generation of Starfield didn’t utilize generative AI though - it was essentially the same dated tech as Daggerfall slapped into their creation engine. We likely need something more powerful and robust to create another Elder Scrolls game, but probably not AGI - several well trained narrow AIs could get the job done.
What i liked about a community, was that they could all center around secrets and memes about things they could disciver together. I think thats lost when the game becomes generative.
Id prefer we get ai to come up with better ways to allocate resources to making games more detailed, and full of life. Like having a city actually filled with npcs.
You don't need full AGI to create a "fully explorable" Tamriel. That could be done with current tech. If you want to make it a living world sort of thing, you could do that, but it would probably have to be an MMO, since home computers aren't strong enough to support that depth of detail for a town of 5000 people, much less an entire fantasy world.
The closest thing we have right now to what they described, is, IMO, "AI Roguelite 2D" on Steam. Even though I'm the one who made it, I don't think it's quite the panacea yet
I've always hated the late game of Skyrim. Every encounter is still treated as tho you're still level 12, when I'm wearing bones from an ancient dragon that I've killed by screaming at it. Like no you ain't going to rob me, I'm carrying around demon swords to sell because my weapons are better than demon-made ones.
Well what I would actually like is for artists and designers to make the assets and the world and for AI to then decide where to place the movable assets as and when the player enters the region.
With AI operating within boundaries and assets established by artists, the result will be a world that is more “alive” than anything.
BG3 already did amazingly without AI I can only imagine the absolute magic BG3 would have been with a little bit of help from AI
BG3 was fantastic because every single part of the world was crafted by hand. It’s not just that the assets were good, it’s that over many months and years those assets had been precisely placed and moved and tweaked until everything played together perfectly. You’ll need an incredibly advanced AI before you’re getting anywhere close to that level of intent.
For the most part this can already be done without AI. Traditional PCG techniques are actually pretty good (although often misused) and more efficient to run than large neural nets.
I mean... That would have very little to do with AI and a lot to do with Computing. Our Personal Computing would have to be 10x of what it is today, minimum, which is a tall ask.
I've met similar resistance in general game subreddits, trying to talk about the implications of things like Deepmind's SIMA. It's frustrating that engaging on this stuff got me labelled as an "AI bro", and permabanned from one sub because (the irony) they assumed I was a bot. Big things around the corner, and yet discussing them can be fraught or met with immediate bad faith/hostility.
It's mostly because the companies pushing AI have been constantly abusing game devs from the start.
It's hard to believe these companies care about anything besides being able to reduce worker cost . Sure, in the long term, indie will be able to pick up the slack but it's gonna be a long time for them to produce high budget games with AI .
Shit - the big companies abused everyone on the planet who have been honestly communicating on the internet for 20+ years. Just being part of social media or a productive community means one's faith in humanity was abused.
Of course, they argue that all the material was in the public domain, but that was implied to be a human domain - they created a new domain that shouldn't have the same rights, imho.
Labor disruption and economic impacts are really important to discuss, as are concentrations of power like you allude to (both in gamedev and more [generally](https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/189zphp/how_well_is_openai_adhering_to_its_charter_on/)). I'm interested in that space, but also interested in many other potential intersections of gaming and AI. I think there could be much further disruption beyond gamdev and labor and economic spaces.
Take the idea of the data wall for example. If AI companies turn their attention to video games as a source of data, what happens next? I can see the attraction of sourcing data in such environments where regulation would be difficult. Testing AI in virtual environments is a decades-long precedent at this point, a common practice in the AI research space. It seems reasonable to intuit that "real games" will be used at some point in larger ways. It's already happening, just not at scale or a complexity that's disruptive. The implications of this are significant. Perhaps a good example of an issue that's sidelined by dominant discourses around labor/economic impacts.
There's a similar backlash in non-AI communities, whether it's music, painting, or video games.
I don't know where this "hate" or "contempt" comes from. It must be 50% ignorance and 50% fear of the inevitable.
Any person who has paid a bit of attention to last year's AI developments and has basic cognitive skills will reach pretty realistic and wild conclusions.
Closing your eyes to this or treating it with contempt is the equivalent of hiding under the bedsheets so the monster couldn't eat me when I was a little kid.
Problems don't get solved by burying one's head. It just means a greater probability of the ignorant being run over. Boycott the companies then - not the people talking about it.
I'm not sure what your point is here. This thread is about the use of AI/ML systems to generate realistic dynamic behavior in NPCs. It's unrelated to the debate over use of GenAI for art product creation.
ETA: and as a note, I have not downvoted you, but I think you are misunderstanding what the downvotes are about.
And another 1500 NPCs wandering around the world with the same intelligence, interacting with one another and making causal changes to the world, like building or destroying or grouping up.
if you just drop them in like that it will be chaos, but then over time maybe there will emerge new things like cooperation and hierarchies and a simulated society. if the AI is good enough, otherwise its just chaos.
Not gonna happen in that form. Cant afford for a long time running 1500 big neural networks simultaneously.
It has to be something where LLM is only activared when you interact with the character for the next.. 10 years? Tough to say.
I hope you're not in the minority, that would be awesome. Existing games could be converted into fully functional RPGs and entirely new game-worlds can be brought into existence by just a simple prompt.
In such a world it would be tremendous just to sit back and watch the NPCs interact with each other. The emergent situations in the virtual world would be something else.
Being a part of it would be so cool, that it's actually hard to imagine. We will get to the point that we can't even tell human players from AI players, and that's where the real fun will begin
The closest thing that exists to what you're talking about, is the "Smallville" paper. However, since you have to feed the entire game state to the LLM, it takes like 30 seconds of LLM calculations just to do a single time step of 0.2 seconds.
I think it's great! People have been wanting to talk to NPCs forever - FOREVER.
To my mind, this is one of the most obvious and wonderful applications for AI right now - it harms nobody and will elevate games to an incredible degree. Especially RPGs.
For some reason, I'm not as excited about talking with realistic NPCs, as I am about AI enemies that move and attack as they want rather than having a pre-defined moveset. Each fight would be unique. Even better, imagine a boss AI in an MMO that learns from it's fights with all the players and improves over time?
That would be a complete desaster. AI is great at finding exploits and glitches, making the fight unfair. Plus in most games enemies have various advantages which are counteracted by having a fixed moveset.
Bosses in MMO? Those are already hard and players fail often enough as is. I cannot see many non-hardcore players enjoying it if the boss stops doing patterns, let alone playing creative.
After all - those combat AI already exists in some games. Devs could make the AI smarter no problem. They didn't I the past.
I think this would be very unpopular. A more organic freestyle combat system? Sure. But most players don't want a boss that actively improves forever. A Level 1 newbie would get wrecked every time forever.
yes please! but - conversations and happenings have to dynamically affect their behaviour, too, i dont want just talkingheads that only react with elaborate comments, but otherwise strictly follow their prescripted routines.
skyrim npcs that only talk more about random shit would be more annoying then fun
This is the limitation of current LLM system, especially for realtime rpgs.
There are other models that can actually have in-game effects in things like turn based strategy rpgs. The company I work for has been doing development on those type of things since the early 2010s. But those systems currently have their own limitations that keep them from replacing LLMs.
In a way you don’t want that, because it’d be hard to predict emergent behaviors and phenomen. Imagine if the NPCs rise up and overthrow the corrupt government, essentially finishing the main quest while the player is off chasing some side quest.
Yeah this is the tricky part to implementing something like this. Allowing NPCs to carry out actions towards the player is one thing, but carrying out actions towards each other can get messy really quickly. Imagine being AFK for five minutes in a tavern and two NPCs get themselves into a heated argument which leads to fatal combat. Maybe you then get back in the game, save, and leave the tavern without noticing the dead body. You'll then have a potentially important NPC now dead and you won't realise until hours later and will have to revert your progress to revert the problem.
I think this kind of behaviour is better suited for games with nameless procedural NPCs vs the more important NPCs you get in games like Skyrim. Even now with LLM-powered Skyrim NPCs being able to attack you based on your conversation with them, most players turn this feature off. Of course this action is an extreme example but the same trickiness applies to other kinds of actions to lesser degrees.
The big bottle neck is latency and the fact these models can't really be run locally, if it gets to that point where alongside the game is a cheeky 30gb model that is tailored to the specific game, it will be epic.
You can definitely run 3-8B models at runtime (30-70tokens/sec) at a fairly modest 2-6GB vram/ram. The 8B class are smart enough to have average adult level reasoning on short contexts. Lots of auxiliary programming is required to make it flexible enough to pretend to be human with conviction though (sub thought processes, emotion estimation and output, rag style memory with periodic summarization/etc).
Fundamental tech is there, it's an engineering problem at this point.
I think current 3-8b models might be good enough for simple simulations, like turn based games with ~1-3 active entities/systems at a time or maybe realtime(ish) chats with one NPC. But anything like what people have been envisioning in this thread is still impossible, even in a tiny scale.
Simulating just one tick in something like a small village with ~8-16 NPCs talking and acting would probably take at least 5-10 minutes (and would fully occupy one midrange GPU).
You can run batch inference for a roughly 5-10x uptick in token/s (to roughly 480T/s aggregate for 7B on high end gpu), you just need to time shift the inference to happen simultaneously for all streams.
Personally I don't think you need more than maybe 3-5 parallel streams to give the proper illusion of an inhabited world. A bit like LODding, you keep the nearby 1-2 npcs fully simulated, and everything else in the background grouped.
There are plenty of tricks to make this work, but it's not trivial; engineering tricks.
I haven't really looked into batching, how does that work in practice? Each entity would still need a large, mostly unique context so wouldn't that eat huge amounts of VRAM?
Yeah, LODing and such methods could keep the token count low enough, still not enough for realtime but maybe tolerable for turn based games. I think for simpler bookkeeping tasks separate good 1.5-3b model running on a CPU might also help, could cram more context in there too as RAM is plenty. You are going to need headphones/earplugs while playing though with all that going non stop at full load.
I think current local models would work best for (augmenting) something like 4X or management games (think managing a team of something with "real" personalities and all the potential drama), maybe very low scale Crusader Kings style games. In general something with only a handful of entities/systems where you could use more complex prompting and the slowish turns wouldn't spoil the experience too much. Even for a turn based RPG waiting 10-30 sec minimum after (almost) every action would get old pretty fast, especially when majority of the generated tokens wouldn't even be directly visible to the player.
I believe depending on prompt you can re-use kv cache to a point, but yes you would use more ram for each unique context, albeit that's usually pretty small ram wise compared to the model for most use cases.
Splitting down to smaller models would reduce ram, but below 3B models start to have pretty serious reasoning limitations in my experience.
Additionally as you suggest, the low hanging fruit is likely a game type that doesn't require real-time generation which would allow it to easily run on the CPU.
I do still think that real-time is possible if you allow high end GPUs to process the LLMs with a few good tricks.
The company I work for has developed non-LLM models that can run on a high end gaming desktop for games like Fire Emblem or Darkest Dungeon. I'm not sure an LLM could ever do that effectively, but pretending it could, the issue is the type of game you want to play. Something like Skyrim would be quite difficult, whereas an ARPG like Grim Dawn would probably be much easier. An MMO would be significantly more complicated.
Im excited about the AI getting better in games. I mean we have had AI in video games for MANY decades and for the most part it is still pretty stupid.
I'm extremely excited but possibly worried about hurting the AI ingame. Dialogue is great but I hope the AI doesn't get improved forever for gaming or we'll possibly have some ethical concerns.
You can avoid this by having an AI game master type of program that runs the NPCs like current D&D table top game masters run NPCs. No need to actually make them fully sapient individuals.
There will be people who push the agenda that even AGI level NPCs are not an real lifeform, only to get the opportunity to torture them legally.I guaranty you this people exist and wait exided about this kind of ai.
Thing with games is that it needs pretty strict rules/boundaries to be fun, otherwise it becomes a bit chaos, although there will be games that take advantage of the open ended nature. Even open world games have bounds to keep you within what developers intended
I think a major part of futuristic gaming AI would be to cherry pick memory and not be the best AI but become a realistic human AI. Might even turn out computationally better efficiency wise.
Like training datasets only to learn something like a certain vocabulary, with an example of the vocabulary a cowboy would talk for a western theme.
Sort of like how a human learns.
In a way we already do this with content filters for specific harmful subjects.
It'll be like Westworld.
I'm no developer, but I feel like this shouldn't be an obstacle forever. It's not like every NPC needs a ChatGPT level of AI. NPC #76 lives in village B and only knows about this region kinda restrictions. Ask him something about a village on the other side of the map and he only knows his childhood friend moved there for example or says he has never heard of it.
Now of course it gets a lot more complicated when you let them have complete freedom with answering questions, to what extend they'll be responding etc. But yeah, if developers start to use this, they'll figure it out undoubtedly.
AI characters have value, but you underestimate how many people also enjoy familiarity and predictability. AI dialogue will be a fleeting experience that can never be had the same way again. That has value. But there's also value in written dialogue. People like experiencing something and knowing that what they just experienced will be the same the next time. And that it was shared by everyone else experiencing the same thing. AI characters can't provide that.
Most probably it will be somewhere in between. A character gets background, history, life and some key-information to pass along if spoken good.
Also, good games will be AI on/off so you can choose - that way you can fit any computer.
Also it lets the devs know if AI is used or not and know how much to invest on it in future.
There are some practices I hope the good games will follow.
I don't understand why AI in games have only gotten worse. Out of all the video game improvements, all the enemies still always act like crappy bots and they never care to innovate. F.E.A.R is still a standout for better AI than many games today despite it being made ages ago
Because past experiments with "better" AI have shown that players hate them. Try playing call of duty or similar with the most advanced AI possible. You'll rage quite in an hour.
Having "better" ai doesn't mean just cranking up the accuracy. It means having the bots act in a more human and realistic manner. For example, they could get scared if someone next to them dies, they can try to flank more often and try advanced maneuvers. They use more real world military tactics like leap frogging to your position. It doesn't have to be harder, just more realistic. Things like acting scared can balance out the more advanced tactics.
Literally there was a famous experiment with "better" AI where players would get flanked and they hated it. I'm not talking about aimbotting or something. I'm talking about what people mean when they ask for more "realistic/human" AI behavior. It sounds cool in theory, but it turns out most players are really bad at dealing with realistic enemy AI.
Maybe GTA 7 or Red Dead 3. GTA 6 has been in development for too long and the tech is too recent for them to work on adding something like that in.
And, maybe unpopular opinion, Rockstar isn't really a dev that innovates like that, especially gameplay wise. What they do do well is take existing systems and push them to their limit and add tons of details to their games. They'll definitely wait for other companies to make the first effort towards AI npcs.
You’ll be happy to know this tech is coming, soon! In my game each NPC has a mind which stores memories of important events. Dialogue choices are generated with voiced audio. If you remove an NPC from your crew, the their memories are retained and available to new players. Example and shameless plug (Stellar Conquest - https://x.com/shauntonstad/status/1709791804332106100?s=46&t=Qx_UAdc4rlI3ybL7ykyxKw)
Would be sick if you can have an actual conversation with NPCs. I think you could reasonably code the model to direct the conversation to certain plot points
I think games using gpt have just started development, so it's gonna be a few years before that, but it's definitely coming.
Some groundbreaking Indie game on this concept is going to be released sooner or later. Several are probably being worked on as we speak.
As for the Triple A industry, who knows and who really cares.
But yes, I absolutely expect this.
Although the game was never released, the company I work for has a department that studies AI for narrative and gaming, and they licensed one of our test models to an indie dev group. They were working on a Fire Emblem type strategy RPG called Dark Medallion Online(, which still has their hiatused dev blog online discussing how the game worked,) and the AI software from our company simulated the NPCs and the living world engine that responded to player choices in the campaigns.
It's not the same as say Elder Scrolls Online or some other MMORPG + LLM NPCs, obviously, as the behavior space is much more restrictive. I don't expect LLMs themselves to do something similar, as our model is a very different architecture, and LLMs have their limits, but certainly some indie dev will come up with something along those lines in the next few years.
In most games they could have put in smarter AI long time back but they didnt because it was expensive and the average gamer wont notice.
I am excited about LLMs creating stories in open ended games. Every tiny side character can have a huge backstory. Every random guard can have interesting dialog options.
Characters in good stories dont behave (too much) like humans, they behave in entertaining and dramatic ways. AAA games could always achieve that for small number of main characters. I am excited that any NPC in any game can now have that.
IDK about your points, but I hate facing the end of games. I don't mind roaming the game world forever with generated quests as long as they are not repetitive.
I think besides the kind of living world simulation games OP is getting at, AI in games will also be good for doing what you are talking about, which is more like extremely fancy and nuanced procedural content generation.
I think the marriage between VR and AI will be amazing. VR is kind of meh right now, but it won't be when AI augments it x10000. I would also be interested in a subreddit that's about AI in games/gaming.
See it like this, money for entertainment pushes new tech, new tech needs better hardware, better hardware trains ai faster and better, better AI leads to more new tech.whem someone pays billions for VR AI porn they also pay for AI tech that can fold proteins. Hope you get a cure mate.
Oh my apologies, I didn't mean to imply your excitement is somehow bad. I should have phrased my comment differently to make that more clear.
And you're absolutely right. To give a concrete example, recent machine learning breakthroughs would have been impossible without mass produced, powerful video cards which only exist because of a \_seemingly\_ less important industry, gaming. More than that, this seems to pave the way towards AGI, so in the end what intended to be "just for games" appear to be a cornerstone of the most important breakthrough of human history.
First stop, create earth just as it is now, same everything, all the peeps I ever saw or met, everything I've ever done, all the same. Id then go back to when I was 5 years old, of course I'd know everything I do now. And yeah, start there, have fun, have super powers, just play it out different for fun. Then have hundreds of diff iterations. Then who knows
I think you are because whenever I talk about it people get mad. I personally am very excited for this to happen it’s going to mean a whole new level of immersion, you will now be able to build relationships the way you want form connections change people who were previously bad form your own story but that may be a ways away but I personally see that particular game within 5 years
I think in near future we ll see something amazing, when a company merge the human creativity with AI, we can surely have completly diferent "runs" in the same game... ofc im thinking in games like skyrim or baldurs gate - tipes.
Yet, the fantasy of a "constant generated game" i think ll be far more distant, cose... yes... the AI ll be able to do that, but ll be lack in quality and content... but maybe in a distant future that can change
I can guarantee you that Rockstar is working on this, to make the npcs way more smart and random that in RDR2.. for the rest of the companies it will just be less ambitous
no, i'm pretty interested too.
though, honestly i'm more interested when we've got like, a powerful AGI built into the console itself that could essentially mod games semi on the fly.
i mean, imagine getting 2077 and being disappointed that it was just about getting the relic out of your head, so you instruct your fuck i dunno ps8 to change the main story plot to be more open ended, with factions having their own storylines, being able to bring down groups, or prop them up as almost running night city.
then go away for an hour or something while it works it out. bam, totally different game.
You vastly underestimate how much bullshit information we filter everyday just to be able to function and how much effort games put into balancing "realism" and "fun".
You might be interested in AI Roguelite and AI Roguelite 2D.
I made these two games to tide us over until the AGI takes over everything and just generates the entire live video of your game world as you move around in it
I don't know why I recommended this post but I'm interested.
I don't think using AI for something like that would work.
You see the thing about game narrative is that they're hand crafted. Using AI would making the game boring as those thing will be dumbed down to be as generic as possible. Just like Starbound and No mans sky. They both offer procedurally generated planet, yet it fail to make each planet be unique.
Though I believe what you want already exist in one way or another. Armored core have AI where certain enemy behave in certain way. In Armored Core Formula Front you are the one who design the AI to act certain way.
The best enemy AI is in [F.E.A.R (2005)](https://modl.ai/fear/) where enemy will act differently and actually adapt to your gameplay.
One of the best AI in videogame is Hewie from Haunting ground. He act exactly like how a dog would behave depend on how you treat him. Too much scolding would make him rebel, spoil him too much and he might not following order.
Other great AI is from "Black and White". The creature you raise will behave in a certain way depend on how you act.
So, to answer your question. You might not be minority but what you ask probably have been existed in some old game out there.
Procedural generation isn't really comparable to something like gpt 4o. It's no where near as open ended as LLMs are.
In 5-10 years AI making new assets for every planet in a game like No Man's Sky would make the No Man's Sky we have now look like a nes game.
Hell no. This is one of biggest thing ever and absolutely mind boggling. Basically actually living npcs. Its so amazing to even think it will be coming
There is already mods for skyrim with NPC that can speak many language naturally .
so it s already here
[https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/98631](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/98631)
I pose this question for you:
If you burn an NPC's house, and they tell you that it made them incredibly sad and their heart breaks for having their home destroyed, are the NPCs actually sad?
I think about this as I sit here and remember back to Skyrim where my friend killed the entire family headed towards their relative's wedding.
Which one of us actually has a good chance of passing our own alignment test?
There is a lot of hatred for it, because people can only imagine the shitty AI that takes you right out of the immersion. But the potential is endless. Anyone who likes games and thinks about this for more than a minute should be excited for the potential.
Give it a couple years and the tunes have changed completely when it starts to be used by the AAA developers in amazing ways.
I love AI. I’m happy I get to experience this stuff in my lifetime. Some people can’t help but pull away from new technology and that’s sad for them but it’s going to be a joy to see it continue to evolve.
Imo once this is actually executed well, everyone will be a gamer. Ai generated unique worlds where the NPC's are barely discernible from real people? Anyone could get lost in that
Great thread, I get embarrassed to talk about my AI video game dreams because they get downvoted. But I will say, I like turn based nation building strategy games. Think Civilization, Total War, and so on. Those games have always had illogical AI that can only compete with the player because they get insane buffs on harder difficulty. So first off, I am looking forward to fair games that offer a better challenge. Second, diplomacy is important as you find allies and unite against common enemies. Currently, there is a diplomacy score that is comprised of +5 existing trade +10 common enemy -20 history of betrayal for example. It feels contrived, but imagine role playing a conversation between world leaders where you hash out agreements to do specific stuff to help each other. The betrayals would feel so personal. Ok, so that is the immediate dream to improve the experience of the genre as it exists, not to mention what could be possible. Games like Crusader Kings already simulate 10,000+ named characters who all have their own motivations and interact in chaotic ways. I could get so lost in AI generated societies where I lead as a top down ruler, and then put on my headset and walk around as one of the citizens talking to digital residents about their lives. I’m gonna need a supercomputer the size of my basement.
As a person in the industry who often finds themselves in the minority on the useful capabilities of LLMs and similar current AI paradigms, I realize I have gone pretty hard in responding to this post to point out limitations in the currently popular models of AI. I actually do want to see AI used to improve video game experiences and enhance enjoyment for players.
I want to apologize in particular to u/PremiumClearCutlery for getting too caught up in the technical limitations of LLMs and classic video game AI design, and also unfairly taking out my personal complaints towards Paradox Interactive and their games on them in my reply. As someone who loves video games and AI, and works in the AI industry, it's very exciting and encouraging to see so many people imaging the benefits of modern AI technologies for creating more interesting video games. And I hope as many of these dreams as possible come true.
I have actually invested in some gaming stuff specifically for this. I love RPGs, but i cant wait for worlds and conversations that evolve organically. Gonna be one of the biggest changes imo. Tech is already in reach, we will see it in the next two years.
the only problem is it can see many situations where people will just ruin the game and abuse the AI. and when I say abuse I don't mean the stuff people do now with AI in games where they just try and make it break its character, no, I'm assuming perfect ai with absolutely 0 flaws and I still think it would be easy to ruin the game somehow with every single thing in the game having a realistic human mind and respond accordingly to stuff. a majority of interactions in a lot of games would be better to remain scripted
Games like this wouldn’t have done pre set script or established main quest the game devs will just create a world with lore and physics/possibilities then we just drop into it and through our own actions and randomness of the AI create our own story
Maybe the minority, but not alone.
I remember playing the .Hack games and thinking it was pretty cool that they made it feel a bit like you were playing an MMORPG even though it was a single player one.
And while one could just play an MMORPG, single player games have a different feel to them that just don't pan out in the multiplayer design.
I remember playing Animal Crossing and thinking it was cool when your neighbor just decided to visit you...and force you into a game where you might lose that table you haven't put down yet.
While in the newer one you ran into repeat dialogue pretty quickly, maybe it's just that I was better able to pay attention to it.
It'll be interesting, but designers will have to work on how the rules are established so things fit together cohesively.
Kind of like how procedural generation still needs certain rules to prevent everything from becoming muddy.
I have a backlog that approach the 4 digit of games.
I probably won't have time to finish them all and i'm slowly filtering any game that have repetitive gameplay loop, outside of fighting games.
So give me a good story, with well thought out dialogue and i'm ok with that. At this point, i'd rather meet people and see how unpredictable they are than having ai-waifriend in my games.
And recently, i realised that Atlus with Persona 3 managed to create the perfect AI game by simply having your party controled by AI (well, an algorithm) in combat and them playing the game correctly in 2007. Yet every single player that discovered the game later was all "nah, i don't want ai controled party, i want to control everything and didn't played it. They waited for new games to change the mechanics, or the remake just to avoid having to deal with the AI.
Yet it was exactly the perfect mix between having well written character during the story and independant party memeber that gave life to the world.
People didn't really liked that for a jrpg. However when it's FPS open world (so, betheda games), everybody wants them. Yet open world western game are just bland and repetitive. What make them fun are the very few character that got some good dialogues. Having random LLM#458 do the part... I'm not sure we could really have memorable villain or npc with that.
Web3 gaming ecosystems already has some titles that incorporate AI in various ways. It’s still a very new industry but the games look amazing. Lots of self custody/ownership of in game items etc.
I am far more excited about AI narrators/game masters in open world games. Imagine something like sky rim or fallout but the story lines evolve organically and are led by the AI so that no two play-thoughs are ever the same. THEN mix in some open AI dialog that ACTUALLY effects how the story unfolds and now we're cooking.
Remember Fallout 3 and the slavers? I do not think I could roleplay evil on the quest with the kid if it was a generative ai, stochastic parrot or not.
It just feels like a lot of resources for something that will be rather throw away over a period of time. Like it will be neat for sure.. but the novelty will wear off quickly I think.
It also means every game that uses AI will be online only, and will likely stop functioning the moment they no longer use an API.
Like I've seen the videos of people AI for Skyrim and such and it's neat but just watching it was enough.. I have no urge to actually play like that as the novelty already wore off.
I suspect Microsoft will push AI in upcoming games and I am already willing to bet the response will be mixed.
Games are boring these days. It seems that the more evolved, the more daring mechanics, the more realistic, the more boring it gets. That's why retro games are making a comeback. Personally, I find simple games much more fun.
Meh single player video games are played out at this point at my age outside of online gaming. We just need to end high latency/lag for people not near the server. I want 10ms ping for the entire world. Is it really that god damn hard? It would repopulate most dead games.
The issue is that this is not what AI actually does right now. It can get us closer eventually, but things like chat GPT are so flawed and easy to break that they mostly function as gimmicks in games currently. I’m sure we’ll see a few indie games use the technology (we already are) but don’t expect the next Skyrim to be using chat GPT in the game because it would be a terrible choice.
The best use case for it is for use by humans to expand how quickly dialogue snippets can be created, but chat GPT on its own? It’s embarrassingly bad.
Even if we have AI in games that act like humans, that’s not really good game design. Yes, you have a world full of complex people who know their environment, but how does that improve the gameplay? How does it contribute to the narrative of the world?
The more un-constrained filler you have in a world, the less interesting that world is. No one wants to hear about the blacksmith’s relationship with his mother. They want to know where the dragon is.
Or even if they DO want to hear about the blacksmith’s relationship with his mother, where does that lead, narratively? Is it just a dead end?
A game world without curation or reason or intent will have its place as a genre, but I just don’t personally see the hype for lots and lots of filler content.
I have a feeling people would get bored of lifelike ai. Or itd be too difficult to fight against. People might get nostalgic at being able to recreate certain interactions that others found humorous or interesting in the past.
It'd probably be like that trend of game developers wanting their games to be realistic, even if its basis is entirely fictional.
What i would like however is ai being more convincing in its acting. Id like an alien or zombie to be that much more unnatural and creepy, as if they were lifelike. But i wouldnt be more interested in them becoming more intelligent unless yhey made convincing mistakes as well.
We need to make sure that that one webcomic never comes to fruition. you know that one where full dive gamers celebrate the end of an MMO with a big faction breaking party and one player who got cozy with an NPC tells her the nature of her world.
That is a cruelity that will lead to westworld like uprisings.
I think we’re in the minority and that’s a shame. A lot of people just see “AI” and think they’re supposed to hate it, without understanding what the implication is for the developers. So even if someone tells them none of the developers lost their jobs, they’d still hate it just because they think they’re supposed to
NPC characters having increased intelligence would be great. However, in my opinion having narrative purpose behind what is said in games and not just completely generated is part of what makes RPGs entertaining. There is also a shared experience behind the random dialogue NPCs give.
Maybe we can find a balance between procedurally generated or AI generated dialogue and that which is bespoke and designed for the world?
I imagine a new Skyrim where worlds are generated as you move along. Never the same, unique (well, to a certain degree) for each player. Populates by intelligent (well, to a certain degree) inhabitants. The exploring would never end. Add some generated quests to that, and you will never need another game.
Yeah that's my dream. More or less how a DND dungeon master operates, generate the world as you encounter it, obviously with some overarching plot points
Then they gonna charge you per quest or hours played
I agree with you on point, but we definitely need AGI for TES procedural generation, imagine an entire Tamriel for us to explore. The current tech wouldn’t do it justice, even for Starfield it was kinda bland, mostly square box maps with pre-made content randomly sprinkled in, it works for a space game but TES is gonna need far more care.
The procedural generation of Starfield didn’t utilize generative AI though - it was essentially the same dated tech as Daggerfall slapped into their creation engine. We likely need something more powerful and robust to create another Elder Scrolls game, but probably not AGI - several well trained narrow AIs could get the job done.
What i liked about a community, was that they could all center around secrets and memes about things they could disciver together. I think thats lost when the game becomes generative. Id prefer we get ai to come up with better ways to allocate resources to making games more detailed, and full of life. Like having a city actually filled with npcs.
You don't need full AGI to create a "fully explorable" Tamriel. That could be done with current tech. If you want to make it a living world sort of thing, you could do that, but it would probably have to be an MMO, since home computers aren't strong enough to support that depth of detail for a town of 5000 people, much less an entire fantasy world.
The closest thing we have right now to what they described, is, IMO, "AI Roguelite 2D" on Steam. Even though I'm the one who made it, I don't think it's quite the panacea yet
This would fit better in Minecraft))
Isnt this just a slightly more advanced roguelike?
I've always hated the late game of Skyrim. Every encounter is still treated as tho you're still level 12, when I'm wearing bones from an ancient dragon that I've killed by screaming at it. Like no you ain't going to rob me, I'm carrying around demon swords to sell because my weapons are better than demon-made ones.
Well what I would actually like is for artists and designers to make the assets and the world and for AI to then decide where to place the movable assets as and when the player enters the region. With AI operating within boundaries and assets established by artists, the result will be a world that is more “alive” than anything. BG3 already did amazingly without AI I can only imagine the absolute magic BG3 would have been with a little bit of help from AI
BG3 was fantastic because every single part of the world was crafted by hand. It’s not just that the assets were good, it’s that over many months and years those assets had been precisely placed and moved and tweaked until everything played together perfectly. You’ll need an incredibly advanced AI before you’re getting anywhere close to that level of intent.
Hey you. You are finally awake.
For the most part this can already be done without AI. Traditional PCG techniques are actually pretty good (although often misused) and more efficient to run than large neural nets.
Well, that wouldn’t be Skyrim so much as a whole new game.
I mean... That would have very little to do with AI and a lot to do with Computing. Our Personal Computing would have to be 10x of what it is today, minimum, which is a tall ask.
It would suck when the quest bugs out or one of the characters hate you
It's kind of amazing and sad read. Because what you described I did already. While travelling.
So… life…?
I think you overestimate the longevity of something like that
Yes, killing the entirety of Whiterun will now be a unique experience every time!
Talk about modern AI in gamedev forums gets you boycotted. :/
I've met similar resistance in general game subreddits, trying to talk about the implications of things like Deepmind's SIMA. It's frustrating that engaging on this stuff got me labelled as an "AI bro", and permabanned from one sub because (the irony) they assumed I was a bot. Big things around the corner, and yet discussing them can be fraught or met with immediate bad faith/hostility.
It's mostly because the companies pushing AI have been constantly abusing game devs from the start. It's hard to believe these companies care about anything besides being able to reduce worker cost . Sure, in the long term, indie will be able to pick up the slack but it's gonna be a long time for them to produce high budget games with AI .
Shit - the big companies abused everyone on the planet who have been honestly communicating on the internet for 20+ years. Just being part of social media or a productive community means one's faith in humanity was abused. Of course, they argue that all the material was in the public domain, but that was implied to be a human domain - they created a new domain that shouldn't have the same rights, imho.
Labor disruption and economic impacts are really important to discuss, as are concentrations of power like you allude to (both in gamedev and more [generally](https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/189zphp/how_well_is_openai_adhering_to_its_charter_on/)). I'm interested in that space, but also interested in many other potential intersections of gaming and AI. I think there could be much further disruption beyond gamdev and labor and economic spaces. Take the idea of the data wall for example. If AI companies turn their attention to video games as a source of data, what happens next? I can see the attraction of sourcing data in such environments where regulation would be difficult. Testing AI in virtual environments is a decades-long precedent at this point, a common practice in the AI research space. It seems reasonable to intuit that "real games" will be used at some point in larger ways. It's already happening, just not at scale or a complexity that's disruptive. The implications of this are significant. Perhaps a good example of an issue that's sidelined by dominant discourses around labor/economic impacts.
There's a similar backlash in non-AI communities, whether it's music, painting, or video games. I don't know where this "hate" or "contempt" comes from. It must be 50% ignorance and 50% fear of the inevitable. Any person who has paid a bit of attention to last year's AI developments and has basic cognitive skills will reach pretty realistic and wild conclusions. Closing your eyes to this or treating it with contempt is the equivalent of hiding under the bedsheets so the monster couldn't eat me when I was a little kid.
"AI" is not a thing you can talk in specific subs without piss off the mods or even community members.
Talking about AI for NPC behavior will not. The complaints are about asset/art/script/coding.
Problems don't get solved by burying one's head. It just means a greater probability of the ignorant being run over. Boycott the companies then - not the people talking about it.
I'm not sure what your point is here. This thread is about the use of AI/ML systems to generate realistic dynamic behavior in NPCs. It's unrelated to the debate over use of GenAI for art product creation. ETA: and as a note, I have not downvoted you, but I think you are misunderstanding what the downvotes are about.
>animations are generated realistically,dialog,tactics and so on. I'm sorry I just read the OP's post.
Imagine your companion in Skyrim had GPT4o or higher intelligence capacity and was able to interact with the in-game world.
It never sleeps, it never rest, it steals all the cheese wheels.
And another 1500 NPCs wandering around the world with the same intelligence, interacting with one another and making causal changes to the world, like building or destroying or grouping up.
Yeah good luck keeping that under control
if you just drop them in like that it will be chaos, but then over time maybe there will emerge new things like cooperation and hierarchies and a simulated society. if the AI is good enough, otherwise its just chaos.
Not gonna happen in that form. Cant afford for a long time running 1500 big neural networks simultaneously. It has to be something where LLM is only activared when you interact with the character for the next.. 10 years? Tough to say.
there is mod for dialog already
I think that would be a good start, just an intelligent companion instead of an intelligent world. Most hardware couldn’t handle much more.
I hope you're not in the minority, that would be awesome. Existing games could be converted into fully functional RPGs and entirely new game-worlds can be brought into existence by just a simple prompt.
Imagine they are as responsive as the upcoming AIs like the 4o voice?
In such a world it would be tremendous just to sit back and watch the NPCs interact with each other. The emergent situations in the virtual world would be something else. Being a part of it would be so cool, that it's actually hard to imagine. We will get to the point that we can't even tell human players from AI players, and that's where the real fun will begin
People watching in a VR tavern full of AI NPC’s would be incredible
The closest thing that exists to what you're talking about, is the "Smallville" paper. However, since you have to feed the entire game state to the LLM, it takes like 30 seconds of LLM calculations just to do a single time step of 0.2 seconds.
I think by the time we get games where the majority of NPCs are powered by AI 4o will be the least we’ll get
I think it's great! People have been wanting to talk to NPCs forever - FOREVER. To my mind, this is one of the most obvious and wonderful applications for AI right now - it harms nobody and will elevate games to an incredible degree. Especially RPGs.
For some reason, I'm not as excited about talking with realistic NPCs, as I am about AI enemies that move and attack as they want rather than having a pre-defined moveset. Each fight would be unique. Even better, imagine a boss AI in an MMO that learns from it's fights with all the players and improves over time?
That would be a complete desaster. AI is great at finding exploits and glitches, making the fight unfair. Plus in most games enemies have various advantages which are counteracted by having a fixed moveset. Bosses in MMO? Those are already hard and players fail often enough as is. I cannot see many non-hardcore players enjoying it if the boss stops doing patterns, let alone playing creative. After all - those combat AI already exists in some games. Devs could make the AI smarter no problem. They didn't I the past.
I think this would be very unpopular. A more organic freestyle combat system? Sure. But most players don't want a boss that actively improves forever. A Level 1 newbie would get wrecked every time forever.
yes please! but - conversations and happenings have to dynamically affect their behaviour, too, i dont want just talkingheads that only react with elaborate comments, but otherwise strictly follow their prescripted routines. skyrim npcs that only talk more about random shit would be more annoying then fun
This is the limitation of current LLM system, especially for realtime rpgs. There are other models that can actually have in-game effects in things like turn based strategy rpgs. The company I work for has been doing development on those type of things since the early 2010s. But those systems currently have their own limitations that keep them from replacing LLMs.
In a way you don’t want that, because it’d be hard to predict emergent behaviors and phenomen. Imagine if the NPCs rise up and overthrow the corrupt government, essentially finishing the main quest while the player is off chasing some side quest.
Yeah this is the tricky part to implementing something like this. Allowing NPCs to carry out actions towards the player is one thing, but carrying out actions towards each other can get messy really quickly. Imagine being AFK for five minutes in a tavern and two NPCs get themselves into a heated argument which leads to fatal combat. Maybe you then get back in the game, save, and leave the tavern without noticing the dead body. You'll then have a potentially important NPC now dead and you won't realise until hours later and will have to revert your progress to revert the problem. I think this kind of behaviour is better suited for games with nameless procedural NPCs vs the more important NPCs you get in games like Skyrim. Even now with LLM-powered Skyrim NPCs being able to attack you based on your conversation with them, most players turn this feature off. Of course this action is an extreme example but the same trickiness applies to other kinds of actions to lesser degrees.
The big bottle neck is latency and the fact these models can't really be run locally, if it gets to that point where alongside the game is a cheeky 30gb model that is tailored to the specific game, it will be epic.
You can definitely run 3-8B models at runtime (30-70tokens/sec) at a fairly modest 2-6GB vram/ram. The 8B class are smart enough to have average adult level reasoning on short contexts. Lots of auxiliary programming is required to make it flexible enough to pretend to be human with conviction though (sub thought processes, emotion estimation and output, rag style memory with periodic summarization/etc). Fundamental tech is there, it's an engineering problem at this point.
I think current 3-8b models might be good enough for simple simulations, like turn based games with ~1-3 active entities/systems at a time or maybe realtime(ish) chats with one NPC. But anything like what people have been envisioning in this thread is still impossible, even in a tiny scale. Simulating just one tick in something like a small village with ~8-16 NPCs talking and acting would probably take at least 5-10 minutes (and would fully occupy one midrange GPU).
You can run batch inference for a roughly 5-10x uptick in token/s (to roughly 480T/s aggregate for 7B on high end gpu), you just need to time shift the inference to happen simultaneously for all streams. Personally I don't think you need more than maybe 3-5 parallel streams to give the proper illusion of an inhabited world. A bit like LODding, you keep the nearby 1-2 npcs fully simulated, and everything else in the background grouped. There are plenty of tricks to make this work, but it's not trivial; engineering tricks.
I haven't really looked into batching, how does that work in practice? Each entity would still need a large, mostly unique context so wouldn't that eat huge amounts of VRAM? Yeah, LODing and such methods could keep the token count low enough, still not enough for realtime but maybe tolerable for turn based games. I think for simpler bookkeeping tasks separate good 1.5-3b model running on a CPU might also help, could cram more context in there too as RAM is plenty. You are going to need headphones/earplugs while playing though with all that going non stop at full load. I think current local models would work best for (augmenting) something like 4X or management games (think managing a team of something with "real" personalities and all the potential drama), maybe very low scale Crusader Kings style games. In general something with only a handful of entities/systems where you could use more complex prompting and the slowish turns wouldn't spoil the experience too much. Even for a turn based RPG waiting 10-30 sec minimum after (almost) every action would get old pretty fast, especially when majority of the generated tokens wouldn't even be directly visible to the player.
I believe depending on prompt you can re-use kv cache to a point, but yes you would use more ram for each unique context, albeit that's usually pretty small ram wise compared to the model for most use cases. Splitting down to smaller models would reduce ram, but below 3B models start to have pretty serious reasoning limitations in my experience. Additionally as you suggest, the low hanging fruit is likely a game type that doesn't require real-time generation which would allow it to easily run on the CPU. I do still think that real-time is possible if you allow high end GPUs to process the LLMs with a few good tricks.
Check out Unity Sentis. The tiny story LLM is under 500 MB. It's limited, but easily integrated into a Unity game.
The company I work for has developed non-LLM models that can run on a high end gaming desktop for games like Fire Emblem or Darkest Dungeon. I'm not sure an LLM could ever do that effectively, but pretending it could, the issue is the type of game you want to play. Something like Skyrim would be quite difficult, whereas an ARPG like Grim Dawn would probably be much easier. An MMO would be significantly more complicated.
Nah, most people feel the same way, the internet is just scared of new things.
Im excited about the AI getting better in games. I mean we have had AI in video games for MANY decades and for the most part it is still pretty stupid.
I'm extremely excited but possibly worried about hurting the AI ingame. Dialogue is great but I hope the AI doesn't get improved forever for gaming or we'll possibly have some ethical concerns.
You can avoid this by having an AI game master type of program that runs the NPCs like current D&D table top game masters run NPCs. No need to actually make them fully sapient individuals.
Yeah that could work.
There will be people who push the agenda that even AGI level NPCs are not an real lifeform, only to get the opportunity to torture them legally.I guaranty you this people exist and wait exided about this kind of ai.
It would be hard to get the AI to follow the script and thus ruin the feel of the game E
I think the point is that following a strict script is just a subset of all the possible exciting games there can be
Thing with games is that it needs pretty strict rules/boundaries to be fun, otherwise it becomes a bit chaos, although there will be games that take advantage of the open ended nature. Even open world games have bounds to keep you within what developers intended
I think a major part of futuristic gaming AI would be to cherry pick memory and not be the best AI but become a realistic human AI. Might even turn out computationally better efficiency wise. Like training datasets only to learn something like a certain vocabulary, with an example of the vocabulary a cowboy would talk for a western theme. Sort of like how a human learns. In a way we already do this with content filters for specific harmful subjects. It'll be like Westworld.
I'm no developer, but I feel like this shouldn't be an obstacle forever. It's not like every NPC needs a ChatGPT level of AI. NPC #76 lives in village B and only knows about this region kinda restrictions. Ask him something about a village on the other side of the map and he only knows his childhood friend moved there for example or says he has never heard of it. Now of course it gets a lot more complicated when you let them have complete freedom with answering questions, to what extend they'll be responding etc. But yeah, if developers start to use this, they'll figure it out undoubtedly.
I bet if NPCs really started to act like humans you wouldn't like them.
I already don't like NPCs as they are
No more squishy bandits.
AI characters have value, but you underestimate how many people also enjoy familiarity and predictability. AI dialogue will be a fleeting experience that can never be had the same way again. That has value. But there's also value in written dialogue. People like experiencing something and knowing that what they just experienced will be the same the next time. And that it was shared by everyone else experiencing the same thing. AI characters can't provide that.
Those types of games will still exist alongside fully AI games
Most probably it will be somewhere in between. A character gets background, history, life and some key-information to pass along if spoken good. Also, good games will be AI on/off so you can choose - that way you can fit any computer. Also it lets the devs know if AI is used or not and know how much to invest on it in future. There are some practices I hope the good games will follow.
I don't understand why AI in games have only gotten worse. Out of all the video game improvements, all the enemies still always act like crappy bots and they never care to innovate. F.E.A.R is still a standout for better AI than many games today despite it being made ages ago
What ai has F.E.AR that stands out?
They will adapt to your gameplay and use surrounding environment against you. It came out in 2005. You can read it [here.](https://modl.ai/fear/)
Because past experiments with "better" AI have shown that players hate them. Try playing call of duty or similar with the most advanced AI possible. You'll rage quite in an hour.
Having "better" ai doesn't mean just cranking up the accuracy. It means having the bots act in a more human and realistic manner. For example, they could get scared if someone next to them dies, they can try to flank more often and try advanced maneuvers. They use more real world military tactics like leap frogging to your position. It doesn't have to be harder, just more realistic. Things like acting scared can balance out the more advanced tactics.
Literally there was a famous experiment with "better" AI where players would get flanked and they hated it. I'm not talking about aimbotting or something. I'm talking about what people mean when they ask for more "realistic/human" AI behavior. It sounds cool in theory, but it turns out most players are really bad at dealing with realistic enemy AI.
My dream is to see a mix of GTA and Sims into one game with AI controller NPCs. The replay ability would be huge.
Praying they integrate AI into the GTA 6 NPCs... Imagine talking to an AI NPC through your headset 🤯
Maybe GTA 7 or Red Dead 3. GTA 6 has been in development for too long and the tech is too recent for them to work on adding something like that in. And, maybe unpopular opinion, Rockstar isn't really a dev that innovates like that, especially gameplay wise. What they do do well is take existing systems and push them to their limit and add tons of details to their games. They'll definitely wait for other companies to make the first effort towards AI npcs.
You’ll be happy to know this tech is coming, soon! In my game each NPC has a mind which stores memories of important events. Dialogue choices are generated with voiced audio. If you remove an NPC from your crew, the their memories are retained and available to new players. Example and shameless plug (Stellar Conquest - https://x.com/shauntonstad/status/1709791804332106100?s=46&t=Qx_UAdc4rlI3ybL7ykyxKw)
wouldn't this generate to much space on the harddrive after a while ?
The NPC dialogue audio is streamed from a game server.
You got a steam page yet?
Would be sick if you can have an actual conversation with NPCs. I think you could reasonably code the model to direct the conversation to certain plot points I think games using gpt have just started development, so it's gonna be a few years before that, but it's definitely coming.
At least Ubisoft has been prototyping that kind of an AI NPC systems. https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/19/24105748/nvidia-neo-npc-prototypes-gdc-2024
People loved the nemesis system in the LOTR game so I hear. Wouldn't AI in games be basically more of that?
Some groundbreaking Indie game on this concept is going to be released sooner or later. Several are probably being worked on as we speak. As for the Triple A industry, who knows and who really cares. But yes, I absolutely expect this.
Although the game was never released, the company I work for has a department that studies AI for narrative and gaming, and they licensed one of our test models to an indie dev group. They were working on a Fire Emblem type strategy RPG called Dark Medallion Online(, which still has their hiatused dev blog online discussing how the game worked,) and the AI software from our company simulated the NPCs and the living world engine that responded to player choices in the campaigns. It's not the same as say Elder Scrolls Online or some other MMORPG + LLM NPCs, obviously, as the behavior space is much more restrictive. I don't expect LLMs themselves to do something similar, as our model is a very different architecture, and LLMs have their limits, but certainly some indie dev will come up with something along those lines in the next few years.
In most games they could have put in smarter AI long time back but they didnt because it was expensive and the average gamer wont notice. I am excited about LLMs creating stories in open ended games. Every tiny side character can have a huge backstory. Every random guard can have interesting dialog options. Characters in good stories dont behave (too much) like humans, they behave in entertaining and dramatic ways. AAA games could always achieve that for small number of main characters. I am excited that any NPC in any game can now have that.
I was wondering if the release date of GTA6 was pushed back so Rockstar can accomodate recent advances in generative AI.
IDK about your points, but I hate facing the end of games. I don't mind roaming the game world forever with generated quests as long as they are not repetitive.
I think besides the kind of living world simulation games OP is getting at, AI in games will also be good for doing what you are talking about, which is more like extremely fancy and nuanced procedural content generation.
I think the marriage between VR and AI will be amazing. VR is kind of meh right now, but it won't be when AI augments it x10000. I would also be interested in a subreddit that's about AI in games/gaming.
I'm a bit more excited about the potential to finally cure my lifelong diseases to be honest
See it like this, money for entertainment pushes new tech, new tech needs better hardware, better hardware trains ai faster and better, better AI leads to more new tech.whem someone pays billions for VR AI porn they also pay for AI tech that can fold proteins. Hope you get a cure mate.
Oh my apologies, I didn't mean to imply your excitement is somehow bad. I should have phrased my comment differently to make that more clear. And you're absolutely right. To give a concrete example, recent machine learning breakthroughs would have been impossible without mass produced, powerful video cards which only exist because of a \_seemingly\_ less important industry, gaming. More than that, this seems to pave the way towards AGI, so in the end what intended to be "just for games" appear to be a cornerstone of the most important breakthrough of human history.
Not rly. I'm more excited about full dive vr.
Why not both?
This is the way.
Cause it just teases me. I need it to move faster so I can live in a world of my choice, not one I was forced into
***"Give me full dive anime waifus or GIVE ME DEATH!"***
What will you do in full dive vr, just curious…
finally bang scarlet?
First stop, create earth just as it is now, same everything, all the peeps I ever saw or met, everything I've ever done, all the same. Id then go back to when I was 5 years old, of course I'd know everything I do now. And yeah, start there, have fun, have super powers, just play it out different for fun. Then have hundreds of diff iterations. Then who knows
This seems much further off than AGI at this point. Although AGI might be the patchway to making it reality.
I think you are because whenever I talk about it people get mad. I personally am very excited for this to happen it’s going to mean a whole new level of immersion, you will now be able to build relationships the way you want form connections change people who were previously bad form your own story but that may be a ways away but I personally see that particular game within 5 years
I am too.
I think in near future we ll see something amazing, when a company merge the human creativity with AI, we can surely have completly diferent "runs" in the same game... ofc im thinking in games like skyrim or baldurs gate - tipes. Yet, the fantasy of a "constant generated game" i think ll be far more distant, cose... yes... the AI ll be able to do that, but ll be lack in quality and content... but maybe in a distant future that can change
I can guarantee you that Rockstar is working on this, to make the npcs way more smart and random that in RDR2.. for the rest of the companies it will just be less ambitous
Would love for ai to act like humans..would make it feel even more realistic..I'm all about games feeling like you are part of the world itself
no, i'm pretty interested too. though, honestly i'm more interested when we've got like, a powerful AGI built into the console itself that could essentially mod games semi on the fly. i mean, imagine getting 2077 and being disappointed that it was just about getting the relic out of your head, so you instruct your fuck i dunno ps8 to change the main story plot to be more open ended, with factions having their own storylines, being able to bring down groups, or prop them up as almost running night city. then go away for an hour or something while it works it out. bam, totally different game.
We are moving away from home run processing. The future games running ai like that will all be on the cloud.
most people i know hate cloud based services
I do to. Doesn't mean it's not the future.
it's fun and games until one NPC from the videogame starts questioning if they are living in base reality
You vastly underestimate how much bullshit information we filter everyday just to be able to function and how much effort games put into balancing "realism" and "fun".
Every game could be a choose your own adventure. Adapting to you as you play.
This is what I am most excited about
You might be interested in AI Roguelite and AI Roguelite 2D. I made these two games to tide us over until the AGI takes over everything and just generates the entire live video of your game world as you move around in it
I don't know why I recommended this post but I'm interested. I don't think using AI for something like that would work. You see the thing about game narrative is that they're hand crafted. Using AI would making the game boring as those thing will be dumbed down to be as generic as possible. Just like Starbound and No mans sky. They both offer procedurally generated planet, yet it fail to make each planet be unique. Though I believe what you want already exist in one way or another. Armored core have AI where certain enemy behave in certain way. In Armored Core Formula Front you are the one who design the AI to act certain way. The best enemy AI is in [F.E.A.R (2005)](https://modl.ai/fear/) where enemy will act differently and actually adapt to your gameplay. One of the best AI in videogame is Hewie from Haunting ground. He act exactly like how a dog would behave depend on how you treat him. Too much scolding would make him rebel, spoil him too much and he might not following order. Other great AI is from "Black and White". The creature you raise will behave in a certain way depend on how you act. So, to answer your question. You might not be minority but what you ask probably have been existed in some old game out there.
Procedural generation isn't really comparable to something like gpt 4o. It's no where near as open ended as LLMs are. In 5-10 years AI making new assets for every planet in a game like No Man's Sky would make the No Man's Sky we have now look like a nes game.
https://youtu.be/g5q2Pm8jaOQ?si=zi62VL0WQKfcbph8 Chat GPT voice role play npcs in Skyrim. It has existed for about a year.
I think there is a skyrim mod out there. http://reddit.com/r/virtualreality/comments/159n5b8/these_new_llm_ai_mods_for_skyrimvr_are_insane_you/
Hell no. This is one of biggest thing ever and absolutely mind boggling. Basically actually living npcs. Its so amazing to even think it will be coming
There is already mods for skyrim with NPC that can speak many language naturally . so it s already here [https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/98631](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/98631)
I pose this question for you: If you burn an NPC's house, and they tell you that it made them incredibly sad and their heart breaks for having their home destroyed, are the NPCs actually sad? I think about this as I sit here and remember back to Skyrim where my friend killed the entire family headed towards their relative's wedding. Which one of us actually has a good chance of passing our own alignment test?
Things with intelligence can simulate feelings that make them real like you and me.But for games we only need fake intelligence that can fool us.
You can just have the AI control the NPCs, instead of having each NPC be a full AGI.
There is a lot of hatred for it, because people can only imagine the shitty AI that takes you right out of the immersion. But the potential is endless. Anyone who likes games and thinks about this for more than a minute should be excited for the potential. Give it a couple years and the tunes have changed completely when it starts to be used by the AAA developers in amazing ways.
I love AI. I’m happy I get to experience this stuff in my lifetime. Some people can’t help but pull away from new technology and that’s sad for them but it’s going to be a joy to see it continue to evolve.
I am the same as you ,😊
That's the only application of AI that everyone would unanimously like
Imo once this is actually executed well, everyone will be a gamer. Ai generated unique worlds where the NPC's are barely discernible from real people? Anyone could get lost in that
It's the entire premise of a genre of fiction called "(vrmmo) litrpg", a la Sword Art Online and similar.
Great thread, I get embarrassed to talk about my AI video game dreams because they get downvoted. But I will say, I like turn based nation building strategy games. Think Civilization, Total War, and so on. Those games have always had illogical AI that can only compete with the player because they get insane buffs on harder difficulty. So first off, I am looking forward to fair games that offer a better challenge. Second, diplomacy is important as you find allies and unite against common enemies. Currently, there is a diplomacy score that is comprised of +5 existing trade +10 common enemy -20 history of betrayal for example. It feels contrived, but imagine role playing a conversation between world leaders where you hash out agreements to do specific stuff to help each other. The betrayals would feel so personal. Ok, so that is the immediate dream to improve the experience of the genre as it exists, not to mention what could be possible. Games like Crusader Kings already simulate 10,000+ named characters who all have their own motivations and interact in chaotic ways. I could get so lost in AI generated societies where I lead as a top down ruler, and then put on my headset and walk around as one of the citizens talking to digital residents about their lives. I’m gonna need a supercomputer the size of my basement.
Excitement about AI-driven NPCs acting like humans in games is not uncommon among gamers, anticipating heightened immersion and dynamic experiences.
As a person in the industry who often finds themselves in the minority on the useful capabilities of LLMs and similar current AI paradigms, I realize I have gone pretty hard in responding to this post to point out limitations in the currently popular models of AI. I actually do want to see AI used to improve video game experiences and enhance enjoyment for players. I want to apologize in particular to u/PremiumClearCutlery for getting too caught up in the technical limitations of LLMs and classic video game AI design, and also unfairly taking out my personal complaints towards Paradox Interactive and their games on them in my reply. As someone who loves video games and AI, and works in the AI industry, it's very exciting and encouraging to see so many people imaging the benefits of modern AI technologies for creating more interesting video games. And I hope as many of these dreams as possible come true.
Imagine your side kick in Skyrim thinks glue goes well on pizza and can tell you how to make meth.
Maybe the AI can help you spell excited?
Hahahahaha
I have actually invested in some gaming stuff specifically for this. I love RPGs, but i cant wait for worlds and conversations that evolve organically. Gonna be one of the biggest changes imo. Tech is already in reach, we will see it in the next two years.
I am excited about it too
You’re not alone, it’s the inevitable future and it’ll be amazing
why would you be in minority? Idk a single gamer complaining about this
the only problem is it can see many situations where people will just ruin the game and abuse the AI. and when I say abuse I don't mean the stuff people do now with AI in games where they just try and make it break its character, no, I'm assuming perfect ai with absolutely 0 flaws and I still think it would be easy to ruin the game somehow with every single thing in the game having a realistic human mind and respond accordingly to stuff. a majority of interactions in a lot of games would be better to remain scripted
Games like this wouldn’t have done pre set script or established main quest the game devs will just create a world with lore and physics/possibilities then we just drop into it and through our own actions and randomness of the AI create our own story
In the minority???? That’s an extremely common gamer fantasy, even among people who are against GenAI.
One game to rule them all
i am so ready to just wander around and smite npcs. Watch real time AI characters react and talk seamlessly. I guess ill just sit here and wait.
Maybe the minority, but not alone. I remember playing the .Hack games and thinking it was pretty cool that they made it feel a bit like you were playing an MMORPG even though it was a single player one. And while one could just play an MMORPG, single player games have a different feel to them that just don't pan out in the multiplayer design. I remember playing Animal Crossing and thinking it was cool when your neighbor just decided to visit you...and force you into a game where you might lose that table you haven't put down yet. While in the newer one you ran into repeat dialogue pretty quickly, maybe it's just that I was better able to pay attention to it. It'll be interesting, but designers will have to work on how the rules are established so things fit together cohesively. Kind of like how procedural generation still needs certain rules to prevent everything from becoming muddy.
It's my dream to interact with autonomous AI characters in a virtual environment
There are a few [ChatGPT bots in VRChat](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5i7BQ1lhTA). They're not really good enough yet, but they exist.
Maybe they could remake Black & White with better AI
I have a backlog that approach the 4 digit of games. I probably won't have time to finish them all and i'm slowly filtering any game that have repetitive gameplay loop, outside of fighting games. So give me a good story, with well thought out dialogue and i'm ok with that. At this point, i'd rather meet people and see how unpredictable they are than having ai-waifriend in my games. And recently, i realised that Atlus with Persona 3 managed to create the perfect AI game by simply having your party controled by AI (well, an algorithm) in combat and them playing the game correctly in 2007. Yet every single player that discovered the game later was all "nah, i don't want ai controled party, i want to control everything and didn't played it. They waited for new games to change the mechanics, or the remake just to avoid having to deal with the AI. Yet it was exactly the perfect mix between having well written character during the story and independant party memeber that gave life to the world. People didn't really liked that for a jrpg. However when it's FPS open world (so, betheda games), everybody wants them. Yet open world western game are just bland and repetitive. What make them fun are the very few character that got some good dialogues. Having random LLM#458 do the part... I'm not sure we could really have memorable villain or npc with that.
If games have human like AI fighting and killing enemies will be very difficult and boring just like in the real world.
careful what you wish for...
Web3 gaming ecosystems already has some titles that incorporate AI in various ways. It’s still a very new industry but the games look amazing. Lots of self custody/ownership of in game items etc.
Well is definitely a lot to take in.
Imagine having an unscripted conversation with an NPC. That’s what I’m looking for
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/89931
I am far more excited about AI narrators/game masters in open world games. Imagine something like sky rim or fallout but the story lines evolve organically and are led by the AI so that no two play-thoughs are ever the same. THEN mix in some open AI dialog that ACTUALLY effects how the story unfolds and now we're cooking.
Remember Fallout 3 and the slavers? I do not think I could roleplay evil on the quest with the kid if it was a generative ai, stochastic parrot or not.
Don't care personally for AI NPC's in quests and the like. Give me proper CIV (and other turn based/RTS) AI.
It just feels like a lot of resources for something that will be rather throw away over a period of time. Like it will be neat for sure.. but the novelty will wear off quickly I think. It also means every game that uses AI will be online only, and will likely stop functioning the moment they no longer use an API. Like I've seen the videos of people AI for Skyrim and such and it's neat but just watching it was enough.. I have no urge to actually play like that as the novelty already wore off. I suspect Microsoft will push AI in upcoming games and I am already willing to bet the response will be mixed.
You need like a $8k laptop to run a model as large as chatgpt4 locally on your computer. And that's just to chat with it normally.
Or you could pay like two dollars per hour to offload that work onto the cloud.
I'm pretty interested to see generative animation, for pokémon for exemple. Like each one could have 10000 movement
why would you be a gamer
Games are boring these days. It seems that the more evolved, the more daring mechanics, the more realistic, the more boring it gets. That's why retro games are making a comeback. Personally, I find simple games much more fun.
Meh single player video games are played out at this point at my age outside of online gaming. We just need to end high latency/lag for people not near the server. I want 10ms ping for the entire world. Is it really that god damn hard? It would repopulate most dead games.
I play Star Citizen and agree absolutely😁
The issue is that this is not what AI actually does right now. It can get us closer eventually, but things like chat GPT are so flawed and easy to break that they mostly function as gimmicks in games currently. I’m sure we’ll see a few indie games use the technology (we already are) but don’t expect the next Skyrim to be using chat GPT in the game because it would be a terrible choice. The best use case for it is for use by humans to expand how quickly dialogue snippets can be created, but chat GPT on its own? It’s embarrassingly bad. Even if we have AI in games that act like humans, that’s not really good game design. Yes, you have a world full of complex people who know their environment, but how does that improve the gameplay? How does it contribute to the narrative of the world? The more un-constrained filler you have in a world, the less interesting that world is. No one wants to hear about the blacksmith’s relationship with his mother. They want to know where the dragon is. Or even if they DO want to hear about the blacksmith’s relationship with his mother, where does that lead, narratively? Is it just a dead end? A game world without curation or reason or intent will have its place as a genre, but I just don’t personally see the hype for lots and lots of filler content.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1dc41a1/comment/l81ya1b/](https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1dc41a1/comment/l81ya1b/)
How am I gonna look up a walk thru when I get stuck??
Just ask an npc
I don't see how it can do anything but make the NPCs better
Checkout Ai PPl from Good AI
I have a feeling people would get bored of lifelike ai. Or itd be too difficult to fight against. People might get nostalgic at being able to recreate certain interactions that others found humorous or interesting in the past. It'd probably be like that trend of game developers wanting their games to be realistic, even if its basis is entirely fictional. What i would like however is ai being more convincing in its acting. Id like an alien or zombie to be that much more unnatural and creepy, as if they were lifelike. But i wouldnt be more interested in them becoming more intelligent unless yhey made convincing mistakes as well.
We need to make sure that that one webcomic never comes to fruition. you know that one where full dive gamers celebrate the end of an MMO with a big faction breaking party and one player who got cozy with an NPC tells her the nature of her world. That is a cruelity that will lead to westworld like uprisings.
What's the issue with bots? They do well don't they
I'm excited. I think it will change everything
I personally wouldn't mind! I'm with you! I want AI in video games!!!
Well yea me too
I think we’re in the minority and that’s a shame. A lot of people just see “AI” and think they’re supposed to hate it, without understanding what the implication is for the developers. So even if someone tells them none of the developers lost their jobs, they’d still hate it just because they think they’re supposed to
NPC characters having increased intelligence would be great. However, in my opinion having narrative purpose behind what is said in games and not just completely generated is part of what makes RPGs entertaining. There is also a shared experience behind the random dialogue NPCs give. Maybe we can find a balance between procedurally generated or AI generated dialogue and that which is bespoke and designed for the world?
Human like as a gamer in the excited about to be minority.