I remember when I posted about how a game full of AI-generated conversations didn't seem particularly appealing to me, my replies were full of "but the IMMERSION!" Which, fine... I get that the IDEA of it seems cool. You can speak to anyone! But... why? What is your life that this seems like fun? - ThreadSky

davidgaider.bsky.social • 105 days ago

I remember when I posted about how a game full of AI-generated conversations didn't seem particularly appealing to me, my replies were full of "but the IMMERSION!"

Which, fine... I get that the IDEA of it seems cool. You can speak to anyone! But... why? What is your life that this seems like fun?

Reposted from Jordan Mychal Lemos

There hasn't been a single game in my life where I've thought, "Man I wish could ask this NPC absolutely anything I want and they'd respond."

Even if I had, it'd be novel for about 2 minutes.

I'll take 50 handcrafted lines from an actual writer than 1 million from a glorified chat bot any day.

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calamarities.bsky.social•105 days ago

Imo true immersion isn't in endless fluff, it's in less but well written words by a writer capable of creating a world you can sink into.

knight1029.bsky.social•104 days ago

I completely agree. AI generated anything is fun for a bit but it can't actually replace what an actual artist can do. AI is just randomizing information it has to make something "feel" different but doesn't have the intention of being different. It can't intend anything.

spacejock.bsky.social•105 days ago

I try to get through conversations with NPCs as fast as possible, not extend them. Life is short.

plasmaring.bsky.social•105 days ago

This whole thing sounds like hell for me as a writer, but almost worse as a player. I feel like there's some kind of divide between "I want to be told a story" and "I want to have a theme-park experience," and genAI only really works for the latter.

plasmaring.bsky.social•105 days ago

And I don't mean "theme park" in the sense of a game on rails; if you're at Disney, what they're selling is the idea that you're the guest of honor and your whole experience will be tailored to fulfill your dreams. In reality, it's about as personalized as generated text. But that's the draw!

plasmaring.bsky.social•105 days ago

Even the idea that maybe AI could be used for combat barks, etc. kind of baffles me, honestly. It sounds like, "This stuff is filler that absolutely sucks to read and write, so it's fine if the AI takes care of it." At that point, let's just cut it!

briarthefriar.bsky.social•105 days ago

I think even without my hatred for AI, I think the concept of this just sucks. I like learning about characters and watch how they interact with the world. I don't want to ask them about mundane crap. It seems like people who champion this value small-talk over actual substance.

davidgaider.bsky.social•105 days ago

I think they envision a world where the NPC does talk about substance and the world registers that this happened and changes the world to accommodate what the NPC said and this would all somehow be cool and relevant but happens in some future where AI is basically your own personal writer I guess.

kc0llin.bsky.social•95 days ago

betting that most people saying that aren’t even the type to actually read dialogues in video games lol they don’t care about narrative design or actual storytelling , they just want a sandbox with cool woaw tech

flatluigi.bsky.social•105 days ago

i find that a lot of these steps are only appealing if you've fully bought in to the idea that, down the line, every single thing they say about AI will be true. being able to talk to any npc is meaningless unless you can *do* anything with that npc, including generating endless Content. it's silly.

davidgaider.bsky.social•105 days ago

Almost every AI enthusiast talks about AI as it will be ~some day~ ...some vague future where it's been iterated to the point of perfection, while ignoring the idea that, at that point, it may as well have upended society so what it does to a videogame is kind of pointless to speculate.

raynegrimm.bsky.social•105 days ago

What people say they want and what they actually want are often diametrically opposed. Ignoring how awful those convos would be you know how pissed I'd be to have even 5 min long conversation with no point? We'll written characters make us fall in love with them or love to hate them. People enjoy

raynegrimm.bsky.social•105 days ago

Characters for the words they do say not for the volume of the things they could say

plasmaring.bsky.social•105 days ago

What always startles me when people get excited about the Possibilities of these things is how it's usually framed as something like, "What if you could ask Samus Metroid anything, and she'd answer you?" That's not her. She's the product of deliberate choices, not an entity the game can channel.

plasmaring.bsky.social•105 days ago

It'd be one thing if they just wanted the chatbot to roleplay with them, but it's always, "What if you could ask the lore questions you always wanted answers to?" The writers aren't there to tell you! It's not a summoning circle.

claiborne.bsky.social•105 days ago

Also, how immersive would it actually feel if every character spoke like a chatbot?

davidgaider.bsky.social•105 days ago

I suspect chatbots intentionally lack personality, but I don't think giving personality to random NPC's in a world actually provides any value outside of maybe brief novelty. In fact, NPC's capable of distracting the player into thinking they had something relevant to say would be actively bad.

aiddonvalentine.bsky.social•105 days ago

To me it just comes off as wanting constant background noise instead of realizing when a bit of silence has its purpose. Sometimes you need to lose yourself in silence

davidgaider.bsky.social•105 days ago

It's funny, because "generate background crowd conversations you're supposed to ignore" is one of the best uses of AI I can imagine. 😅

dalto2.bsky.social•105 days ago

I think you could create an amazing experience once AI evolves...a lot.

Writing a backstory and personality for each NPC and giving them guidance on acting within the defined story and they had some freedom within that.

It wouldn't be a replacement for creativity but a new way to write.

dalto2.bsky.social•105 days ago

But as it is now? No way. It would just be meaningless drivel instead of enriching the world.

A cool tech demo but not much more.

koksiroj.com•105 days ago

Folks looking for a bunch of ai generated NPC dialogue are so poisoned by the absolute idea that more content = better game. A world that populated with speech from characters who all have a programmed incentive to keep a conversation going until prompted otherwise sounds so draining

allanshoe.bsky.social•105 days ago

As someone that struggles with Live Pen and Paper when asked "how would you go about X?", one thing I love about CRPGs is I can get an idea of what the game setting/writing has accounted for based on the responses I have available to me.

davidgaider.bsky.social•105 days ago

Every good DM knows that you have to lead the players where you want them to go, and they know you're doing it, but you're doing it in a way where they feel like that's where they wanted to go anyhow so they're OK with it. 😅

ironprophet.bsky.social•105 days ago

I kinda wanna know when it's okay for me to fucking STOP talking to an NPC because they've run out of things to say.

lazygardener.bsky.social•105 days ago

The more recent Trails games—which are famous for the amount of NPC dialogue—have a change in the color of the font for the chat bubble when there’s nothing new. Great little QoL aspect for a game where I actually DO want to read all the NPC dialogue.

devo-was-right.bsky.social•105 days ago

my god this lol

davidgaider.bsky.social•105 days ago

Now, don't get me wrong. I think there's potential for AI to *assist* writers, especially ones tasked with filling a game world. Not all AI is alike, and for that matter not all writing is either... some of it is downright drudgery where I'd LOVE to have an AI just take a prompt and flesh it out.

davidgaider.bsky.social•105 days ago

When it comes to game worlds, however, you're aiming for *verisimilitude*... not *replication*. You want a world that *feels* real, not one that works exactly like the real world does. The latter sounds great, but would become thin quickly, and that's not nuance I'd expect AI to ever get on its own.

hajokirchhoff.bsky.social•104 days ago

Well, yes, I agree when it comes to the main NPC characters. But when I hear "I used to be an adventurer, but I took an arrow to the knee" for the 1000th time, I wouldn't mind having a little bit of variation from an AI.
Use both - good human writing for the plot, AI stuff as a filler.

coil.bsky.social•104 days ago

Here's the thing, though: can you recall a single other idle quip from a Skyrim guard?

"Arrow to the knee" wasn't bad writing or not enough writing, it was great writing heard too frequently. GenAI won't improve that, it would only dilute it because it's *not creative*. It's forgettable.

hajokirchhoff.bsky.social•104 days ago

Umm, I don't know about "great writing". But I definitely agree with the "heard too frequently" part. My guess is that for huge open world adventures, uncreative AI chatter for NPCs is still preferable to any kind of writing heard too frequently. We'll find out, I am sure of that :)

coil.bsky.social•104 days ago

Check out Spider-Man 2's street NPCs - a master class in immersive background VO, all of it improvised by the voice actors with very light direction.

turnsky.bsky.social•105 days ago

game worlds *need* that human element to make it feel "real", AI can't really "do" that.. (it's basically glorified procedural generation anyway), Plus people don't consider that being able to ask anyone anything would mean giving those anyones personalities so it doesn't feel all samey anyway.

coil.bsky.social•104 days ago

And a world where you can talk to anyone for infinity isn't realistic, either - most strangers WOULD only give you two sentences and then (perhaps curtly) suggest you keep walking.

We accept abstractions in the service of simulation. GenAI for "narrative" is the opposite.

davidgaider.bsky.social•105 days ago

At this point, I expect at least one person to say "AI won't get it on its own, you have to manage it"... I don't WANT to manage it. The moment my role is to assist it and not it to assist me is the moment we've crossed the Rubicon and you've lost the *intent* that is essential to good writing.

makingaltcetera.bsky.social•102 days ago

I'd recommend watching the open world game demo from NVidia's CES presentation this year. They present a game where every NPC's dialogue is AI generated. And the results are ...dystopian. There is no conflict, everyone gets along. No motive for either player or NPC. A game without a designer.

makingaltcetera.bsky.social•102 days ago

Here it is: https://youtu.be/Pk9z1upOj3U?si=O9jHHMtKXIJIcuUt

makingaltcetera.bsky.social•102 days ago

Like, seriously, their AI isn't behaving like a human being or a character. This is how a dystopian government assumes it's model citizens should behave (having never met a normal person before in their lives).

vian.bsky.social•105 days ago

I think you would enjoy Tim Minchin's recent thoughts on the subject; he deals with AIs lack of creative intent in the last part of this speech, after a very fine poem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lmthPTROqA

tomlonde.bsky.social•105 days ago

We've already seen plenty of people experiment with modding LLM's into games, and I can confidently say that none of them screamed immersive or made me want to try it for myself.

nicknomi.bsky.social•104 days ago

Ai in games always makes me think of the brilliantly bizarre Facade, which is still, after 20 years one of few good, visible uses of AI in video games.

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