> Things I do for fun: play sports, video games and drink.
Video game NPCs will very quickly be replaced by LLms. No more boring scripted dialogue. This allows for a truly open world where the inhabitants can dynamically respond to your actions. Video games will become cheaper to create with generative AI that can quickly create a layout of a game world that can then be built on.
No more boring scripted dialogue. Now you get boring, procedurally generated dialog. About things that don’t matter, don’t make sense, or veer wayyyy off topic.
You fundamentally cannot make a random npc interesting because they are not supposed to be interesting. Ideally they say very little.
Agreed that LLMs, etc., will game development _cheaper_ by requiring less labor. It seems like software development in particular is will be getting a lot of powerful new tools over the next few years.
> Video game NPCs will very quickly be replaced by LLms. No more boring scripted dialogue.
I'm skeptical that this is what the users want. Sure, it would be nice to have, say, less repetitive background chatter in Skyrim. But, human-scripted dialog is intentional, which is at the core of a lot of gaming. Take that away and you end up with the early versions of No Man's Sky, where yes, there's an infinity of different variations to explore. But it wasn't what users actually wanted; they wanted a designed experience.
Sure, there are still scripted stories/quests and what not. But the background characters can become much more interesting if they're all LLMs that are just given a prompt like "you live in this cabin and are a subsistence farmer who has a dark secret" or something instead of just standing around looping a few lines. Open world games don't feel organic at all imo because these characters who should be adding flavor and making the game dynamic are just completely static.
I think whether or not it will actually be cheaper remains to be seen. Right now many AI products are still being heavily subsidized, thus the cheap or free price tag. Once these services decide they need to monetize, it may not be cost effective for most video games at scale. Maybe eventually these computations can (reasonably) take place on the client side, but I think that's so far away that we could very well see another paradigm shift by the time that's realized.
Video game NPCs will very quickly be replaced by LLms. No more boring scripted dialogue. This allows for a truly open world where the inhabitants can dynamically respond to your actions. Video games will become cheaper to create with generative AI that can quickly create a layout of a game world that can then be built on.