The only LLM-Based Experiencetm I’ve had so far (and probably ever) was a brief session of Death by AI I had with friends, and that game boils down to “give the chatbot a prompt and your response, and maybe try to not die horribly”.
Pretty much all the fun of that game comes from giving the chatbot manmade horrors beyond its comprehension and seeing it struggle to keep up.
Novelty value is basically the only thing LLMs have going for them, and that isn’t changing any time soon.
I think there is some potential for LLMs in games, in the same way that a game like Façade showed potential for … being able to create some sort of … thing. But that would require a little bit of artistic vision and integrity, which obviously AAA studios can’t have. I like the idea of games that are about navigating conversation. But I’m not sure you can ever massage a LLM into being in any way compelling—what I’ve seen of character·ai is pretty ghastly. Maybe only using it as a parser could work? Might as well just be ELIZA.
Anyway, this quote
“It’s very different,” Mosser said. “But for the first time in my life, I can have a conversation with a character I’ve created. I’ve dreamed of that since I was a kid.”
brings to mind a Nabokov quote I think about a lot.
INTERVIEWER:
E. M. Forster speaks of his major characters sometimes taking over and dictating the course of his novels. Has this ever been a problem for you, or are you in complete command?
NABOKOV:
My knowledge of Mr. Forster’s works is limited to one novel, which I dislike; and anyway, it was not he who fathered that trite little whimsy about characters getting out of hand; it is as old as the quills, although of course one sympathizes with his people if they try to wriggle out of that trip to India or wherever he takes them. My characters are galley slaves.
I think it could work as a minor gimmick, like terminal hacking minigame in fallout. You have to convince the LLM to tell you the password, or you get to talk to a demented robot whose brain was fried by radiation exposure, or the like. Relatively inconsequential stuff like being able to talk your way through or just shoot your way through.
Unfortunately this shit is too slow and too huge to embed a local copy of, into a game. You need a lot of hardware compatibility. And running it in the cloud would cost too much.
Or the game could be about a newly laid off worker that has to trick unconscious LLM bots to give them the things they need to survive.
Yeah plenty of opportunities to just work it into the story.
I dunno what kind of local models you can use, though. If it is a 3D game then its fine to require a GPU, but you wouldn’t want to raise minimum requirements too high. And you wouldn’t want to use 12 gigs of vram for a gimmick, either.
For me it would be enough to make a simple concept game in the style of an old dungeon crawl and put it up on GitHub…
one game that could benefit from in it within a world confined framework where they couldnt break character or act like an “ai” would be something like project zomboid.
it would be funny trying to convince them they arent real, and they just flip their shit on you. like “you must have lost your mind, i dont feel safe being in your base anymore. zomboids are one thing to worry about, but dealing with a nut job with a god complex is another risk im not willing to take for me, or my family”
they could literally decide amongst themselves to leave or even kill you in mutiny or something. you could maybe convince them you are a messiah and start an end of the world cult by predicting game conditions, the lights going off, the helicopters, the TVs cutting out on specific day.
or maybe they think you are the devil leading them astray based on their randomized era accurate personality profile.
the game memorizes these moments, what you say, how they react, and creates story arcs based on it. maybe one day a survivor leaves your cult, and finds another group, but wants to save her parents. so they send a death squad over and have a jamestown moment where you can convince them all they are going to paradise if they all drink bleach together.
the possibilities would be endless.
the game memorizes these moments, what you say, how they react, and creates story arcs based on it
LLMs famously can’t be consistent, so your fantasy game would have story arcs that doesn’t fit together, brings back characters that are already dead as if nothing happened, and everyone would have a son named Dorian.
imagine if you read the article at all instead of posting 6 paragraphs about an impossible game you’re fantasizing about, that LLMs do nothing to enable because they’re stochastic chatbots and don’t understand game systems (just like you!)
“Hey wouldn’t a game where you just talk to chatbots be really fun???” -this fucking guy
No thanks!
I saw that one Matrix game thing where they used AI to interact with NPCs. I think if that could be refined, it could create fantastic immersion in games.
But AI art and story writing in general is just horrible.
Most AI usage is hated but I saw a lot of people that were a fan of when Fortnite did it with the Darth Vader NPC a few weeks ago I thought it was creepy but hearing Vader talk about rizz or aura or the bite of 87 was kinda fun I guess
yeah the use case for LLMs is amusing novelty. That’s why LLMs peaked with GPT-2, it was just the right amount of broken.
They also needed to rapidly rein it in after gamers got it to pull a Tay AI and start spamming slurs.
Ubisoft and EA are terminally rotten corporations. Not really fair to characterize game studios over what those are up to.
I’m not seeing how it’s not fair to talk about what gaming studios do in terms of two of the largest.
They targeted game studios. Game studios.
Because these specific two are growing increasingly irrelevant to the medium and they’re outliers compared to other studios. They’ve both been infamous for years for their exceptionally scummy practice. They’re literally the worst.
if only the industry could be rid of Ubisoft and EA, we could finally play our AAA live service gacha games in peace, without being exploited for money
if only we could go back to the good old days, when the most prominent people in gaming were:
- the out and proud fascist who runs Epic
- the out and proud fascists who ran id
- Todd Howard
- fucking Peter Molyneux
- it’s ok, a developer who’s existed since the Amiga days has made a good game!
- I regret to inform you that the above-mentioned developer has willingly sold their entire studio to EA in exchange for a sack of money and now the sequel is a live service game with gambling mechanics
- at least we’ll always have the Wing Commander guy. I wonder what he’s up to?
look Star Citizen will own
notice how Take Two didn’t rate the wild response, and neither of the companies in the Aftermath article were EA or Ubisoft
Huh? I’m not saying the past was better, I’m saying the present is better. Stardew Valley is still #25 on the Steam top seller 100. Balatro, Factorio, Rimworld, Baldur’s Gate 3, Clair Obscur, all proper no ai/nft/blockchain grift products by decent studios in the top 100. The top 2 spots are free-to-plays with various monetization schemes: Counter-Strike 2 & Dota 2. Not my cup of tea, but nevertheless: they’re from Valve. Valve is not exactly known for embracing genAI. It’s simply not gaining traction in the gaming world at the same speed it’s creeping up into Ubisoft & EA.
Valhalla and Shadows are two of the best-selling Assassin’s games even though they’ve been exactly equally as shit and tedious since Origin, so I’d put a [citation needed] on your “increasing irrelevancy”.
Also which big game studios don’t suck? The list you give below has, the top 10 largest in order,
- Sony (I guess defensible, idk),
- Tencent (lol), Microsoft (lmao)
- Nintendo (legal almost as predatory as Oracle)
- NetEase (???)
- EA, Epic, Take-Two (sincerely wishing prostate cancer to all three of those CEOs)
- MiHoYo (literally one gacha game), and
- ROBLOX CORPORATION.
Sony (I guess defensible, idk),
their two highest profile failures as of now are Concord, a live service Overwatch clone that was shut down two weeks after launch, and Marathon, an upcoming (or possibly cancelled) Bungie live service Escape from Tarkov clone that doesn’t play well, isn’t anything like the original Marathon games, and infamously has already had several credible accusations of art plagiarism leveled against it. for the latter, I suspect we’ll see a second controversy surface over generative assets; the art that wasn’t plagiarized was starkly ugly and weirdly generic, and I don’t buy that it was that way stylistically.
that shit like this is a normal part of doing business points at a gaming industry that’s rotting at the head, because as unpopular as live service games are, corporations like EA proved they can be very profitable if you tweak the right dopamine receptors to hook enough whales. it’d be nice if EA and Ubisoft were irrelevant now, but unfortunately the industry is still exactly the same exploitative piece of shit they helped make it into. myself and anyone who gives a fuck about quality can keep playing indie games all we want, but these corporations don’t care — they know that a mediocre live service with gambling mechanics will make many times more profit than any indie hit, so they target mediocrity. sometimes they miss and hit rock bottom instead, but who cares? the executives responsible will decimate the studio that developed the game with layoffs or eliminate it entirely, and because capitalism is a death cult that’ll be seen as a win.
My entire experience with Sony is that I loved Patapon on the PSP (I would sell my fucking soul to get it to play on a smartphone god) and I watch The Last of Us and that’s it. None of their games exist as far as I’m concerned because I can’t play them on PC. What, I’m going to play TLoU 2 without playing 1 or GoW 4 without playing 1-3? Go fuck yourselves.
What, I’m going to play TLoU 2 without playing 1 or GoW 4 without playing 1-3?
Part I and Part II are both on Steam, so you can get the full Last of Us experience without a console, and GoW 2018 is a soft reboot, so playing the original trilogy isn’t strictly necessary.
As for GOW 1-3…there’s no PC port, so you’ve got two options: sail the high seas and emulate them via PCSX2 and/or RPCS3, or get the games and a used PS3 off of eBay.
And, given I’ve already mentioned emulation:
My entire experience with Sony is that I loved Patapon on the PSP (I would sell my fucking soul to get it to play on a smartphone god)
If you’re looking for Patapon on your phone, the only course I know of is to grab PSP emulator PPSSPP and find the ISOs online. If you’re fine playing them on your PC, a remaster of the first two games is coming to Steam on June 10th.
(I am deep in the weeds on this shit, I’ll admit)
If you’re fine playing them on your PC, a remaster of the first two games is coming to Steam on June 10th.
Oh my god this is the best news I’ve heard this year
pretty much same! I’ve heard good things about some of the games published under Sony, and their umbrella as a publisher still includes excellent studios whose previous games I have very good memories of. but… I just can’t swing the price for a PS5, it really doesn’t feel worth it just for a few games, and I’m not a huge fan of the hardware design. they also seem to have fumbled PSVR2, and I was a big fan of the indie VR scene and how accessible it was on the PSVR1. on top of everything else, I feel like I’ve gotten by far more mileage out of open platforms than I have from any modern console — so for me, just like you, most Sony releases are invisible unless they’re the ones that bomb
Being the worst and the biggest studios aren’t unrelated concepts, they’re the biggest because they’re the worst.
reminded of the guy who said i could get rid of my problems with SPF/DMARC/DKIM by just not accepting mail from Gmail
this was his advice for a business with ordinary customers btw
I assure you it’s much easier gaming all day without touching EA or Ubi than it is rejecting gmail on a storefront.
i really don’t care, you fuckin weirdo
What a garbage article. I don’t hate AI in games. If I could have smart NPC:s in my games that would be the fucking tits. Not to mention that DLSS is basically standard config these days for better performance.
basically standard config
Ah yes, the sole decider of what is good and fun in a game, industry standards.
oh wow, the one Gamer who doesn’t hate frame generation for looking like shit has joined the chat
bye bye Gamer
lol people fuckin hate DLSS
Are we talking upscaling DLSS or specifically the frame generation thing that I didn’t know existed? The upscaling’s alright I think.
the one that nvidia’s currently pumping as AI is the frame generation one, I believe. upscaling predates the current bubble and is mostly fine — I usually don’t like it outside of very limited use on my steam deck, but that’s personal preference
also:
Russian Spyware now with built in support for fascism. Fucking garbage
it’s fascism except when the exact same backend is used to make the NPCs in my garbage generative games say fash shit, then there’s no harm done
what the fuck even are you
Why can’t a game run its own tiny local server to manage the NPCs? I think it’s been done.
for an LLM? it’s a heavy GPU-bound workload that’ll tank performance for anything else using the GPU
Weird that you’re downvoting me already. Lol
Anyway, some language models run on the CPU (the one I used did anyway), and many can run decently with modern hardware. The game Suck Up! is the perfect example save for the part where the developers chose to run it server-side on release, though, probably to protect their IP.
Other games have also been published with local LLMs like Origins and Ouija Online since last year.
you know it’s weird
I looked for established reviews of Suck Up, the perfect local LLM game that isn’t local and is barely a game, and I couldn’t find any
all of the hype for this piece of shit that came out in 2023 and made zero impact was from paid influencers and the game’s dev Gabriel spamming reddit on a regular basis
so I guess what I’m trying to say is: fuck off with this shit, we’re not buying
Weird that you’re downvoting me already. Lol
weird that you’re complaining
The game Suck Up! is the perfect example save for the part where the developers chose to run it server-side on release
the perfect example. yeah, this is barely a game and they couldn’t even make it run locally. all of this shit is just an awful tech demo for an expensive gimmick. none of it is fun, nobody plays it. why in fuck are you even here pumping it?
Not to mention that DLSS is basically standard config these days for better performance.
Ye and that’s a fucking travesty and everyone responsible for UE5 should be hanged. And this is the rational, levelled take from me, most people I know would not put it as mildly.
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