Opinion: Everything you hated about text adventure games is now being sold as a productivity tool
  • paraphrand@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    1 day ago

    People keep saying LLMs are going to revolutionize video games. And I’m very skeptical that it won’t just feel like madlibs and talking to NPCs who have a form of dementia.

    • owenfromcanada@lemmy.caEnglish
      9·
      1 day ago

      If someone wants to use an LLM in a game effectively, they should use it for input, not output.

      Imagine an RPG where there are no pre-set responses for your character. You type in your words yourself. The LLM gauges your responses and the NPCs respond with one of a pre-set list of responses (to avoid the dementia thing), but an LLM could gauge things like how cooperative or threatening you’re trying to be.

      That has potential for revolutionizing the RP of RPG.

      • paraphrand@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        14 hours ago

        That makes more sense than the demos of NPC conversations I’ve seen. And seems plausible in a smaller on device model too.

      • DanVctr@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        3·
        23 hours ago

        I think someone did something similar like this with a Skyrim mod where you could speak with your voice to the NPCs and they would respond using info from their character’s background, the Skyrim wiki, etc.

      • bizarroland@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 day ago

        There are lots of ways an LLM could effectively improve an rpg game.

        Unfortunately, the people who are using LLMs either do not have the finances needed to do it correctly, or they’re attempting to make it do something that it is not actually good at.

        The ideal scenario for it would be for unimportant and trivial NPCs to have an actual world that is going on actively, a world that they interact with and comment on and respond to.

        However, for that to work, there needs to be some way for an LLM to have memory and to store the events that are happening in the world.

        Aside from that, the LLM would need to respond accordingly as events progress over time, to react to the events that the Player Characters themselves are a part of, for news to be regional, and for the characters on one side of the planet to not know about the events that happened on the other side of the planet if there was no logical way for that information to make that distance.

        The only way to make something like that work would be to have several LLMs with their own event memory banks, all running in parallel tied to different regions and different types of NPCs.

        in which case you’re talking about a MMORPG with LLMs.

        Given how people finding out that textures were generated with AI and it cost what seems to be a very good game several awards, I doubt that any company with pockets deep enough to pay for the server space necessary to run the LLMs to power such a system are going to do anything like that anytime soon.