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Comment by FishInTheWater | Hacker News Reader

But it isn't different. People have been using things like Markov chains to experiment with NPC dialogue for well over a decade.

It just never got widespread adoption because it's just not interesting, and LLMs are no different here. The dialogue is still empty, despite being deeper and more grammatically complex than previous attempts.

If every farmer in an RPG hands out the same "collect 20 bear asses" quest it doesn't matter if they all have "detailed" randomly generated backstories and can opine about the game world, real world philosophy, or the 2024 US elections.

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I actually think it makes a world of difference to opine about the game world. It's so much more immersive.

Have you ever gone to a living history museum? (Old Sturbridge Village is one example, my favorite I've been to). All these people in character, able to talk about the period, it makes for an amazing experience.

In traditional video games, if we try to or even accidentally push any deeper, we see the cracks in the universe. "Oh, I spoke to this person again, and they said the same thing to me." AI can help fix those cracks, and fill them in wherever the player ventures.

This certainly doesn't change Fortnite, but I think it could change immersive RPGs and MMOs.

"Living History" is a well crafted written experience, not procedurally generated slop.

The issue here is that LLMs can only act in-character if the world has already been built and written, if the prompts are so pre-chewed that you may as well just write the dialogue directly and get even better results.

Take Solaire of Astora. He's an interesting NPC not because of any depth of the dialogue, but because of how well in-tune he is to the world and game itself. A true believer in the old god, a beacon of optimism in a depressed dying world, and someone who sets the tone of the co-op multiplayer to be silly and fun.

You can't get that out of an LLM.

“‘Living History’ is a well crafted written experience, not procedurally generated slop”

Having known people who lived/worked at a living history museum, their experience was much closer to improvisational comedy than a scripted interaction. Sure, they were riffing on their historical knowledge instead of cracking jokes, but it was not scripted.

> It just never got widespread adoption because it's just not interesting.

True. There have been NPC systems where the NPCs had motivations and a life of their own, even when no one was around. Those haven't helped gameplay much.

The current problem is that LLMs don't know enough about the game world. Recent progress on that.[1]

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03442

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