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Everyone's a skeptic these days.

I'm pretty confident that people will find ways to make fun and interesting games using them, just like they have with every other computer technology over the last 40 years.

> Everyone's a skeptic these days.

You'd be surprised at how untrue that is, unfortunately.

> I'm pretty confident that people will find ways to make fun and interesting games using them

I agree - but also, that's a different phenomenon than simply inserting AI naturalistic characters and expecting them to be fun to interact with.

I mean, you're imagining unfun things, and then declaring them unfun, rather than imagining fun things. Of course unfun implementations would be unfun. But what the gp was clearly intending to suggest was fun implementations of more advanced NPC AI. And your responses are either ignoring that intention, or implying that it's unlikely to occur, both of which seem like being a downer and a skeptic just for the sake of being a skeptic.

I can't tell if this is satire, but one of the "rules that are always true, until they aren't" in game design is that realism isn't fun (https://www.gamesradar.com/gabe-newell-says-games-dont-need-...)

Games bend over backwards in a million ways not to be realistic even when they seem realistic: from silently helping your odds, to intentionally breaking physics (see: coyote running in platformers), to helping your movement align with enemies.

Even the most realistic games with human locomotion almost all rely unrealistic ankle-breaking acceleration changes for your character because you'd feel like you were piloting a bowl of soup otherwise.

The reason we don't have full agentic NPCs right now isn't a technical limitation: it just wouldn't be fun.

Usually you're the hero going against impossible odds with NPCs, in the real world you'd just die.

Games like GTA constantly have NPCs saying outlandish but comical quips at a rate that far surpasses real life.

Hard coded NPC behaviors in games often become the defining features of those games

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There's nothing wrong with realizing that outside of very narrow context like simulator physics, people generally don't seek out realism in our entertainment. People want a certain degree of escapism that relies on breaking the rules a little, or in the case of NPCs a lot.

This take makes no sense to me. I would bet you any amount of money that, 5 years from now, there will be fun+successful games that use modern AI to make NPCs more realistic than they are today. And I guarantee you wouldn't take that bet, because you know you would lose money.

The questions is not, "Is there a level of realism that is unfun," because duh, of course there is. The question is, "Will new advances in AI allow game developers to bring life to NPCs in a way previously not possible, that's also fun." And duh, of course it will.

Pointing out ways that increased realism can be unfun does nothing to prove that there are no ways in which it can be fun. Y'all are betting against the creativity of the entire game development industry. Absolutely wild.

I mean you're making a bad bet: today companies are using modern AI to help with NPCs like voices.

I expect AI will be used to scale dialogue options, NPC model assortments, NPC voices, etc. to an amazing degree too at build time.

But realtime "Large Transformer Models", to generate how NPCs act is almost a "duh no one will want that", when you can get 99% of the benefits by baking the output of gen AI in the game with none of the drawbacks like losing the shared experience of a game or playing roulette with the quality of someone's experience.

AI would let you bake in insanely intricate dialogue trees today

> when you can get 99% of the benefits by baking the output of gen AI in the game with none of the drawbacks like losing the shared experience of a game or playing roulette with the quality of someone's experience.

You're making tremendous assumptions here:

- That the shared experience of game is always more fun than individual experiences.

- That only 1% of benefits can come from real-time AI decision-making.

- That using AI will mean playing roulette with experience, AND that playing roulette can never be fun.

I would bet all the money on earth that game developers will prove you wrong in each of these areas over the course of the next 3-5 years.

Outlandish but comical quips? You no take candle. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/YouNoTakeCandle

It will be just like any new tech.

At first, devs start using generative AI for NPC interactions. It forces you to keep Internet connection and it feels extremely laughable. Everyone hates it.

Then 3 years later it becomes so natural that every AAA game has generative AI, and no one even mentions that as if that was always how games were made.

Not all tech is fun, some is just glue.

Can you name any games built around the Y-combinator, CRDTs, or PCA? (Please oh please let there be games about principal component analysis.)

Gabe Newell touches on this exact subject: https://youtu.be/MGpFEv1-mAo

That being said, I've noticed that realism in games has a function beyond gameplay: it makes the game cooler.

For example in Rainworld, the enemies keep doing their own thing even when you aren't around. This has some gameplay value (makes the game less predictable), but I think the main value is that people talk about it and think it's interesting. So it changes people's perception of the game world in a positive way.

If I remember correctly, in Rainworld this extremely interesting and cool property ("The world keeps turning when you're gone") was wildly misunderstood and lambasted by games critics. E.g. I think it was a Rock Paper Shotgun reviewer who threw the controller because, he thought, enemies would respawn randomly after he died. Which they didn't: they just kept living their virtual lives and wandering about while _he_ was respawning. In game forums players were also very frustrated with this because they had learn to expect set patrol patterns that they could memorise for the win. A bit of a failure of human generalisation abilities that, if you ask me.

Another game that has this property (and that has somehow escaped the befuddled reviewers' ire) is Don't Starve. e.g. I once got chased by the Deerclops and ran through a Beefalo herd. After a while I realised the Deerclops wasn't hunting me anymore. Next day I went back to the Beefalo herd and there was a huge amount of meat and Beefalo wool, and a Deerclops eye, lying around.

After playing games like that, I play e.g. Hollow Knight, or Zero Dawn, where every enemy you kill comes back the next time you revisit the area and it feels so fake.

> Anyway, with AI characters, I expect it will actually be more frustrating and boring than not if they have realistic lives and schedules. All the littler irritations that we deal with and accept form real people just become friction in a game.

I remember Ultima V in the 80s had this. NPCs had their own daily routine and went here and there throughout the day. A couple of side quests relied on this mechanic—you had to learn their schedule and catch them somewhere at some time.

Majora's Mask did something like that too. The game was centered around a 3 day cycle you had to do things in because at the end the moon would crash into the world and everyone dies. So you'd get stuff done, then time travel back to the beginning of the cycle repeatedly. NPCs all did the same things in those 3 days, so you could help people out with their sidequests in each cycle, like in Groundhog Day.

Shenmue and Deadly Premonition also do the NPC's with schedules thing... and are considered cult classics at best. Waiting around for an NPC just isn't fun.

Well, weird movements in games should be a thing of the past in the near future, as we can begin to extract motion capture data from videos of normal people acting normally.

I think it depends on the type of game you have, but I wouldn't underestimate this type of technology for say, open world games where it might make the game more immersive due to convincing realism.

> Well, weird movements in games should be a thing of the past in the near future, as we can begin to extract motion capture data from videos of normal people acting normally.

I think you misread my posts. We don't have awkward animations because our mocap isn't good enough, we have awkward animations because typical human motion looks awkward - our brains just mostly ignore that.

People are awkward; we don't actually want characters in games/movies/etc to be like real people. Very few movies, for example, would be well served by conversations frequently and for non-plot-related reasons being interrupted by loud noises, having people talk over each other and nonverbally try to figure out who gets to speak, having characters ask "What?" and then begin to reply without waiting for the answer because their brain caught up half a second later, etc.

I see, I did misread it!

But I don’t think I can agree with what you meant then - why would our brain mostly ignore it in real life but not in video games? Where is the transition from something feeling real (in an immersive way) to us not liking it because it feels awkward, and why does it happen? I’m imagining a “perfect simulation” game which is like real life in ways that matter/don’t get in your way in terms of gameplay - I think everyone would be awed (of course this can be argued though). What would need to degrade in terms of realism for it to seem awkward/not be immersive anymore?

I agree with the movie example, but in a game you don’t have to watch the mundane - it’s just background “noise” to make the world believable.

That sounds like a game that'd be an instant buy for streamers, though. All the weird, annoying, unexpected interactions? Possible comedy gold in the hands of the right person.