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Comment by forrestthewoods | Hacker News Reader

> But you're saying that you want a single model to handle all NPCs and the whole world.

No, I did not say that at all. I didn't specify how the LLMs may or may not be structure. I'm saying that current LLMs - and yes I've used Claude 3.5 Sonnet - are insufficient. There is no existence proof that they're sufficient.

LLMs are great. They aren't great enough for video game NPC. Not yet. Further innovation is needed. You're free to disagree. I can't prove a dispositive. But there is no working example.

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As a gamedev, what would you use currently instead for NPCs? And what would you say makes this/those solutions better than LLMs?

Dialogue systems vary by game and are generally custom. But they amount to hard coded if-else branches if you squint. The only one I ever wrote was a simple announcer for a sports-ish shooter.

Your question is weird. Every video game ever made has shipped using not LLMs. Not a single commercial game has ever shipped with an LLM. So I’d say what makes classic NPC systems better is they’ve shipped tens of thousands of commercial successes over 50+ years. And what makes LLMs worse is they haven’t once been proven viable for even a single title. Nor have they produced even a compelling tech demo.

Geez people.

There are multiple games that use LLMs, available in Steam.

Name them and demonstrate they don’t suck.

First you were talking about those games just existing, now you want me to prove to you that "they don't suck". That doesn't seem fair. Anyway, here you go:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1519310

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1889620

Those are the two that I could easily remember, there are much more games (already in the 10s) that embed the LLM APIs for things like dialogue generation for some parts of the game, e.g. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2530950/

My question was genuine as I'm not from the gamedev domain and I might have missed the real state of the art.

Hard coded dialogs often feel very unnatural and limiting. I can see why people want to explore LLM to try to make new experiences possible.

I can see it becoming a new dimension of game design, open vs closed dialogs, like there is currently open vs closed world. And as in the open vs closed world, they will probably coexist instead of one type replacing the other.

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