Even if the dialogue wouldn't be generic like ChatGPT tends to be, I would find this incredibly boring. With so many options all the options become meaningless to me. But to each their own I guess - I've always liked games with linear storylines more than the ones where you get to choose your own path.
Also I have a feeling that the NPC narratives when enriched by all player interactions would tend to go towards some average, i.e. become more and more generic and dull. The truly rich experiences have always been on the fringes in all art for me. I'm interested to see a counter example to this though.
I'm working on a website [1] that's essentially "Choose your own adventure with AI NPCs" and I've found two things:
a) LLMs are excellent at keeping a "linear enough" storyline without being linear. They'll let you do outlandish things, but given the assignment of "tell a cohesive story" they manage to corral the story back to something sensible unless the player intentionally keeps pushing at the boundary (in which case they probably do want things to go off the rails)
b) LLMs can do delightfully colorful dialogue, they just need to be grounded in a character. Everyone thinks of factual grounding, but given enough description of speech patterns, character motivations, etc. they're capable of dialogue that's lively and completely rid of "GPT-isms", which are what tend to break immersion
I actually trained an open model [2] on the task of grounding LLMs in characters and actions as opposed to factual things like RAG, and eventually I want to build a game demo out of it
I've experimented with 30 or models so far, my general finding is closed source models like Claude have GPT-isms, while open source models do have a little less of a default tone but their ability to understand existing worlds is directly tied to how many tokens they were trained on.
Since existing worlds are (currently) where most of the stories are set, it's worth it to use a closed source models and wrangle their issues with dialogue.
To it's credit though, Llama 3 is the first OSS model trained on enough tokens to not feel lost for most worlds, so I've started routing some traffic to it for free users
The output format the site uses is also really really hard for most models to follow without fine-tuning, but fine-tuning then causes them to pick up the vocabulary of whichever model they were fine tuned on, which is a bit unfortunate
Really cool project. When I got to the sign in page, the email address I would have given my (edit: Google account) info seemed fishy, like it was a random string of letters. Any way to make it seem more…inviting?
Unfortunately Supabase charges extra for the luxury of setting that URL, and the site is wildly unprofitable right now so I'm sticking to their free offering for the time being
Obviously we don't want experience averaging NPCs.
> Mad Hatter’s first goal is to ask the player to humor him with a joke.
This is ok for simple stylized, small world, single storyline games, but not for open worlds.
For that, NPCs need their own motivations, so they essentially play the game too. With needs like maintain their smithy, so they can build quality armor, so they can make customers happy, so they can make money, so they can feed their family. I.e. not just being props.
And flexible in how they adjust subgoals to meet their core goals, relative to player interaction: such as being convinced to go on a trek as an armorer, or on a search to find and extract rare materials for a magical shield. Willing to fight in revenge for their home town's sacking.
Ah Westworld is a good example! I liked the series and the premise, but I still wouldn't liken the park to a good game - it's a theme park with nice attractions.
As c048 said best (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40316308), good art needs direction and focus, and AI NPCs being able to do anything they want in an open world doesn't make for a good story. It could make for a good sandbox with emergent gameplay, sure. But my point was that there are people who yearn for a good story, and a good story doesn't have many options in it, otherwise the story's beats would become meaningless.
Hmm. Maybe with this the problem Rockstar has with their linear missions mixed with open world could be fixed a bit - i.e. the open world NPCs could react in story missions to what you've done in free roam. This would lessen the cognitive dissonance the NPCs seem to have when you can now blow a town into pieces and then start the story mission and no one cares.
I like the idea of challenging uber goals, that progress in a series, but each with a deep tree of alternate subgoals/solutions.
Subgoals that are resource, constraint defined, could make very flexible solutions. For instance, if you need help with some subgoal, it is going to play out very different depending on what NPCs you have established credibility with before, and their skills and dynamics.
If you need money, then how you get that money is also going to depend on your history, knowledge of a city, previous connections, etc.
That could provide an overall story arc, but with a very open world and fully functional NPC experience.
So: organized series and trees of goals. Open ended solutions.
> For that, NPCs need their own motivations, so they essentially play the game too. With needs like maintain their smithy, so they can build quality armor, so they can make customers happy, so they can make money, so they can feed their family. I.e. not just being props
So you want a system like rimworld, and a LLM doesn't really help on that front. It can power the dialogues, but that's it, all the logic you describe would need to be encoded somewhere else.
To each their own indeed. I was never a fan of linear games.
In Skyrim it took me multiple years to finally complete the main story line. I would always look for books, store potion ingredients, walk in the forest...
There's a big role play component in this. The game could learn from the players RP and improve.
Also I have a feeling that the NPC narratives when enriched by all player interactions would tend to go towards some average, i.e. become more and more generic and dull. The truly rich experiences have always been on the fringes in all art for me. I'm interested to see a counter example to this though.