> Then we'll make new kinds of games where the unpredictability of the NPCs is a core mechanic.
This is impossible, you need the NPC to be predictable on some level to make a fun game. Even unpredictable NPC needs to have a predictable personality on some level, total randomness isn't fun. Like, imagine a terrain generator that just randomizes terrain on each tile, that wont be fun at all, that is what a basic random personality would be like.
Think of a human opponent, they are very predictable, just looking at a human player and what he does and I can predict what he will do in the future. Not perfectly, but players aren't that random. To make an AI that feels good it has to be very predictable.
The main problem with "smart" bots is that they have so far always been way less predictable than humans, they get a strange edge cases and bugs where they start to act very dumb and strangely, that feels like a bug to the player and isn't fun. Or their smartness makes them do the same thing every time making them even more predictable than basic scripting, either way they are worse than basic scripting.
Getting over these issues is a really hard problem, LLMs hasn't helped solve that so far.