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Comment by sintara | Hacker News Reader

I'm actually really excited about AI driven Gamedev. Imagine the next generation of Skyrim where rather than picking prewritten dialog options you can have natural conversations with NPCs.

Where rather than the - necessarily limited - set of predesigned outfit/equipment/face combinations each characters appearance can adjust to what happened to them. Their outfit changes with their commercial status, fights leave scars, having experienced tragedy leaves a haunted look.

Where rather than premodelled dungeons the world shapes around me to tell a story.

Gamedesign would change - and game artists would change from making 3D meshes, textures and animations to being authors of storylines and styles.

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Someone already did this, and it was a dancing bear of a thing. Cool that it worked, pretty boring in practice. The sims-like Inzoi was built around this idea as well and the blandness really put people off.

I'd love to see it happen, but until I see an AI write a compelling story worth reading, I'm glad people are still doing the heavy lifting.

Part of it is putting them in the right world and harness; I've been working on implementing bots driven by models in a 20 year old MMO with a relatively simple interface, and just a few weeks into developing the bot/model features and contracts, I'm already seeing glimpses of interesting emergent behavior in model driven worlds; alliances form, hostile players get exiled, and teams try to support each other.

From here, it's a matter of dialing in what's "the bot" vs what's "the model", then working through how to integrate them with human players. Obviously I don't have any guarantees, but it does seem like some interesting gameplay could come from it. Having a real sandbox style world with multiple clearly quantifiable goals that are at odds with each other seems to be a key way to push the models towards interesting, emergent behavior.

Also, if you haven't seen it, check out the Emergent Gardens youtube channel; it's one of my favorites, and they've been exploring these ideas for a while.

I've been playing around with this stuff for around a year too, mixing deterministic-ish simulation with AI comms, decision making and story guidance. There are flashes of cool, but the work to guide it to write good stories with what you have often takes just as much effort as writing the story. Fine, you've written a situation generator. Now you have to tell it what kind of situations are compelling, without them feeling like cookie-cutter templates. Then what you're doing is writing.

Thanks for the Emergent Garden rec, looks interesting.

If this comes to pass, it will destroy one of my favorite aspects of gaming: talking about shared experiences. If my gaming experience is randomly generated and yours is too, there's almost nothing we share.

> Imagine the next generation of Skyrim where rather than picking prewritten dialog options you can have natural conversations with NPCs.

Back when Animal Crossing: Wild World was announced on the DS, and I heard that you could send letters to your neighbours and they would respond, naïve 11-year-old me was hoping for something along those lines.

Of course, it didn’t even come close.

You don't need to wait for the LLM driven NPCs. It already exists and has been done for years. It's always, always, always absolute dog shit and doesn't add anything to the game. Voice acting is whatever trash the LLM puts out. You get the same roundabout sentences that LLMs put out.

Character customisation already exists. AI won't make blending textures easier or harder.

>game artists would change from making 3D meshes, textures and animations to being authors of storylines and styles.

You fundamentally misunderstand game artists if you think that the meshes, textures and animations they make _today_ isn't driven by a storyline and styling. That's the absolute core of everything artists do. Otherwise we'd have reusable animation packs everywhere, like every default UE5 game does and nobody would redo a 50th running animation.

Having experienced LLM driven gamedev, I watch the movement with utter disdain. I recommend you to do the same, to actually play the products of such endeavor that you bought with your own money, for more than a dozen minutes.

> Imagine the next generation of Skyrim where rather than picking prewritten dialog options you can have natural conversations with NPCs

And of course those dialogs would be uploaded to the cloud and sold. Can't wait

Your posts here are being uploaded to the cloud and sold. Yet, you still write here. So people will still play Skyrim.

Sure, but this is clearly a public forum with the intention of communicating publicly with others. I don't know if people would necessarily be OK with the kind of speech they use during games to be treated the same.

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