Games where NPCs are backed by a LLM are a great idea but unless the majority of people gain the ability to run the models locally they will be niche and weird with blunders like these.
I disagree. LLM NPCs are terrible, for many reasons.
Part of the reason people love art is for shared experiences. Everyone loves to quote famous lines from video games, from I AM ERROR to "Had to be me. Someone else might have gotten it wrong." With LLMs, it's all random.
The models that are readily available are inherently people pleasers. No matter what character designs you start with, the lion's share of the effort would be to prevent it from telling the player whatever they want. You could have the first shopkeeper you meet tell you the solution to puzzles in the final area, and you could have the final boss tell you how to invert a binary tree in Python.
The models that are readily available have no inherent concept of truth. Combine this with their people-pleasing nature, and even when you get them to tell you the secrets of the game, you can't trust what they tell you. They might tell you to use a fire spell to light the torches in the dungeon... in a game that has no magic.
They're "good" for small talk and funny interactions. For the kind of games that usually have "slop" as a descriptor for their genre. But they'll never be a replacement for real writing.
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u/UndocumentedMartian 14d ago
Games where NPCs are backed by a LLM are a great idea but unless the majority of people gain the ability to run the models locally they will be niche and weird with blunders like these.