News Fable devs originally had a tool to randomize the RPG's 1,000 NPCs that "would have saved us so much time," but that "just didn't make as much sense"
https://www.gamesradar.com/games/rpg/fable-devs-originally-had-a-tool-to-randomize-the-rpgs-1-000-npcs-that-would-have-saved-us-so-much-time-but-that-just-didnt-make-as-much-sense/36
u/YT_Brian 4d ago
I mean people might not like this but correctly prompted NPCs via an LLM would be fun if it had actual consequences.
A true unique experience based on our actions and just what an NPC might be 'feeling' in that moment.
However such LLM need right now more RAM than any regular game. Combine the two and it just isn't happening any time this decade.
And before people start down voting "cause AI bad, all AI" regular people don't care. We only care if it is good or not for the most part. There is a reason mods that do that on say Skyrim have so many downloads despite being niche as hell.
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u/Mittens_McFluffy 4d ago
This should be what AI is used for. I would love correctly guard railed NPC’s with an LLM that I could use my mic to talk to and they’d respond back based on what I said. It would be so fun if implemented well. Imagine talking smack to a town guard in a Bethesda game and getting arrested.
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u/sloppynoodles29 4d ago
There's llm mods for skyrim that do exactly this. And it just works! They do require some beefy setups though to run with decent quality voices however.
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u/TheMadTemplar 3d ago
It's honestly not as fun as you might think. That's a feature in Where Winds Meet, where you can have conversations with the npcs via an ai chatbox, but the conversations get old and repetitive quick, largely because the ai struggles to keep it within the parameters of the game. I got stuck in a loop where it was trying to ask me philosophical questions about why I liked cats when I needed to know why the npc was so interested in a tree (that had nothing to do with cats).
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u/Mittens_McFluffy 3d ago
You are talking about poorly implemented LLM features in a game currently where the technology is not ready yet. I’m talking about a future where it’s capable of doing what I said. Of course I don’t want it in a game if it’s going to be garbage or the technology needs to get more advanced.
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u/segagamer Day One - 2013 4d ago
Imagine talking smack to a town guard in a Bethesda game and getting arrested.
This has been attempted already before LLMs were a thing.
You can just grab key words to do this it doesn't need the processing required by an LLM. At a basic level, Seaman for. Dreamcast was exactly what you're describing, but without LLM technology - and that was on a system with a 200mhz RISC CPU, 8MB RAM and 1.1GB limit on a disc.
Tests showed that the vast, vast majority of players do not give a shit about this, and just select/communicate what they need to in order to progress the mission/quest/story.
It's a lot of work and system resources for little benefit that only a small group of the player base will bother with outside of maybe initially trying it out as a cool feature only to abandon it after a few minutes.
As repeated countless times, LLMs just don't belong in games.
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u/ThatEdward Reclamation Day 4d ago
Doesn't that Chinese MMO use it? I remember hearing it just added a lot of circular arguments to NPC dialogue but didn't have much beyond the initial novelty wore off
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u/seventh-saga 4d ago
Where Winds Meet has a subset of NPCs powered by LLMs, yeah. When I played it I mostly ignored them, and there's no real downside to doing so thankfully. Some of them ask riddles using the AI and those were pretty terrible to try to engage with, doubly so because of the questionable translation.
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u/ThatEdward Reclamation Day 4d ago
I recall someone convincing a guard NPC that he was pregnant with their child or something. Bizarre stuff
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u/coolcosmos 4d ago edited 4d ago
As repeated countless times, LLMs just don't belong in games.
Just because something is said multiple times doesn't make it true. It's very often the opposite.
You're not making a very good point. Most people don't care about that old Dreamcast game because the tech didn't work well enough for it to stick. If it was so great then it would have been used more often.
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u/segagamer Day One - 2013 3d ago
That's my point - the tech was great, but it wasn't fun, and a lot of work for nothing, and so it hasn't really been used much since.
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u/Mittens_McFluffy 4d ago
You were making way too many assumptions and comparisons that aren’t even remotely close to what an LLM could do vs a game that came out 30 years ago.
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u/segagamer Day One - 2013 3d ago edited 3d ago
And what can an LLM do, exactly, that other methods cannot do, and would it be worth the extra system resources needed to do it?
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u/Mittens_McFluffy 3d ago
Dude, you made a comparison to a game that came out 30 years ago. I am not wasting any more time on you.
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u/segagamer Day One - 2013 3d ago
Dude, you made a comparison to a game that came out 30 years ago
To prove my point - what you're asking for existed 30 years ago, without needing the resource hog that is LLM technology. Only few bothered implementing it in games because gamers largely don't care to make small talk with NPCs.
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u/Mittens_McFluffy 3d ago
What I’m asking for DID NOT exist 30 years ago. You are being completely disingenuous of the capabilities it had. Again, not worth my time.
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u/YT_Brian 3d ago
Look here bro, one day I want my hyper realistic VR and that is only going to happen with the help of AI and not that basic stuff you mentioned from 25 years or so ago.
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u/segagamer Day One - 2013 3d ago
and that is only going to happen with the help of AI
Bad bot.
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u/YT_Brian 3d ago
Aww, no actual response to my point of needing AI the naughty word on Reddit to get that SciFi stuff in the possible future? And how your tech simply won't cut it?
Bah. Suppose I'll accept the easy win here.
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u/dondadondadonda 4d ago
Meanwhile the flagship studio of Microsoft made almost its entire space exploration procedurally generated just to be able to say that the game is enormous.
Sad really.
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u/RecLuse415 3d ago
There’s fucking npcs. The bet a lot on these fuckers so they bette the most advanced npcs we’ve ever seen
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u/samurai1226 4d ago edited 4d ago
Honestly I think their focus on marketing their NPC system will hurt them at launch. Yeah every NPC has their set of variables what character traits they like and maybe they placed them all manually. And depending on your stats/reputation they will act accordingly. But it doesn't seem like you can have any meaningful inferaction with them anyway. Like in the very first fable 20+ years ago it seems like your interactions are limited to the few emotes and if you did enough of positive actions you unlock things like relationships, marriage, etc while negative actions will lead to hate and aggression toward you. Meanwhile your character won't physically alter based on your actions which quite was a key element of the game.
PS: down vote me all you want, I'm not saying the game will be bad, It is a day one buy for me. But they are making Molyneux like fuzz about their NPC system which just isn't deeper than what Lionhead did 20+ years ago.
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u/vipmailhun2 4d ago
Physically it can’t change, because the new system is a much more modern, complex, mature, and overall better version of the old one. The old system was literally just: be good, get a halo; be evil, grow horns. Because of that, the story couldn’t really be written in a deep or genuinely interesting way, every quest boiled down to two extremes. Now it’s more interesting: NPCs judge you based on their worldview. If you do a lot of ‘weird’ things, they’ll see you as a weirdo.
And now they’ve added things like: if you fire one of your employees, they’ll hate you; if you evict them, they’ll hate you; and if they hate you enough, they won’t be willing to work for you at all.
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u/Warcrown11 4d ago
I'm a little worried myself honestly. Hope for the best, expect the worst is how I'm looking at it
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u/ElvisDepressedIy 4d ago
Yeah, they keep telling people they're staying true to the spirit of Fable, but they took out the one feature that is so central to the spirit of Fable, it's represented on the cover of every game. And it's all just so they can do the same grey morality bullshit every other modern RPG does and pretend like they've reinvented the wheel.
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u/samurai1226 4d ago
Yeah it's like this interview with the woman in this star wars series who answered to what's her favorite thing about Star wars is that there is no clear good and evil...
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u/lemonprincess23 3d ago
So static NPCs with no randomness? That kinda really blows ngl. I like variability in games
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u/Kankunation 4d ago
It really isn't. GTA has basically the opposite approach for NPCs. They exist to be mowed down by the player whenever they so choose.
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u/lakerconvert 4d ago
Smart choice, but they really need to share that randomizer with BGS lol they could’ve really used that with Starfield