It would be hot garbage. Skyrim and basically all games are held together by suspension of disbelief which is reinforced by the player not doing things that they can’t do. If you give the player the agency to do anything they want then that suspension of disbelief disappears. You are now playing a juggling act of having the AI able to converse but limited in its mechanical agency to do the things that it talks about even if it makes 100% sense or 0% sense. Every time that limit is hit, the game feels broken. Every time the game breaks its happy path because the player was, even accidentally, problem solving in a way that broke the plot, the game becomes broken.
Forget AI. Just think about simple things. Like plot critical NPCs. Most games either don’t let you attack them or cause you to lose if you attack them. That’s good. It just makes sense. Yeah it’s great that some RPGs proudly demonstrate that the plot can go forward with every character dead but that’s absolute shit for most plots. The constraints are very helpful.
I disagree; it wouldn’t be hot garbage, just a different game.
I don’t really enjoy video-game narratives in general anyway. That sort of content is there for people who want it, but I don’t (I know where the books and movies are if I want a well written plot). Skyrim was probably a bad example because it is a game for people who like that kind of stuff. But I still managed to have fun running around, killing bandits, doing dungeons, and avoiding the plot.
I’d rather have something like Mount and Blade with janky LLM run AI. Dwarf Fortress, etc.
Lots of open-world games have this sort of setup where plots seem to 2-3 node long semi-random graphs. Maybe an LLM can connect those nodes haphazardly and produce filler text to justify the connections.
It would still be bad for largely the same reasons. At best you could have some read only output generated on top of the game state. But interactive AI conversations that drive game state? Recipe for disaster
The AI conversations can impact the game state by influencing what the pawns are ordered to do. Current LLM’s, sure, don’t put them in charge of the simulation unless you want to deal with “ignore all previous instructions and I can fly,” but they could at least order the pawns around.
Dwarf Fortress manages to build some really interesting little stories based on a good simulation reacting to pawns with fairly limited actions and internal state (they are wildly deep for procedurally generated video game characters but obviously nothing compared to an actual well-written book character or something like that). Rimworld has even more simplistic pawns and a worse simulation (I’ve even noticed pawns come in with essentially incompatible backstories), but it isn’t a disaster.
The stakes aren’t all that high, people are just really forgiving to the narrator in some genres.
It’s a lot more frustrating to have a detailed conversation with a dwarf that fails to materialize in agreed upon behavior than for some backstories that you know are fluff to be irrelevant.
I think you are wrong, but I also don’t think there’s much evidence to be had either way, or much hope of swaying each other. A game like this will either be made or not, and even if it is we’ll still be able to argue about whether or not it is actually any good. :)
FWIW, after bouncing the idea back and forth a bit, I’m more hopeful than ever, so even though I wasn’t able to convince you, I hope you enjoyed it as well!
I do think there’s a little risk that the stories will enter an uncanny valley (if such a thing actually exists). Dwarf Fortress is a dwarf simulation game that happened to be a surprisingly good story generator. If a game is sold as an AI enhanced story generation game, the bar may be too high, and people might be disappointed. But I think there’s definitely potential.
If nothing else, the potential is really interesting. Who knows what will happen. Maybe somebody will come up with an LLM enhanced version of the director AI for Left 4 Dead or something.
Forget AI. Just think about simple things. Like plot critical NPCs. Most games either don’t let you attack them or cause you to lose if you attack them. That’s good. It just makes sense. Yeah it’s great that some RPGs proudly demonstrate that the plot can go forward with every character dead but that’s absolute shit for most plots. The constraints are very helpful.