The bigwigs who want AI-generated NPCs and writing think you're too dumb to appreciate a good story—don't prove them right

3 days ago by sanitation to c/pcmasterrace

The delight's in the details.
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CarbonIceDragon 32 points 3 days ago

I get what this is saying, and I partly agree, but at the same time, I still think that open world video game npc dialogue is one of the few cases where "program that generates plausible sounding strings of text" could actually be mildly useful. Yes, if you generate everything procedurally, especially the actual story, the result is going to feel rather flat, but I think this misses any middle ground between having all dialogue dynamically generated and having it all be a prewritten human script. For example, suppose that an NPC had conventionally human-written dialogue for the most plot-important conversations, like giving a quest, cutscenes, a player's first visit to a location, etc, just as these sorts of games have now, but during less important conversations or once the prewritten dialogue was exhausted, it would switch to generating new dialogue, using a human-written backstory and the prewritten dialogue for that character as part its prompt to keep every character from sounding exactly the same. Such a "shift" past what the writers had written for a character would be noticeable, sure, but so is just having that character repeat itself over and over, the utility wouldnt be to have AI write the story instead of the devs but instead to make the point in which that character's part in the story is done less immersion breaking.

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Jomega 36 points 3 days ago

That sounds great until the NPCs start hallucinating.

Have you heard of the elf kingdom in the north? Legend has it that a weapon of unlimited power can be found there.

Then you search for hours for this "elf kingdom" only to find out it made that shit up.

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Delphia 3 points 3 days ago

Ive had random people on the bus tell me random shit that was also likely untrue. NPCs halucinating random time wasting shit for players to waste their time on actually sounds more like real life.

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dmir 8 points 3 days ago

The difference is real life has immeasurably more entropy and variance and randomness. Fiction is created, with intention, and good open world game design is one that leads and pushes and hints at things, preferably without being explicit - unless this explicitness is itself (mis)leading you somewhere or is just the McGuffin of the story.

Fiction without intention, even in its smaller, seemingly random encounters and details, is just messy and disrespects your time.

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