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I think AI could reinvent text based games in a fresh way that would be fun. Text based games were always so constrained by what the developer could guess that you would type but with AI it really could read more like an interactive choose your own adventure novel that is easy to navigate.
No one wants to move first with such a polarizing, unproven and rapidly changing tech.
I think AI could reinvent text based games in a fresh way that would be fun. Text based games were always so constrained by what the developer could guess that you would type but with AI it really could read more like an interactive choose your own adventure novel that is easy to navigate.
Basically you create characters with bios, traits. Then a setting/context. Now, as you write your story, you can have multiple characters involved and they'll act from their perspective and traits.
Then these also have lorebooks with triggers, so if you mention The Barking Dog Inn, the AI and the characters will know what you mean and your characters with an outgoing personality type will be more eager to go there than others etc.
Finally, these systems usually have a long term memory where key events are saved and the AI remembers.
So a lot of this already exists!
It could be about cost: big LLMs don’t work locally like most games, and even with server hosting, the context for a well-detailed and non-textual game would grow very fast, so processing it would become slow and/or expensive. These are the current limits for truly generative games. As for generated content in regular games, I don’t see an issue if the content is high quality and free of errors. People don’t like low…
I have to imagine someone is looking into that, sandbox style games with hundreds of characters who have unique personalities and respond to any input and remember all your interactions... that would be amazing.
Also having recently played a run of Civ5(before burning out because the late game is tedious and the overall game so unrealistic), I thought that good AI would help 4x games remain epic while letting the user choose their level of tedium. It would be nice, for instance, to manually go through the early game when management is easy and exploration is fun, only to turn that over to an AI at some point(and you generally do with autoexploration). Same thing with other eras though. By the time I'm in the late game and have a large empire, I'd rather focus on diplomacy and moving armies, not city management or worker management. I don't want to commit to fully giving up on those aspects of the game though. It would be nice to, say, automate war mostly but be able to jump in if I want to micromanage for a few turns.
I've said this before: In Mass Effect, characters are interesting because they are unique, principled, not always right, and are tested. Garrus for example is a former law enforcement official who got upsetty spaghetti about how sometimes the law fails to catch a criminal so he decides to start murdering them instead. In the course of several missions, you as the player personally experience this dynamic, hearing his story, seeing how the failure of real justice impacts people, talk with Garrus about his beliefs and how they changed, you can critique his position and point out ideals or whatever, and then after an hour of directly chewing on and mulling over the finer points of this textbook moral quandary, you are put in a position to make a snap decision whether you should kill a bad guy or let the courts handle it, including having your own motivations and incentives.
AI doesn't do that. There's no internal consistency, and certainly not consistency with the surrounding game. It won't build a character to explore a point, and also build levels and game and even background events to tie in with it. Do you remember any characters from playing AI dungeon a few years ago? People remember Garrus for decades.
Go read an AI generated book, they aren't very good. They aren't trying to say anything. They don't have a unique perspective or set of ideals they want to explore. They don't have a purpose in their content creation.
If you burn immense effort tuning a procedural generation system, it will occasionally spit out content that seems to have a story, but 95% of it will just be unconnected boring mush. Game paste.
If you want to know what a LLM produced story looks like go play a recent Call of Duty Campaign. It's just a list of 5 second Set Pieces and the entire point of the game is just to be dragged through set piece after set piece with barely the fragrance of a narrative in there. It's utterly boring and desensitizing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think a system like this could really work well Too bad, it's patented! https://www.eurogamer.net/shadow-of-mordors-brilliant-nemesi... Fuck software patents and every single person who has ever filed one.
Ah. Well, maybe we could improve the patent system instead? If most property is going digital, and we agree as a society that idea generators and executors deserve compensation for their effort, I think the answer would be better more evolved compensation systems and I agree stopping patents that are clearly a troll though would be better to be fucked.
The patent system benefits the uber-wealthy at the expense of everyone else, so no, that won't be happening.