7 ms·

I hope devs are able to use this to give more life to NPCs. So many times we've been promised NPCs in RPGs that have their own lives, do their own things indepe

I hope devs are able to use this to give more life to NPCs. So many times we've been promised NPCs in RPGs that have their own lives, do their own things independent of the player, etc. and it's never really materialized into anything notable. With AI though, I feel like we may be getting close.

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
Have you played Dwarf Fortress?
digging 3y ago
I'm suspicious of whether that will actually make games more fun or interesting. For example, the more realistic human character animations get, the deeper we seem to fall into the uncanny valley. The fact is that humans themselves naturally move in ways that look weird when put on a stage, so mocap tends to look sillier the better it is. Which is why we have theater, where movements are exaggerated. Anyway, with AI characters, I expect it will actually be more frustrating and boring than not if they have realistic lives and schedules. All the littler irritations that we deal with and accept form real people just become friction in a game. Games, as movies and books and shows and plays and illustrations, don't need to be more realistic to be better. Media is caricatures of real life, with important information intentionally presented to give us a good experience. Taking inspiration from real life can give us better mechanics but blindly mimicking real life will give us shitty games.
- timlod 3y ago
  Well, weird movements in games should be a thing of the past in the near future, as we can begin to extract motion capture data from videos of normal people acting normally. I think it depends on the type of game you have, but I wouldn't underestimate this type of technology for say, open world games where it might make the game more immersive due to convincing realism.
  - digging 3y ago
    > Well, weird movements in games should be a thing of the past in the near future, as we can begin to extract motion capture data from videos of normal people acting normally. I think you misread my posts. We don't have awkward animations because our mocap isn't good enough, we have awkward animations because typical human motion looks awkward - our brains just mostly ignore that. People are awkward; we don't actually want characters in games/movies/etc to be like real people. Very few movies, for example, would be well served by conversations frequently and for non-plot-related reasons being interrupted by loud noises, having people talk over each other and nonverbally try to figure out who gets to speak, having characters ask "What?" and then begin to reply without waiting for the answer because their brain caught up half a second later, etc.
    - timlod 3y ago
      I see, I did misread it! But I don’t think I can agree with what you meant then - why would our brain mostly ignore it in real life but not in video games? Where is the transition from something feeling real (in an immersive way) to us not liking it because it feels awkward, and why does it happen? I’m imagining a “perfect simulation” game which is like real life in ways that matter/don’t get in your way in terms of gameplay - I think everyone would be awed (of course this can be argued though). What would need to degrade in terms of realism for it to seem awkward/not be immersive anymore? I agree with the movie example, but in a game you don’t have to watch the mundane - it’s just background “noise” to make the world believable.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  > Anyway, with AI characters, I expect it will actually be more frustrating and boring than not if they have realistic lives and schedules. All the littler irritations that we deal with and accept form real people just become friction in a game. I remember Ultima V in the 80s had this. NPCs had their own daily routine and went here and there throughout the day. A couple of side quests relied on this mechanic—you had to learn their schedule and catch them somewhere at some time.
  - hbn 3y ago
    Majora's Mask did something like that too. The game was centered around a 3 day cycle you had to do things in because at the end the moon would crash into the world and everyone dies. So you'd get stuff done, then time travel back to the beginning of the cycle repeatedly. NPCs all did the same things in those 3 days, so you could help people out with their sidequests in each cycle, like in Groundhog Day.
  - staticman2 3y ago
    Shenmue and Deadly Premonition also do the NPC's with schedules thing... and are considered cult classics at best. Waiting around for an NPC just isn't fun.
- Legend2440 3y ago
  Everyone's a skeptic these days. I'm pretty confident that people will find ways to make fun and interesting games using them, just like they have with every other computer technology over the last 40 years.
  - digging 3y ago
    > Everyone's a skeptic these days. You'd be surprised at how untrue that is, unfortunately. > I'm pretty confident that people will find ways to make fun and interesting games using them I agree - but also, that's a different phenomenon than simply inserting AI naturalistic characters and expecting them to be fun to interact with.
    - csallen 3y ago
      I mean, you're imagining unfun things, and then declaring them unfun, rather than imagining fun things. Of course unfun implementations would be unfun. But what the gp was clearly intending to suggest was fun implementations of more advanced NPC AI. And your responses are either ignoring that intention, or implying that it's unlikely to occur, both of which seem like being a downer and a skeptic just for the sake of being a skeptic.
      - BoorishBears 3y ago
        I can't tell if this is satire, but one of the "rules that are always true, until they aren't" in game design is that realism isn't fun (https://www.gamesradar.com/gabe-newell-says-games-dont-need-to-be-realistic-i-have-never-thought-to-myself-that-realism-is-fun/ https://www.gamesradar.com/gabe-newell-says-games-dont-need-...) Games bend over backwards in a million ways not to be realistic even when they seem realistic: from silently helping your odds, to intentionally breaking physics (see: coyote running in platformers), to helping your movement align with enemies. Even the most realistic games with human locomotion almost all rely unrealistic ankle-breaking acceleration changes for your character because you'd feel like you were piloting a bowl of soup otherwise. The reason we don't have full agentic NPCs right now isn't a technical limitation: it just wouldn't be fun. Usually you're the hero going against impossible odds with NPCs, in the real world you'd just die. Games like GTA constantly have NPCs saying outlandish but comical quips at a rate that far surpasses real life. Hard coded NPC behaviors in games often become the defining features of those games - There's nothing wrong with realizing that outside of very narrow context like simulator physics, people generally don't seek out realism in our entertainment. People want a certain degree of escapism that relies on breaking the rules a little, or in the case of NPCs a lot.
- andai 3y ago
  Gabe Newell touches on this exact subject: https://youtu.be/MGpFEv1-mAo https://youtu.be/MGpFEv1-mAo That being said, I've noticed that realism in games has a function beyond gameplay: it makes the game cooler. For example in Rainworld, the enemies keep doing their own thing even when you aren't around. This has some gameplay value (makes the game less predictable), but I think the main value is that people talk about it and think it's interesting. So it changes people's perception of the game world in a positive way.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
    If I remember correctly, in Rainworld this extremely interesting and cool property ("The world keeps turning when you're gone") was wildly misunderstood and lambasted by games critics. E.g. I think it was a Rock Paper Shotgun reviewer who threw the controller because, he thought, enemies would respawn randomly after he died. Which they didn't: they just kept living their virtual lives and wandering about while _he_ was respawning. In game forums players were also very frustrated with this because they had learn to expect set patrol patterns that they could memorise for the win. A bit of a failure of human generalisation abilities that, if you ask me. Another game that has this property (and that has somehow escaped the befuddled reviewers' ire) is Don't Starve. e.g. I once got chased by the Deerclops and ran through a Beefalo herd. After a while I realised the Deerclops wasn't hunting me anymore. Next day I went back to the Beefalo herd and there was a huge amount of meat and Beefalo wool, and a Deerclops eye, lying around. After playing games like that, I play e.g. Hollow Knight, or Zero Dawn, where every enemy you kill comes back the next time you revisit the area and it feels so fake.
- helloplanets 3y ago
  That sounds like a game that'd be an instant buy for streamers, though. All the weird, annoying, unexpected interactions? Possible comedy gold in the hands of the right person.
ca_tech 3y ago
There is a delicate balance though. The draw of the RPG is that you play a character who usually has an outsized impact on the world in comparison to most everyone else. If we expect the NPCs to operate as independent entities, how do we manage their ambition so that they don't individually, or in aggregate, impact the world more than you? Without that, your character becomes another cog in the machine; it's their world and you are simply living in it... Which I could see having a certain appeal and may be just another genre.
- rebuilder 3y ago
  Sandbox games are pretty big. Not my thing at all, but I’m sure there’d be a big market for believable open-world RPGs for example. They’d probably be more simulators than narrative-driven games.
- russfink 3y ago
  Maybe give them a “Robocop Directive 4 [HIDDEN]” that prevents significant actions…?
- sfjailbird 3y ago
  That sounds really cool, as a genre, actually. You would have to figure out what given NPCs actually want, and how you may be able to use that, to make them do what you want. And not based on some lame script, but complex world and character models. I'm sold!
  - Tossrock 3y ago
    At a certain point, you're just reinventing real life with worse graphics.
    - Jensson 3y ago
      Real life where you are the chosen one with super powers.
    - silveraxe93 3y ago
      Real life with worse graphics + - Ability to reload when you fail - You can choose your gender - Actually, be anything. A dwarf, elf, dog, tall, short, muscled, etc... - Novel physics (magic) - Sooooo much more
summerlight 3y ago
The problem here with highly capable agents is that it's not predictable and controllable in the point of designer's view. That might work for certain types of games, but many cases designers want to have a certain degree of control on their games.
- Legend2440 3y ago
  Then we'll make new kinds of games where the unpredictability of the NPCs is a core mechanic. Seriously, have you no imagination? Why sit around coming up with reasons it won't work instead of ways to make it fun?
  - TillE 3y ago
    Nobody actually wants to read LLM-generated soup. That's just a waste of everyone's time. If you're making a highly interactive, dynamic game, you don't even need detailed language for NPC interaction. You may as well use simple templates or even symbols.
  - Jensson 3y ago
    Figuring out what wont work is how you figure out what do work. All his points are good, they are things you would have to work around in some way. > Then we'll make new kinds of games where the unpredictability of the NPCs is a core mechanic. This is impossible, you need the NPC to be predictable on some level to make a fun game. Even unpredictable NPC needs to have a predictable personality on some level, total randomness isn't fun. Like, imagine a terrain generator that just randomizes terrain on each tile, that wont be fun at all, that is what a basic random personality would be like. Think of a human opponent, they are very predictable, just looking at a human player and what he does and I can predict what he will do in the future. Not perfectly, but players aren't that random. To make an AI that feels good it has to be very predictable. The main problem with "smart" bots is that they have so far always been way less predictable than humans, they get a strange edge cases and bugs where they start to act very dumb and strangely, that feels like a bug to the player and isn't fun. Or their smartness makes them do the same thing every time making them even more predictable than basic scripting, either way they are worse than basic scripting. Getting over these issues is a really hard problem, LLMs hasn't helped solve that so far.
treprinum 3y ago
Game AI already had the problem of too tough opponents two decades ago. Nobody (OK, outside Rainbow Six players) is going to play a game where AI demolishes any player within (milli)seconds.
- ajcp 3y ago
  Skill or mastery is not what LLMs offer in-game AI though, it's creativity, originality, and agency. Players don't primarily prefer to play against other human players because they're an "easier" opponent, but rather because they're dynamic, creatively proactive and reactive, and endlessly original.
  - nox101 3y ago
    While I agree that some players like playing against other players, I can say at least for me, I've never preferred that ever in a video game. Real players can be mean, or over powered, or over skilled, or use cheats, etc... and they can be annoyingly competitive. On the other hand, I've loved co-op games. Maybe (it's a big maybe) I'd enjoy an AI driven NPC co-op character. It assumes they can get them good enough to be fun to play with, do what you want, etc. Player: "Let's go to the castle", NPC: "See you layer I'm going to the bar". You either follow the NPC or play without it.
    - ajcp 3y ago
      I think that's a play-style preference, and honestly one I share almost completely; I very much enjoy PvE over PvP experiences 9 times out of 10. But again, that's where LLMs can thrive! Currently if I want to play anything co-operatively I have to either convince my partner or friends to pick up the game and care about it, or hope that the existing community of players is such that I'm not spending what can be a very uncomfortable time trying to relate to kids/teens or toxic adults. If all the NPCs were driven by LLMs whereby I could modulate their play-style, personality, drive/ambition I could be looking at genuinely stimulating, creative, and original "co-op" experiences from bots.
snejj5 3y ago
Checkout Rain World
dartharva 3y ago
This would be a rather expensive way to do that, I reckon you'd be better off actually expanding NPC behaviour the old-fashioned way.
weregiraffe 3y ago
Dwarf Fortress has it without any AI.

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

Have you played Dwarf Fortress?

digging 3y ago

I'm suspicious of whether that will actually make games more fun or interesting. For example, the more realistic human character animations get, the deeper we seem to fall into the uncanny valley. The fact is that humans themselves naturally move in ways that look weird when put on a stage, so mocap tends to look sillier the better it is. Which is why we have theater, where movements are exaggerated. Anyway, with AI characters, I expect it will actually be more frustrating and boring than not if they have realistic lives and schedules. All the littler irritations that we deal with and accept form real people just become friction in a game. Games, as movies and books and shows and plays and illustrations, don't need to be more realistic to be better. Media is caricatures of real life, with important information intentionally presented to give us a good experience. Taking inspiration from real life can give us better mechanics but blindly mimicking real life will give us shitty games.

timlod 3y ago
Well, weird movements in games should be a thing of the past in the near future, as we can begin to extract motion capture data from videos of normal people acting normally. I think it depends on the type of game you have, but I wouldn't underestimate this type of technology for say, open world games where it might make the game more immersive due to convincing realism.
- digging 3y ago
  > Well, weird movements in games should be a thing of the past in the near future, as we can begin to extract motion capture data from videos of normal people acting normally. I think you misread my posts. We don't have awkward animations because our mocap isn't good enough, we have awkward animations because typical human motion looks awkward - our brains just mostly ignore that. People are awkward; we don't actually want characters in games/movies/etc to be like real people. Very few movies, for example, would be well served by conversations frequently and for non-plot-related reasons being interrupted by loud noises, having people talk over each other and nonverbally try to figure out who gets to speak, having characters ask "What?" and then begin to reply without waiting for the answer because their brain caught up half a second later, etc.
  - timlod 3y ago
    I see, I did misread it! But I don’t think I can agree with what you meant then - why would our brain mostly ignore it in real life but not in video games? Where is the transition from something feeling real (in an immersive way) to us not liking it because it feels awkward, and why does it happen? I’m imagining a “perfect simulation” game which is like real life in ways that matter/don’t get in your way in terms of gameplay - I think everyone would be awed (of course this can be argued though). What would need to degrade in terms of realism for it to seem awkward/not be immersive anymore? I agree with the movie example, but in a game you don’t have to watch the mundane - it’s just background “noise” to make the world believable.
ryandrake 3y ago
> Anyway, with AI characters, I expect it will actually be more frustrating and boring than not if they have realistic lives and schedules. All the littler irritations that we deal with and accept form real people just become friction in a game. I remember Ultima V in the 80s had this. NPCs had their own daily routine and went here and there throughout the day. A couple of side quests relied on this mechanic—you had to learn their schedule and catch them somewhere at some time.
- hbn 3y ago
  Majora's Mask did something like that too. The game was centered around a 3 day cycle you had to do things in because at the end the moon would crash into the world and everyone dies. So you'd get stuff done, then time travel back to the beginning of the cycle repeatedly. NPCs all did the same things in those 3 days, so you could help people out with their sidequests in each cycle, like in Groundhog Day.
- staticman2 3y ago
  Shenmue and Deadly Premonition also do the NPC's with schedules thing... and are considered cult classics at best. Waiting around for an NPC just isn't fun.
Legend2440 3y ago
Everyone's a skeptic these days. I'm pretty confident that people will find ways to make fun and interesting games using them, just like they have with every other computer technology over the last 40 years.
- digging 3y ago
  > Everyone's a skeptic these days. You'd be surprised at how untrue that is, unfortunately. > I'm pretty confident that people will find ways to make fun and interesting games using them I agree - but also, that's a different phenomenon than simply inserting AI naturalistic characters and expecting them to be fun to interact with.
  - csallen 3y ago
    I mean, you're imagining unfun things, and then declaring them unfun, rather than imagining fun things. Of course unfun implementations would be unfun. But what the gp was clearly intending to suggest was fun implementations of more advanced NPC AI. And your responses are either ignoring that intention, or implying that it's unlikely to occur, both of which seem like being a downer and a skeptic just for the sake of being a skeptic.
    - BoorishBears 3y ago
      I can't tell if this is satire, but one of the "rules that are always true, until they aren't" in game design is that realism isn't fun (https://www.gamesradar.com/gabe-newell-says-games-dont-need-to-be-realistic-i-have-never-thought-to-myself-that-realism-is-fun/ https://www.gamesradar.com/gabe-newell-says-games-dont-need-...) Games bend over backwards in a million ways not to be realistic even when they seem realistic: from silently helping your odds, to intentionally breaking physics (see: coyote running in platformers), to helping your movement align with enemies. Even the most realistic games with human locomotion almost all rely unrealistic ankle-breaking acceleration changes for your character because you'd feel like you were piloting a bowl of soup otherwise. The reason we don't have full agentic NPCs right now isn't a technical limitation: it just wouldn't be fun. Usually you're the hero going against impossible odds with NPCs, in the real world you'd just die. Games like GTA constantly have NPCs saying outlandish but comical quips at a rate that far surpasses real life. Hard coded NPC behaviors in games often become the defining features of those games - There's nothing wrong with realizing that outside of very narrow context like simulator physics, people generally don't seek out realism in our entertainment. People want a certain degree of escapism that relies on breaking the rules a little, or in the case of NPCs a lot.
andai 3y ago
Gabe Newell touches on this exact subject: https://youtu.be/MGpFEv1-mAo https://youtu.be/MGpFEv1-mAo That being said, I've noticed that realism in games has a function beyond gameplay: it makes the game cooler. For example in Rainworld, the enemies keep doing their own thing even when you aren't around. This has some gameplay value (makes the game less predictable), but I think the main value is that people talk about it and think it's interesting. So it changes people's perception of the game world in a positive way.
- YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
  If I remember correctly, in Rainworld this extremely interesting and cool property ("The world keeps turning when you're gone") was wildly misunderstood and lambasted by games critics. E.g. I think it was a Rock Paper Shotgun reviewer who threw the controller because, he thought, enemies would respawn randomly after he died. Which they didn't: they just kept living their virtual lives and wandering about while _he_ was respawning. In game forums players were also very frustrated with this because they had learn to expect set patrol patterns that they could memorise for the win. A bit of a failure of human generalisation abilities that, if you ask me. Another game that has this property (and that has somehow escaped the befuddled reviewers' ire) is Don't Starve. e.g. I once got chased by the Deerclops and ran through a Beefalo herd. After a while I realised the Deerclops wasn't hunting me anymore. Next day I went back to the Beefalo herd and there was a huge amount of meat and Beefalo wool, and a Deerclops eye, lying around. After playing games like that, I play e.g. Hollow Knight, or Zero Dawn, where every enemy you kill comes back the next time you revisit the area and it feels so fake.
helloplanets 3y ago
That sounds like a game that'd be an instant buy for streamers, though. All the weird, annoying, unexpected interactions? Possible comedy gold in the hands of the right person.

ca_tech 3y ago

There is a delicate balance though. The draw of the RPG is that you play a character who usually has an outsized impact on the world in comparison to most everyone else. If we expect the NPCs to operate as independent entities, how do we manage their ambition so that they don't individually, or in aggregate, impact the world more than you? Without that, your character becomes another cog in the machine; it's their world and you are simply living in it... Which I could see having a certain appeal and may be just another genre.

rebuilder 3y ago
Sandbox games are pretty big. Not my thing at all, but I’m sure there’d be a big market for believable open-world RPGs for example. They’d probably be more simulators than narrative-driven games.
russfink 3y ago
Maybe give them a “Robocop Directive 4 [HIDDEN]” that prevents significant actions…?
sfjailbird 3y ago
That sounds really cool, as a genre, actually. You would have to figure out what given NPCs actually want, and how you may be able to use that, to make them do what you want. And not based on some lame script, but complex world and character models. I'm sold!
- Tossrock 3y ago
  At a certain point, you're just reinventing real life with worse graphics.
  - Jensson 3y ago
    Real life where you are the chosen one with super powers.
  - silveraxe93 3y ago
    Real life with worse graphics + - Ability to reload when you fail - You can choose your gender - Actually, be anything. A dwarf, elf, dog, tall, short, muscled, etc... - Novel physics (magic) - Sooooo much more

summerlight 3y ago

The problem here with highly capable agents is that it's not predictable and controllable in the point of designer's view. That might work for certain types of games, but many cases designers want to have a certain degree of control on their games.

Legend2440 3y ago
Then we'll make new kinds of games where the unpredictability of the NPCs is a core mechanic. Seriously, have you no imagination? Why sit around coming up with reasons it won't work instead of ways to make it fun?
- TillE 3y ago
  Nobody actually wants to read LLM-generated soup. That's just a waste of everyone's time. If you're making a highly interactive, dynamic game, you don't even need detailed language for NPC interaction. You may as well use simple templates or even symbols.
- Jensson 3y ago
  Figuring out what wont work is how you figure out what do work. All his points are good, they are things you would have to work around in some way. > Then we'll make new kinds of games where the unpredictability of the NPCs is a core mechanic. This is impossible, you need the NPC to be predictable on some level to make a fun game. Even unpredictable NPC needs to have a predictable personality on some level, total randomness isn't fun. Like, imagine a terrain generator that just randomizes terrain on each tile, that wont be fun at all, that is what a basic random personality would be like. Think of a human opponent, they are very predictable, just looking at a human player and what he does and I can predict what he will do in the future. Not perfectly, but players aren't that random. To make an AI that feels good it has to be very predictable. The main problem with "smart" bots is that they have so far always been way less predictable than humans, they get a strange edge cases and bugs where they start to act very dumb and strangely, that feels like a bug to the player and isn't fun. Or their smartness makes them do the same thing every time making them even more predictable than basic scripting, either way they are worse than basic scripting. Getting over these issues is a really hard problem, LLMs hasn't helped solve that so far.

treprinum 3y ago

Game AI already had the problem of too tough opponents two decades ago. Nobody (OK, outside Rainbow Six players) is going to play a game where AI demolishes any player within (milli)seconds.

ajcp 3y ago
Skill or mastery is not what LLMs offer in-game AI though, it's creativity, originality, and agency. Players don't primarily prefer to play against other human players because they're an "easier" opponent, but rather because they're dynamic, creatively proactive and reactive, and endlessly original.
- nox101 3y ago
  While I agree that some players like playing against other players, I can say at least for me, I've never preferred that ever in a video game. Real players can be mean, or over powered, or over skilled, or use cheats, etc... and they can be annoyingly competitive. On the other hand, I've loved co-op games. Maybe (it's a big maybe) I'd enjoy an AI driven NPC co-op character. It assumes they can get them good enough to be fun to play with, do what you want, etc. Player: "Let's go to the castle", NPC: "See you layer I'm going to the bar". You either follow the NPC or play without it.
  - ajcp 3y ago
    I think that's a play-style preference, and honestly one I share almost completely; I very much enjoy PvE over PvP experiences 9 times out of 10. But again, that's where LLMs can thrive! Currently if I want to play anything co-operatively I have to either convince my partner or friends to pick up the game and care about it, or hope that the existing community of players is such that I'm not spending what can be a very uncomfortable time trying to relate to kids/teens or toxic adults. If all the NPCs were driven by LLMs whereby I could modulate their play-style, personality, drive/ambition I could be looking at genuinely stimulating, creative, and original "co-op" experiences from bots.

snejj5 3y ago

Checkout Rain World

dartharva 3y ago

This would be a rather expensive way to do that, I reckon you'd be better off actually expanding NPC behaviour the old-fashioned way.

weregiraffe 3y ago

Dwarf Fortress has it without any AI.