Technology

I'm not sure I really buy the argument that this could be better for several reasons.

1. The implicit guardrails these companies are going to add which will complicate things.

2. Numerous game-breaking states because you're risking a more traditional Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master problem where your party somehow has failed to ask an NPC the right kind of questions or even consider that they might have information relevant to the campaign. How do you get this information across if the player isn't somehow prompted to attempt it?

3. Baldur's Gate 3 only came out about 4 months before this article. It exists as a counterpoint to the idea that pre-scripted dialogue can reduce replayability. Only if you approach it like Bethesda and you refuse to block your players off from content. I don't think Todd Howard realizes how that philosophy hurts replayability because you can always complete every questline every playthrough. While in a game like BG3, large amounts of the game are locked off based on your character, class, party and choices you make. Certain things you have to replay the whole game to access. There's mountains of replayability in their world of pre-scripted dialogue. It's rather no other company has been willing to put the kind of time, money, effort, and production quality that something like BG3 demands.

I think this AI stuff is a cheap cop-out that uses way too much energy for a weak result. Instead of making better games the system spec requirements will either become insane or all games will be delivered via streaming platforms. They've maxed out graphical fidelity but still need excuses to use "better" hardware. Better game design achieves the same result without the vendor lock-in and absurd hardware/power demands.

I've used an LLM chat bot to play D&D with and it worked pretty well. At least for running the game and making shit up based on the campaign I wrote it to run. It wasn't really much different than playing with real people; not least of all because it wasn't perfect. It would make mistakes, just like a real person. It would misinterpret the rules, like a real person.

So I think this kind of "AI" could be used pretty well for games. However, from how these major companies have been using it, it won't. Because they're gonna try to get the entire fucking story written by it, and that's when it'll fuck up.

It's decent at making up new shit on the fly creating dynamics never really found in video games, but it isn't always necessarily congruent or logical. A game like Dwarf Fortress could benefit from it, but a game like The Last of Us would suffer from it.

I think that the technology just isn't there for most generated dialog.

What we're doing today is taking a training corpus and then directly, without higher-level processing, producing more text like it, given a prompt.

What limitations exist here?

• Written and spoken language are not the same, and a lot of training data is from written language. In English, written sentences are longer than spoken ones. People use some different words and grammatical structures. Try reading a play or transcribing what someone says, and it kind of drives the point home. That's not an unsolvable problem, but it's a good argument that gluing something like ChatGPT to a speech synthesizer is a long way from where you want to be.

• You need a training corpus similar to the way a given character would speak. Maybe if you want "a generic American", you're okay. And there's legitimate uses for that in games, certainly. But what if you want to have Celechir, high-elven guard in the kingdom of Arandie? How do you build up a list of things that Celechir would talk about? How much germane training data is there out there?

• There is no strong association between text and game world state, which is normally desirable. Let's say that I'm creating a character in Fallout 4. How am I going to get them to talk about the world around them? I can encode some world state and state about that character in a prompt, but that's sharply-bounded using existing mechanisms -- I can provide maybe a couple of hundred prompt terms, which is not a lot to try to describe the world and relevant characters and all that. I'd guess that any such generation mechanism is going to require some level of pre-processing as to world state that doesn't exist today.

I am all for using generative AI to do speech synth. I've been impressed with output there. We may not be quite to the point of good, emotive speech yet, but we're good-enough for a lot of uses, and it lets one do things that cannot be done with pre-recorded, static samples from a voice actor, like dynamically-generated text.

But for writing dialog via generative AI? I'm a lot more hesitant there in the near future, given what I've seen so far.

Now, I am sure that you can make video games in certain limited genres that do leverage what's there. But I think that it's far enough from a drop-in replacement for hand-written text that it's not a great option. Maybe you can make a so-so sexy chatbot or something like that that's isolated from a broader video game world. Maybe you can create characters that speak in fairly-constrained ways. But I don't think that we can just create NPCs on par with human-written-dialog characters via gluing ChatGPT to them and providing a handful of human-language directives about how the character should act, the way we could for a human writer, which I think is what some people are dreaming of. Further down the line, maybe, but I think that it's still a fair way from where we are in 2024.

Need me a cyberpunk detective game with real verbal interviews.

9 months old.