I have been playing with this. Having tiny models provide more contextual information when an NPC speaks is cool but the "small enough" models tend to go off the rails.
It's fun if you have a handful of people playing, but it would quickly go towards negative reviews if you tried to sell it.
I don't think an LLM should ever be having a two-way conversation with the player. It would be more suited to 2 npcs having conversations amongst themselves. All dialogue delivered to the player should be human written.
At most it should be mildly tweaking existing dialogue, e.g updating a line to reflect game events. But as soon as you present a prompt window to the player the entire illusion that you are in a game world instantly dies.
> I don't think an LLM should ever be having a two-way conversation with the player. It would be more suited to 2 npcs having conversations amongst themselves. All dialogue delivered to the player should be human written.
I don't agree. All -important- dialogue yes. Background NPC chatter? Even when studios spend a lot of effort crafting multiple lines, pretty soon you have seen them all. They also don't change based on player actions.
Most dialogue in games is crap. I would much rather have an LLM writing the dialogue so that it can include references to player choices over what currently exists.
i think it can work for procedurally generated situations, and the llm is acting more like a translator between data model and player rather than being a data storage layer.
thats close to tweaking existing dialog, but with a bit more freedom.
you still dont have to give the player arbitrary response
You absolutely cannot let the player get any whiff of AI slop so the integration needs to be extremely delicate. Watching a film and noticing a person has 6 fingers in a scene would instantly kill any engagement someone would have with it. For it to remain as art it must always be fundamentally about human-human communication, I want to have a conversation with the game developers through the game, not with a LLM. If developer intent ever becomes muddled the game has failed.
Nothing great was ever built by someone who was sweating the reviews. Fuck 'em, do what feels right to you.