Why haven’t we actually seen a serious video game yet where NPCs talk using LLMs?
Even as a very casual gamer, it’s crazy that three years have passed since GPT burst into our lives and we still haven’t gotten a single game that uses it for dialogue, even side conversations. The only game I found online is AI Dungeon, which is a dungeons and dragons game but I’m a girl without visual imagination so it’s not for me (story for another time).
True, it’s not that easy technically. But latency and cost of API calls are absolutely things we can already deal with. There’s already great text-to-speech. So what’s stopping us?
The answer is quite simple: the studios are scared. That NPCs will say something the character shouldn’t say yet, that they’ll answer questions about the weather in Tokyo, that they’ll take the conversation in a weird direction, that they’ll hurt the gaming experience.
But more than that - that NPCs will say something offensive or create PR disasters, and there’s no shortage of those in the gaming industry. A few months ago, Fortnite added a Darth Vader character powered by Gemini with Eleven Labs for audio, and they even used the voice of the original actor (James Earl Jones) who died a year ago. You can both talk to him and actually add him to missions. Awesome!
Of course, despite all the safety layers, within an hour or so players managed to get him to curse and say homophobic things. The company immediately put in some patches but the feature was crowned a disaster.
And adding insult to injury - even though the actor signed a contract before he died allowing his voice to be used in the future with AI for the franchise, the actors and voice actors union filed a lawsuit for unfair labor practice, out of fear of replacing human actors with AI.
So is it even worth it for major studios to take these risks, given that it’s just a side conversation with a shopkeeper selling potions?
It feels like a perfect metaphor for the real use of language models by companies. It’s almost a given to use them for tons of business use cases, and many employees use them as aids for daily work (in the gaming industry too, of course), but for anything that requires real trust - today’s controls simply aren’t good enough yet.
And it’s a shame - it’s hard not to get excited thinking about the unlimited possibilities of a game that adapts itself, characters you can really interact with, a story that develops according to our choices. An actually open world.
Rumors say that GTA 6 will be the first major game to do this, but for now we’ll keep waiting - maybe for indie studios that can, like startups, afford to take more risks.
In the next post: about the time I waited at a traffic light in GTA 5 (told you, not a very impressive gamer)