“Have you ever dreamed of having a real conversation with an NPC in a video game?”, asks Ubi’s official post about it. And what all people who make this fail to understand that the answer most normal people give if they think about it is “Erm, probably no, actually?”
So, you have to type random questions and the AI gives random answers like any other chatbots?
That seems incredibly pointless because the NPC will just make up responses that may or not be accurate in the game world.
Like, ask it how to complete a mission or for advice, and it might give random shit that doesn’t work in the game.
A limited amount of pre written interactions would at least all be relevant to the game.
It seems like they just want to avoid paying writers to fill their empty open world games.
Edit:
No it’s worse… You have to use a mic and speak out loud to the NPC…
Like, imagine how shit it is trying to talk to an automated AI customer service phone line.
That’s what Ubi wants to put in games.
Like, imagine how shit it is trying to talk to an automated AI customer service phone line.
“I need some help with this quest, I’m stuck at the part with the Old Mayor’s House.”
“Have you tried entering the Old Mayor’s House?”
“Yeah. That was like four objectives ago.”
“I see. To enter the Old Mayor’s House, you may be able to use the front door.”
“Yes…I’ve already gotten in there, found the mirror, solved the riddle in the parlour, and found the hidden switch by the painting. But there’s nothing in the secret room.”
“I understand how that could be frustrating. Perhaps you should speak with Gary the Farmhand.”
“You are Gary the Farmhand.”
“Try the steps in this wiki which should fix the issue. https://www.ubiverse.com/kb/entering-old-mayore-house.htm”
“Fuck you’re dumb.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, <playername>. I’m only here to Welcome to the Farm, Gary the Farmhand. I’m <playername>. You should see the Old Mayor! I hear he’s looking for a strong <playerrace> from !ERROR in row 28”
You forgot about 20
I’m sorry, can you repeat that?
Before eventually resorting to button prompts
It’s lazy “development” in the interest of saving time and therefore cost of development for Ubisoft.
That’s all there is to it. They probably aren’t even trying to train it in the context of the game world, just take existing models and run a few phrases to show that it “works”.
This is kind of interesting as a concept. A well-trained and well-prompted bot that could help teach in virtual worlds like Second Life or Opensim, for instance, would be really cool. But at the current state of the tech, unless it’s just an exercise in improv acting, it doesn’t seem ready to help tell stories. Can you imagine if the Consort had a nervous breakdown in Mass Effect?
From the other comments on here I guess this is an unpopular opinion, but this is exactly the type of thing I want added to games like Skyrim.
Even done poorly this will still be better than the millionth time that generic guard tells you he took an arrow to the knee.
And done well this absolutely has potential for great storytelling and character.
It’s not good enough yet, of course, but it has potential.
its bad if its freeform ai driven. there just needs to be integration into the games save flags (aware of what happened so far in the game) as well as some restrictions on what they can say which will make it fine. but outright making an ai model and just slapping it in a game is a bad way to go about it.
I think that would actually be really cool. You’re walking through Whiterun and you hear some NPC saying “Did you hear, some guy just ate the soul of that dragon that attacked us.” “What? That’s ridiculous. Where are you hearing these dumb rumours?” “No, really, he killed the dragon then just sucked its soul right out.” etc. etc. An LLM could at least make a conversation like that sound semi-plausible, and it could go on as long as you are listening. Then as the game goes on the rumours just get more and more wild. “I heard he can transform himself into a dragon and breathe fire.” “Yeah, well I heard that he’s the god of all the dragons sent to Tamriel to help them kill us all.” Not that they couldn’t have added that kind of thing with voice actors, but it would just be ‘arrow to the knee’ repetitive and get stale really fast.
Agreed. The random NPCs shouldn’t just know everything about anything, but it would be amazing if I could ask more detailed questions about what they do know, like for example, asking for directions to something.
Ah, so it’s going to be like those old text-based adventure games, but instead of typing “Talk Bartender Cave… Talk Bartender Dungeon… Talk Bartender Goblin Pit… Talk Bartender Goblinpit”, I will now to guess the correct thing to actually SAY to gather the relevant bits of info from the sea of generic LLM replies.
Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
They can’t, but they still shouldn’t
Hahaha that’s the one
So… this is just the Mantella mod for Skyrim VR then?
