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As I sit right here, watching Saber Interactive’s CEO have a standard one about how generative AI dialogue can completely enhance videogames, I am unable to assist however grit my tooth in the identical, enamel-grinding vogue I’ve ever since firms like Ubisoft began promising a future with AI-powered “neo-NPCs.”
If you’d consider the hype, this stuff are probably good on paper, proper? We stay in a improvement setting the place the ambitions of big-budget open world video games are far outstripping their price—would not it merely be marvellous should you might populate a world with infinite dialogue chains and storylines?
In follow, the result’s… fairly middling. While sure, among the isolated tech demos we’ve seen have been impressive, the actual implementation of those we’ve seen in videogames, such as the life sim Seed, or Inzoi, which tried to pilot “smart Zois”, fell flat.
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Even when they’re a source of entertainment, that fun is mostly found in the process of making them believe they’re pregnant—and listen, I love toys. Putting aside my general distaste for generative AI, I don’t think that every single videogame that comes out has to be a work of art. Toys are fine, you can smash action figures together and have a lovely time.
But that’s not been the pitch, has it? Convai, an AI NPC start-up, wants to avoid a world without games where background “characters are given one line and repeat that one line over and over again, maybe two lines at best.”
Ubisoft wants “fully personalised and immersive experiences”, where its neo-NPCs make games “more alive and richer,” whatever that means. Meaning Machine, a company that’s pioneering reactive battle banter, is pushing for narrative-based games which are entirely powered by the tech. The dream is, in a lot of places, to use AI to try and tell stories.
The problem is, this pipe dream fails at the conceptual level, because this just isn’t how good storytelling works. These people don’t get it. And if they do get it? They think you’re dumb. They think you’re dumb as bricks.
In defense of miscellany
The main lie to the idea is the implication that background details, specifically what NPCs in said background say, aren’t of any great importance. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
One of videogames’ biggest strengths is the ability to divorce themselves from pacing. Not entirely, mind—a singleplayer game with a linear narrative is still going to care about pacing a great deal. But an open-world game can take the time to establish, create, and put forward background details that would otherwise bog a story in any other medium down.
There are more obvious examples. Say, a town crier in a fantasy RPG telling you about some far-flung event you’ll likely be dealing with—but there are more subtle instances of this sort of thing working brilliantly. My favourite example by far are Cyberpunk 2077’s adverts, that are tailored to invoke the precise correct amount of company overstimulation and dread in you as you muddle round Night City.
In a recreation with a stand-out story, all of those lots of of little alternatives can be leveraged powerfully to attract you in—they will do extra than simply hand you details about the plot, they will create a way of scale or place. Combat barks can characterise an enemy faction, journal entries can flesh out a tradition, and so forth.
The notion that these qualities in a recreation’s overarching script are someway “less important” is simply fully backwards—they’re the spine on which the remainder of the story lies. And even once they’re not precisely award-winning, this background chatter nonetheless creates a recreation’s sense of character.
Imagine a world through which traces like “Do you get up to the cloud district very often? Oh what am I saying, of course you don’t ” or “I used to be an adventurer like you, but then I took an arrow to the knee” had been scraped out and changed with the flexibility to, like, make them suppose you are Abraham Lincoln reincarnated, or one thing.
Background chatter, fight barks, NPC dialogue, side-quests, all of it issues.”
Heck, the fact that you’re probably summoning to mind videogames with hilarious or immersion-breaking background natter proves my point, right? You’re already able to tell when it’s gone wrong.
Starfield’s setting feels bland and dull when compared to something like New Vegas not just because of its main yarn, but because in the latter, its locations and background babble are hand-crafted and designed to surprise you, and in the former, procedurally-generated planets lie next to grey and perfunctory cities with all the rough edges sanded off.
Even just being placed next to a bunch of crap that wasn’t hand-made causes Starfield to feel shallower as a result. Now imagine if all of those cities had AI-generated NPCs with disconnected, jilted, random stories to tell you—stories you couldn’t even have a shared laugh at with your mate when they were bad. Does that sound better?
In this sense, the idea that AI-generated NPCs are some miracle fix that will give smaller studios the ability to tell stories in bigger worlds just completely falls apart, because those worlds are only made to feel big and textured because of thousands of little scripts that are laboriously written out by hand.
At the risk of stating the obvious, you can’t just skip over that hard work and expect the same results! There’s far more creativity in all the smaller choices a team of writers makes than the broad, conceptual idea that started them off. Background chatter, combat barks, NPC dialogue, side-quests, it all matters.
They think you can’t tell the difference
The motive these bigwigs suppose they will get this crap previous you has rather a lot to do with the identical, broader, govt misunderstandings of what makes good artwork: People. It’s a sentiment that was echoed by id Software’s baffled Chris Hays, who has been watching Microsoft push statement after statement that the studio was still the same id Software, even after half of its staff were laid off.
Or take EA’s head honchos, who Dragon Age creator David Gaider said believed “you made an RPG and the nerds in the cave would always show up for an RPG, because it was an RPG.” It’s no coincidence that Gaider, ostensibly responsible for one of gaming’s best fantasy settings, was pre-emptively exhausted at the idea of AI-generated story back in 2023.
Nor is it a coincidence that Cyberpunk’s quest director was unimpressed by the technology, or Larian’s head writer, who called its output worse than their worst drafts. People who know what actually makes a story good aren’t cringing at generative AI because they’re luddites whose jobs are being threatened—if it was able to put something compelling together, they’d spot it.
They think it’s garbage because it’s garbage, and they don’t want to have a hand in feeding you garbage. It’s really that simple.
The biggest insult of suits peddling this crap is the idea that you just don’t care. That you don’t care if the music you’re listening to is crap, you don’t care if their games look hideous, and that you don’t care if a game’s story leaves you confused and hollow. They believe that you will merrily accept the substitute of a bunch of keys being jangled in front of your face over something that was carefully hand-crafted to make you feel something.
To those people, videogames are products. Hasbro thinks it can spit out another Baldur’s Gate just by throwing the same amount of money at a different studio, Amazon’s then-boss of games blithely said, in 2024, that videogames don’t have acting. This is the prevailing attitude—a row of artless suits who are trying to sell you a bridge. Don’t buy the damn bridge, I beg you. It won’t make your games better.
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