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HoloDust on 29 March 2024
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JEMC said:
HoloDust said:

I thing the most disruptive thing within next few years in how games are made (especially RPGs) will be implementation of non-scripted AI NPCs, who are powered by motivations and goals, and systemic based worlds. Once you get that into games, pretty much whole game design paradigm will change drastically. So all this coding to make "narrative LEGO" and "n+1" will be very outdated very soon (and this is the reason why I think next Elder Scrolls is nowhere near being complete, since I'm certain they want something like that in that game).

We've been hearing devs talking about the AI of their NPCs for years, and now they have the tools for it. But it will still ask for a lot of work from the devs, giving them a personality and a story and a whole lot more, and because of that I don't expect a lot of games to really shine in that aspect. My guess is that most will do the bare minimum and call it a day.

Still, those narrative LEGOs and n+1 will have a place, as the devs will have to create the stories and boundaries for the player and the NPCs. AI will help with that, hopefully, but it won't replace them.

Oh, I don't know - we already have games that are letting NPCs do whatever they want (according to their motivations) and that reflects in gameworld. Dwarf Fortress being prime example. City 20, upcoming survival RPG being another. So if you figure out how to make plot triggers, let the systemic world just exist, throw player into it and let them achieve goals in any way they want, while interacting with that systemic world and AI NPCs, it would be quite different than any notion of classic game design so far. And eventually add an AI Game Master, and you have radically different experiences than what we're used to in video games.

Not saying classically designed games won't still be viable path to take, but with such NPCs, all of the sudden you have much different view toward designing everything. Pretty similar to what I once said in some BotW discussion - if you make a game where axe can chop wood (and that means ALL wood), and make all doors wooden, then your view on the game design needs to be quite different than in game where axe can chop only some wood and all doors are artificially impervious to it.