Like everything, there will be those who convince themselves that its use in gaming is not so bad in order to cope. After all, it won't be pleasant for those who outright reject AI and stick to their guns by living without it. But don't kid yourself. AI is capable of doing a lot of good (curing disease, solving physics questions that better our understanding of the universe etc.), but when it comes to art? When it comes to songs and books and games and paintings and photographs, or regular things like building cars and factory work? No. Just no. Not if you care about people. Because it's going to lay waste to jobs. And if it's going to lay waste to jobs, it's going to lay waste to people and families and the children that rely on those jobs to live. And, imo, that is unacceptable.

Yeah I think online sandbox titles are probably the area where agentic AI can have the most impact. I watch a YouTuber who has experimented a lot with building an agentic framework in Minecraft, as an example. 

I've also experimented with it myself with LLM's in Local Exchange Trading System simulations I have been building in my personal time, where the AI "agents" are used to make trade decisions and perform simulated labor in a tick-based system (similar to how MMO's work.) They do an alright job, but it's very hard to get emergent behavior without hard-coding heuristics that set guard rails. I've mostly been using small-ish LocalLLMs for it though, since testing with an API costs like $200 every time I've tried it. 

That's a problem with the curated experience. The illusion of choice is an illusion because there are only a very limited set of outcomes supported in the game. The NPC is there to steer you in the right direction or rather the direction that follows the quest as written.

Once you start with dynamic answers, how are you going to back these up? It's the same as shouting at the TV when the plot does 'stupid' things for dramatic effect. Not sure which Fallout game it was but there was one where you could simply obey the NPC telling you not to go and complete the game that way in the first 10 minutes. Congratulations, your adventure never started.

RPGs only work because of the illusion of choice rather than actual choices. Otherwise you end up with clumsily AI scripted quests to fit your responses.


But sure, NPCs could respond to a lot more. They used to when the convention was still to type your questions out, before all that was replaced with choosing a reply. Do people want to actually talk to NPCs now? Do people actually want to search through a town full of NPCs asking around to finally find the one with relevant information instead of heading to the one with the exclamation mark over their head?

A lot of side quests and tasks already feel like AI generated busy work. Do we want more of that?

In the end you're still following a pre-determined story path. Choose your own story books never became popular nor TV show experiments where you choose what direction to take. Why would it work with AI?

In the end games are also about sharing / talking about the experience. That only works when the experience is mostly the same for everyone. How did you tackle that quest becomes what are you talking about, that never happened in my game. There is already much controversy over difficulty levels changing the experience...


Anyway, time will tell. Either these new choose your own path, talk with everyone indie games become popular or remain a niche. Personally I'm already exhausted from all the talk and daily information overload by the end of the day. Games are an escape from that, hence I gravitate to simple repetitive games like puzzling, racing, rhythm games. I don't want a life simulator turning my game into a support chat marathon.

And I believe most gamers are of that mindset, repetitive tasks are the most popular in games after all. From replaying older games to hanging out online in live service games.

Sorry, I think this is being overcomplicated.

I just mean that, alongside the usual preset dialogue choices like this:

There could be an additional free-text option where you can say whatever you want to the NPC. For example, you could tell them to put their dick in a block of cheese, and the NPC would generate a response that fits their personality and tone. Maybe they’d even remember it in a later interaction.

That’s all I’m talking about. Whether that’s done with AI or some other system, who knows, I'm indifferent to the means - but the end result could make the single line response you get back from an NPC a bit more interesting, while making your silent protagonist self insert character, a bit more of a proper personal self insert.

VG RPGs are like that because they don't have GMs to run the world and are too reliant on developers "story", while in properly constructed RPG, to paraphrase wise man., "story is something that happens when your players don't engage with your world". So properly done RPG should have world and narrative tensions, and players that act in it.

Breaking the 4th wall, sure why not. Modern games lack humor so this could help bring that back :)

True, the best times in open world games are when following your own path, creating your own story. TotK does it pretty well at the cost of breaking the main quest's narrative tension.  

I don't know if narrative tension is possible with true freedom. It's not even possible now since any urgency is either inconsequential or leads to failure or missing things. I enjoyed WoA's detective Death in the family' mission a lot, but failed the first time since things move on on their own. So replay, but then all the tension is gone. How do you make a good DM making it feel like you're not in the Truman show, ie everything only happens because you're there.

Oblivion experimented with NPCs doing their own thing. It was interesting and also annoying. Where the heck is that guy I need. Which also happens in TotK, trying to find the NPC or wait for timed events. But if NPCs would be able to answer questions, like where is the baker and give some useful directions it could work a lot better.

Yeah, NPCs with their own schedules in RPGs have been a thing ever since Ultima V, but also it's very annoying when you can't ask around to actually find them...that's where this new crop of "smart" NPCs can really augment design and gameplay.

As for narrative tensions (AKA PbtA's Fronts, though I prefer just tensions), when RPG setting is built with idea of them serving as powder kegs that player's action eventually ignite (with some of them moving on their own and act/depend on other tensions, and some that are more influenced by direct player actions) you have setting that's truly open-ended with actual choices, instead of illusion of choices. It's then GM's job to adjudicate how those actions influence world and vice versa. Putting this in VG RPG is not an easy task, and this is another area where trained ML model will be, IMO, able to change quite a bit how VG RPGs are designed.

Ok I don't know what kind of experience you have, but since when software development is just coding? The way more important thing is to make things fixable for me. Does Claude Code make you understand the code more or less? For me coding is being less important, making things scalable and secure is what brings money IMO.

Claude makes significantly more readable code than humans, it even comes with pre-generated docstring and comments, which developers HATE to write 

The rest of your post is attacking a strawman. I talked specifically about coding, and then you come with architecture, security and system design

AI can be used to help with those as well, but even if you put an agent on meetings to analyize technical discussions it can't plan, model and design a software by itself. That's why agents still need specifications, documents and human supervision 

For coding itself though? I'm sorry but Gen AI is already ahead of humans