tech

For decades, the characters you talk to in video games could only repeat a fixed set of pre-written lines from a branching dialogue tree.

What technology now lets game characters hold open, unscripted conversations that change with whatever a player says?

Q: What technology now lets game characters hold open, unscripted conversations that change with whatever a player says?

Large language models. Large language models let non-player characters generate dialogue on the fly instead of reading fixed scripts, so they can respond to almost anything a player types or says. Studios began demoing such AI-driven NPCs by 2023-2025, hinting at games where no two conversations are alike.

Large language models ✓
Ray tracing
Procedural terrain generation

Large language models
Large language models let non-player characters generate dialogue on the fly instead of reading fixed scripts, so they can respond to almost anything a player types or says. Studios began demoing such AI-driven NPCs by 2023-2025, hinting at games where no two conversations are alike.

Large language models are the technology enabling this shift. Traditional game characters could only speak lines that a writer had prewritten and arranged into a branching tree of fixed choices, but a large language model can generate original, contextually appropriate dialogue on the fly in response to whatever a player actually says or types, meaning the character is no longer limited to a finite script and can respond to inputs the original writers never anticipated.

Ray tracing is a graphics technique for simulating realistic lighting and reflections, and procedural terrain generation is a method for algorithmically building game landscapes; neither has anything to do with how a character decides what to say.

Studios began publicly demonstrating these AI-driven non-player characters in the years around 2023 to 2025, hinting at a future where two players could have completely different, unscripted conversations with the very same character in the very same game.

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