Nintendo announces the Switch 2 [video]

I've found more incredible improvements in AI than in consumer electronics these days. I'm still daily surprised at just how good ChatGPT is at understanding my pretty complex queries.

Maybe that will be the next big thing in games. Finally deliver on the promise of living, breathing worlds, instead of breaking the illusion when the character scripts start to repeat and you realize “your choices matter” means you can pick from one of three different endings.

I think this is it. Once a console can run an LLM you will see open world games with immersion that we’ve never seen before

Procedurally generated worlds are one thing but imagine exploring an endless world where you can talk to every NPC and never have the same conversation twice

It sounds like a good idea at first, but would people really care after the first few conversations? After all, the conversations are unlikely to be related to any of the gameplay, and even though you could drip feed worldbuilding to the player, you only have so much source material. After a while I suspect it would become obvious which things are part of the official world source material, and which things are being made up on the fly without any consistency from conversation to conversation.

That said, though, I can definitely see a use for making the world feel more alive. Watch_Dogs: Legion put a lot of effort into having tons of voiced NPCs with interesting conversations and phone calls, but you could go even further by having an LLM generate text to be read by an AI TTS system.

I’d expect some combination of large models, reinforcement learning and NPUs to substantially improve non player characters.

These days, AMD has low power SoCs that include an NPU, and Nvidia seems to have just remembered that the consumer market exists. I’m sure next gen (after this one) consoles will do something with that hardware.

Imagine that classic Star Trek scene where a crisis erupts, you’re in the captain’s chair, and you ask your bridge crew, “options?”

In a modern game, the crisis was scripted, and then you’ll get a scripted followup, or you’ll get a few scripted answers you can choose from, and half the challenge is figuring out which ones the game designers think are the good ones and which ones are supposed to kill you.

Now let’s imagine the crisis arose organically because you got yourself into a bad situation, and the options from your crew make sense in context, and maybe none of them will save you or maybe some will and you can’t just figure out which ones the game designers thought were good.

Basically, tabletop roleplaying with a good group and a good DM, but as a solo game with fancy graphics and all that.

I’d pay good money for that sort of thing, and it’s not something that can be built yet but which sufficiently good AI tech can enable (or maybe it’s now possible but only very recently).