I replaced Animal Crossing's dialogue with a live LLM by hacking GameCube memory

It always felt both "a cheap shot" and "valid" to express dismay that characters in video games don't react when you do things like jump up and down on their table.

While it's impossible for game developers to write code to cover every situation, AI could make general reactions possible.

It's surprising that really simple things like this haven't been tried yet (AFAIK!). Like, even if it's just the dialogue, it can still go a long way.

Many games have tried for more "realistic" simulated NPCs, but usually it turns out they don't make the game any more fun, quite the opposite.

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is one of the closer attempts, NPCs will react to lots of things about you and behavior, like if you smell bad or stare at them for too long

The cost benefit is really poor, but I also wonder if it's just never been done well.

Old text adventures honestly did this heaps better than modern games do, but the reality is there was a more finite action space for them and it wasn't surprising when something wasn't catered for.

I was so surprised in BotW and TotK to see NPCs duck, huddle, gasp and otherwise react to odd shit you might be doing. Also in dialogue, do contextual things like talk about the weather and time.

I would love to see a Zelda game implement LLM dialogue for random inconsequential dialogue or relating dialogue to the game context.

Which games are these? I’d be interested in checking them out.

I’m only aware of experimentation in making more “difficult” NPC AI which was found less enjoyable for obvious reasons, so would be interested to see why similar but different attempts down another path also failed.