This is awesome. LLM-powered NPCs is one thing I'm most excited about in the future of gaming. Characters repeating the same scripted dialog over and over again is one of the biggest immersion breakers.
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There could probably be cool uses but I don't think it will be a pure "upgrade" as the repeating dialog is kind of a feature honestly.
We'll have to see how it pans out xD
Current video games are designed around streamlining content. As a player, your job is to extract all content from an area before going to the next. That's why most areas are designed as linear corridors so that there is a straightforward progression, and most NPCs interactions are meant to offer something meaningful so as to not waste the player's time.
But imagine if interaction with NPCs wasn't just a content delivery mechanism, but instead could sometimes be rewarding, sometimes useless, dynamically adjusted in how you interact with the world in non-predictable ways.
The player would just waste their time in their usual approach of canvasing each new area, which would become unsustainable. There would be no reliable way of ensuring you've extracted all the content. All he/she could do is roam around more naturally, hoping the glimpses they catch are engaging and interesting enough.
Maybe a new player skill would be to be able to identify the genuine threads of exciting content, be it designed or emergent, within the noise of an AI-generated world.
Realistically though, how do you build an exciting player experience with this framework? A starting point might be to approach it as something more akin to LARP or improvisation theater, you'd give each NPC and player a role they need to fulfill. Whether players actually enjoy this is another thing entirely.
Wrong right from the outset. Some games are designed around content and "extraction". Many are not.
While I think the parent post leaves a lot of open ended questions, I think they are spot on about the tightness of design in games.
In many open world RPGs, or something like GTA, you cannot open every door in a city. In street fighter you can't take a break to talk to your opponent. In art games like Journey you cannot deviate from the path.
Games are a limited form of entertainment due to technical and resource restrictions, and they always will be. Even something as open ended and basic as minecraft has to have limits to the design, you wouldn't want the player to be able to collect every blade of grass off of a block just because you could add that. You have to find the balance between engaging elements and world building.
Having a LLM backed farmer in an RPG that could go into detail on how their crops didn't grow as well last season because it didn't rain as much seems good on paper for world building. But it is just going to devalue the human curated content around it as the player has to find what does and does not advance their goals in the limited time they have to play. And if you have some reward for talking to random NPCs players will just spam the next button until it's over to optimize their fun. All games have to hold back from adding more so that the important parts stand out.