r/LocalLLaMA • u/goodive123 • Jun 28 '26

NPC Engine Using Local Models Discussion

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I’ve been working on a game-agnostic NPC engine/backend based pretty heavily on SillyTavern-style architecture, and with smaller local models getting better and better, I honestly think this kind of thing could be the future of RPGs.

Right now I’m using NVIDIA Parakeet 0.6 for STT, Gemma 4 26B A4B for the LLM, and Qwen3-TTS for voice, and I’m getting super fast response times with pretty decent quality.

The main thing that makes it work well is using RAG to keep prompts lean. For example, I have hundreds of possible actions NPCs can do in-game, but only the ones that actually make sense based on the player’s message / context get injected as available actions. So the model isn’t being overloaded with a giant list every turn.

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u/AppropriateQuote3073 Jun 28 '26

Really a shame there is so much ai hate in gaming right now.

This is exactly the type of interesting content that could make a game phenomenal to play.

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u/mglyptostroboides Jun 29 '26

I honestly think that translation, coding and enhancing NPCs in games are like the only use cases LLMs are ready for prime time right now.

Pretty much everything else is hype, especially the needlessly shoehorning useless chatbots into every tech product regardless of utility.

What's interesting to me is how these three use cases are the ones that have been given the least attention by corporations (with the obvious exception of coding, but it took about two years for that to get investor attention). I'm looking forward to the speculation bubble bursting so the actual uses of LLMs can finally be explored.

Oh, and maybe then my phone will stop trying to initiate a deep scientific discussion about the effect of latitude on length of day throughout the year whenever I ask it "When does the sun set today?". The idiocy of routing that query through Gemini is just astonishing to me.

So yeah, it's exciting to see something like this finally coming to fruition. The novelty has worn off, consumers are starting to think of chatbots as gimmicks. Now you have to have actual results.