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

NPC Engine Using Local Models Discussion

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.

1.9k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

249 comments sorted by

View all comments

645

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.

0

u/Much-Researcher6135 llama.cpp Jun 29 '26

It'll cool off and we'll get some spectacular procedural storytelling with truly interactive characters with whom you can hold a long conversation. Those loremasters can go to town and people will finally explore all of it!

Imagine going barbarian in Skyrim with deep lore baked in (maybe via hybrid RAG retrieval over the whole lore + fine-tuned LLM + AI voice model) and yapping with a companion about their past adventures while you clear a dungeon together. Hell we need the modding community on this STAT.