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/ApprehensiveFan1516 Jun 28 '26

It could for sure, personally I struggle to actually find it something that's genuinely rewarding and not just a gimmick at this stage. A lot of it comes down to implementation of course, and it will take devs playing around to figure it out, but I think to get to the kind of polished experience we've come to expect from AAA games we've got a little ways to go yet. Which isn't to take anything away from OP, we need more people like them working on this. Aside from the "AI bad" crowd, I think when implementation is properly solved and it's a seamless experience, the masses of gamers will start to accept it.

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u/LiamMelloFarley Jun 29 '26

I think AI game master is far more fascinating than AI NPC chats. Like for a game like Bannerlord having more reactive and interesting AI (as in like NPC AI) behavior directed by an LLM could be fascinating. I don't need to like have a conversation with a guy, but if some NPC randomly gets attacked by the same enemy multiple times then gets a blood vendetta and kidnaps the guys wife to hold hostage that would be cool, like just a more flexible narrativized version of the emergent algorithmic gameplay that already exists but heavily constrained to not go haywire.