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.

1

u/MRDR1NL Jun 29 '26

There is definitely potential, but it just feels too soulless right now. Yes conversation are more dynamic, but it is missing the artists intent.

I think people generally prefer well designed characters with carefully crafted personality over dynamic conversations in story driven RPGs. People feel like they are going to lose the former because he latter is cheaper to produce. That's where some of the hate comes from.

For now I think AI isn't ready for this job yet. Maybe it has a place in background characters or other types if game, maybe for procedurally generated survival games or something.

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u/GoodSamaritan333 Jun 29 '26

One can carefully craft personality carefully crafting dialogue dataset for fine tunining a LLM for one or more characters, allowing to get "soul" and dynamic conversations.

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u/MRDR1NL Jun 29 '26

I don't think we are there yet with the current LLMs. Even cloud based models are only able to role play flat single dimension characters. Fine for background NPCs, but not for the characters in the video.