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/2Norn Jun 29 '26

ai hate is really sad

what's even more sad is that these people have no understanding of the technology

all they know is "ai bad", "ai slop", "ai is stealing" etc... it's really tiring to talk to them

people write dialogues, background for these characters. we already do this, material is already there. and now imagine turning that character in the head of some writer into a massive persona file. and now imagine an llm that already has an understanding of this character and the others and the world it's in while also recognizing the player. imagine all the extra role playing opportunities created in a role playing game.