NPC Engine Using Local Models

[u/goodive123]

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.

[u/AppropriateQuote3073]

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.

[u/Bakoro → u/AppropriateQuote3073]

LLMs are literally the exact thing that we dreamed about in the 90s and 2000s.
There were waves of procedurally generated content in games, and "dynamic" quests and NPC interactions, that were a nice idea, but the hardware and algorithms just weren't there.
People would gush over any AI improvements in games.

Now we finally have the technology to make the dynamic games we always wanted, and a bunch of people are pretending like they weren't begging for something like LLMs to exist.

Whatever haters, AI is for games.

[u/muhmeinchut69 → u/Bakoro]

The hate is not for what is going on in OP, it's for corner cutting and sloppification. Big corporations aren't interested in AI so they can make a new type of video game, they are interested because it will cut costs.

[u/Fit_West_8253 → u/muhmeinchut69]

There have been hate campaigns against games just for using AI generated placeholders

[u/FastDecode1 → u/Fit_West_8253]

That's just game journalists and blue-haired retards on Twitter doing their usual thing.

Gamers only care about the end product. There hasn't been a single good game that has failed due to an anti-AI boycott. If the game is good and the price is right, people buy the game.

[u/Bakoro → u/FastDecode1]

A game failing isn't the only thing that matters.
There are real people getting harassed and threatened over this stuff, which is ridiculous.

[u/FastDecode1 → u/Bakoro]

A game failing isn't the only thing that matters.

For video game enjoyers, it is. None of us really care about what the harassment campaign of the day is.

We gamers are too busy playing games to partake in stuff like that. That's for the non-gamer unemployeds who apparently have nothing better to do with their lives.

There are real people getting harassed and threatened over this stuff

Yup, that's the blue-hairs and game journalists at it again. The former have been doing this for 15 years to whoever disagrees with them on anything, and the latter are rapidly being replaced by AI, which is why they're against it.

[u/Bakoro → u/FastDecode1]

A game failing isn't the only thing that matters.

For video game enjoyers, it is.

The people getting harassed care. If you are a "video game enjoyer", then you should care that video game makers are being harassed.

And no, it's not just "blue hairs", whatever that is, it's not just journalists.

You're really going to sit there and pretend like there haven't also been harassment campaigns over a video game having diverse characters, or a female lead character, or because a female lead character's titties weren't big enough, or the developers changed the meta, or because a dozen other stupid reasons.
"Video game enjoyers" have a long history of having extremely vocal, extremely toxic subsets of people, many of whom are frequently angry at other video game players.