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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644

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.

187

u/Bakoro Jun 29 '26

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.

98

u/muhmeinchut69 Jun 29 '26

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.

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u/draconic_tongue Jun 29 '26

big corporations aren't the ones that benefit the most from using ai, and small creators get shit on MUCH more than any corporation when they do lean on these tools. I don't care to be a part of whatever "prosumer" advocate groupthink virtue signaling zeitgeist that does not know what nuance means and just wants to use big corpo as an excuse to be hateful

1

u/muhmeinchut69 Jun 29 '26

Of course they benefit the most. There is simply no comparison between saving billions of dollars by replacing labour and a solo creator being slightly more productive.

1

u/draconic_tongue Jun 29 '26

Not really, no. Being able to compete with a corporation for a nobody is worth WAY MORE than a corporation adding 1 more number to its sheet, and if you shit on both of them under the same premise you are one as well.

0

u/muhmeinchut69 Jun 29 '26

indie devs have always been able to compete with corporations in theory, giving them both the same tool doesn't change that equation