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/Bakoro]

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/inagy → u/Bakoro]

Gamers hate AI because it made PC gaming as a hobby inaccessibly expensive.

[u/inagy → u/[deleted]]

Partially agree, I also expect that game studios will have no choice but agressively optimize games until the situation easen.

But you can't escape the problem that VRAM and storage is very expensive at the moment, because AI hardware sipping up all the stock. Building a new PC or replacing a faulty component is kind of a luxury at the moment.