Honestly, a few years ago when ChatGPT was becoming popular, I thought it would be much more common by now to be able to talk to characters in games. Yet here we are in 2025 with existing, quite good voice assistance technology and gaming world does not seem to be particularly interested
developers have been working on this, but it doesn’t scale to games in the way you might think. For one, games have to communicate with data centers to process LLMs, so we will still have to deal with the lag of data transmission and processing. The other problem is that, in general, the AI are not very good. ChatGPT has all the hype because it is very convincing, but it does not actually know what it is talking about. Go ask ChatGPT to add up 5 multi-digit numbers and watch it fail at a task that your pocket calculator can complete in seconds. All these LLMs are doing is taking your input and spitting out a response that sounds correct based on how people usually respond to that input. In the context of a game, this means that any dynamic conversation you might have with an NPC would go flying off the rails in ways that would make a game feel broken and/or unfinished. Go watch the video in the linked article and make your own judgment.
I saw a video of someone demoing a Skyrim AI mod and it sent him on a quest that didn’t exist because it just made shit up when he asked, despite the AI being fed all the true information about the game.
There could be a game where the lag is expected. Let’s say you’re heading for Mars, but you have to fix your ship, because there was an unexpected asteroid impact. You ask home base for instructions, but you’re already so far away, that the text takes a minute to travel all the way.
That is a fair point! That could be neat. Still not worth the environmental cost of using this technology, but interesting in a vacuum!
Talking to characters in game would be cool, talking to chatgpt that’s been told “you are darth vader” is not
It also makes it too difficult to know what is important. In most games you can talk to people and you usually knew if it’s chitchat or plot relevant, generated text blurs the line enough that it’s probably only really useful in specific games like Façade
