Ruin Explorer
Legend
It won't work because of the logistics and because of interacting with game systems.I recently decided to start playing Skyrim again and often, when you're speaking with NPCs, you're strapped with dialogue options that you dislike.
Example: NPCs wife is missing. You go look for her only to find our she's now a bandit leader. You talk to her and she gives you her wedding ring. You go back to the husband and you only have two options: 1. Give the ring and tell him she's dead; 2. Tell him you never found her.
Where is option 3?: Tell him she's alive and doesn't want anything to do with him anymore.
This seems like a great example of where you can leverage Chat Bots to make a game better. Option 3 opens the ability to type in your questions/answers and have the bot respond.
Is this already in practice? If not, do you think it would work? If so, what are the logistics to this?
A) Here's the logistics problem - chat bots don't run locally.
They run on distant servers, and furthermore, they take up really surprising amounts of processing and power and energy, especially if you want responses that aren't delayed.
And it costs money, significant money, to run them. A lot of companies are running them as loss-leader or alongside adverts or trying to convert people to subscriptions of microtransactions. Microsoft might be willing to temporarily run a videogame using copilot AI or the like on their subscription service (Game Pass), but you can bet two things:
1) They won't let you purchase the game and play it outside the subscription service. Certainly not on Steam or the like.
2) At some point they will turn off copilot AI for that game, and the NPCs will revert to being non-AI-boosted, or they might even just stop the game from being playable.
B) There's the interacting problem - how do you hook game systems into AI-based chat?
No-one has an answer for this yet, but it's a non-trivial problem, and not possible to dismiss. Let's look at the scenario you outlined. Yes, copilot or ChatGPT or the like might well let you tell the NPC that, and even let them NPC verbally respond, but would it be able to do anything else? Would it register the quest finished? If so how do you prevent the PC accidentally triggering that sort of thing by the saying the wrong thing?
You'd basically have to design the entire game around AI chat and not pre-determined responses, and have NPCs be less fixed and have more of just a wide set of actions they could perform, and you're have to structure them so that they basically made sense most of the time. People are willing to accept quite a lot of jank, but not too much jank. There are already games experimenting with this, but it's pretty much a car crash in all cases.
So we have these two problems - if you want a game to be AI driven, it probably has to be essentially wholly AI driven, without much in the way of fixed dialogue or the like, it's not going to work as just a bolt on, and that AI is being processed on a server somewhere else, using up a ton of energy, costing someone money, using up water for cooling, and will inevitably be turned off at some point.