How far are we from AI that can act as chatbots so as to make conversations a bit more dynamic. It would be nice to have NPC with personality traits where they knew about their game world and surroundings so as to have dynamic and different conversations with the NPC's instead of scripted questions and responses. Imagine two guards, one has a bribe-able trait in their personality and if you chat with them and offer him money he lets you commit a crime, but that's all chat and personality driven. Ofcourse a game has to have a story and a path so scripted conversations would still exist
You mean something like you enter an actual chat with an NPC and you can say literally anything to them and they'll have responses depending on their randomly assigned personalities? We're still pretty far from that kind of thing being particularly immersive, even with huge companies like Google and Apple, nevermind with a small gaming company.
The best way to approximate this without inventing a world-changing technology is with enterable keywords for NPCs, like in Wasteland 2 (mixed in with basic questions). So if a guard had a "corrupt" tag, you could type in "bribe" and it would bring up new dialog options where he'd ask you to pay 100g to ignore crimes, want to pay that or not?
But we could probably just skip the whole trait system and just write out specific character responses to keywords, instead of making several "corrupt" guards that all have the same answer to "bribe." Instead you just have to find the two or three guards who are bribeable, all with slightly different responses and costs, which you'd have to infer from their other dialogs. Bribe the wrong guard and they'd throw you in prison. I don't think having generic personality traits really adds anything to D:OS2, with the kind of game it is. A more open world game like skyrim where there are hundreds of generic NPCs would benefit more from something like that.
Actually, we're
closer than you think.
I don't know the mechanics of it, but I know that it is indeed possible to emulate personalities in a conversational manner, to some degree.
That's a good question.
Most real world natural language problems are handled using a data driven approach.
If you wanted to put a chat bot on the internet, it would be fairly easy to do because you can get as much example text as you want to build the bot (things like the conversation we are having right now). The idea is to find a lot of data to use for machine learning approaches. Giving the bot personality traits would be harder, but certainly plausible.
When you put that in the game world (for a game not set in our world near our time), you don't have unlimited amounts of game specific text that refer to things in the game world and that don't refer to things outside of it (like computers and 747s etc. for D:OS2). So, you would have a harder time doing something purely data driven. For example, in a game with levitation spells, you don't want to ask someone about flight and have it answer something about airline schedules. You also don't want to hand write reams of text to train on or large numbers of generation rules.
Actually, we're
closer than you think.
I don't know the mechanics of it, but I know that it is indeed possible to emulate personalities in a conversational manner, to some degree.
That's cool, though haven't tried it. But that's also a game designed basically entirely around the concept of an AI chatbot. And it's hard to say how much of that is essentially pre-written out answers to obvious questions or interactions the player would have, plus some basic algorithms. Probably how a chatbot in an RPG would work as well for the near future. Yonjuro is right also that a lack of data in a fantasy environment makes creating a truly dynamic AI chatbot pretty difficult.
Now I'm half expecting Swen to troll us by implementing Eliza somewhere. That would be pretty awful. D:
A chatbot is a long way from being a in a state where it can fit into an RPG without shattering immersion. You don't just need one chatbot, you need one per distinct personality (per NPC). It'd basically be a lot of work and never really feel right anyway.
You know... I really do think I'd like to play the first RPG that tries it.
That said, I don't think this should be the first RPG that tries it.
You know... I really do think I'd like to play the first RPG that tries it.
That said, I don't think this should be the first RPG that tries it.
Who better to build this than Larian, i mean Tyranny came out last year and it doesn't even half the features of DOS2 which is in alpha....nobody else breaks new grounds nowadays but Larian and CD Projekt Red