The biggest issue I have with all of these is that the dialogue is never connected to the actual actions of the npcs.
Its easy to have an npc say something, but tying it to gameplay mechanics isn’t. So we end up with people asking for this in new games, but all you get is conversations disconnected from the gameplay. I’m sure there is someway to make it feel more “right”, but we’re a farcry away from making true open world games like this.
That sounds like no one really tried. Like, sure, you’ll get bullshit occasionally, but in the code you know exactly what the NPC is doing, so crafting a prompt based on that is not really that hard and will work most of the time, especially for the simple NPCs.
It’s not that the dialogue doesn’t sound right, it’s that the dialogue is disconnected from the game.
A great example was someone did this with Skyrim a while back. In the dialogue they convinced the NPC to join their party. But there isn’t any code logic to allow that, so the NPC is talking like they joined the person’s party, but the gameplay itself doesn’t support it.
Now for animal crossing you could make it work a bit easier cause the character can’t directly interact with the NPCs, but then again it also makes the endless dialogue less impactful.
A great example was someone did this with Skyrim a while back. In the dialogue they convinced the NPC to join their party. But there isn’t any code logic to allow that, so the NPC is talking like they joined the person’s party, but the gameplay itself doesn’t support it.
That’s the exact type of scenario I was thinking as well. I had seen another video for Skyrim with AI dialog where they used it to haggle with a merchant who agreed to drop the price of an item in the shop. But an item’s gold value is baked into the game itself. An NPC can say they’ll lower the price, but it will still cost the exact same (barring the normal modifiers based on skills/quest completion/disposition/etc.)
That’s another great example.
The concept is really cool, and I hope to see some more interesting attempts to incorporate more of that adaptive kind of dialogue and gameplay, but its not going to be easy to figure out how to make it work.
Here’s his YouTube video, if you’d rather go straight to the source: https://youtu.be/7AyEzA5ziE0
Now if Nintendo released something like this I might actually enjoy the Animal Crossing series again. The dialogue in the newer games is so soulless and repetitive.
I can’t imagine this would be any less soulless feeling.
I can only stand to read the same joke about a sea bass so many times
You can tune a guitar but you can’t tune a guy naned sebastian
Honestly I can’t lie that’s really cool
You physically cannot lie? :P
They said “honestly” didn’t they?
Hmm, it is indeed hard to lie with honesty
