So picture this. You’re in a big open world RPG, and instead of choosing from fixed dialogue options, you just type what you want to say. Like actually talk. You could say something kind, sarcastic, creepy, emotional, whatever. And the NPCs get it. They respond like real people based on your tone, your choices, the situation, and their own personality.

No pre-written paths. Real conversations. One player might befriend a guard, another might piss him off and get thrown in jail. It’s all up to what you say and how you say it.

We’re experimenting with this using AI that understands your message and builds a response in real time that fits the game world.

Would this kind of system make you more immersed? Or do you think it would get weird or break the game flow?

Curious what you all think.

I would say the certain amount of AI has a chance to make some product even better, but there should be the line, where AI help to make the game, and where AI is the game itself

Oh, you assume players are not too lazy to really type questions? Or speak them into voice recognition.

For experimental games, yeah, seen that. People fool around with the AI and make a meta game out of it.

As a mechanic for established game genres, it would bring some benefits and some disadvantages. Probably you would introduce game breaking bugs or the AI would be so shallow that people lose interest in that new feature and prefer the quick way of preselected options.

An rpg means that the player will not have the skills, that the character has. Like having a high charsima and Speech 100. If you make conversations freestyle, like befriending a guard, you shift the in-game conversation to real world skills of the player.

NPCs in a game usually have a purpose and a scope. If you can define that purpose and scope with AI and let the player find out with freestyle options, ok, that might be interesting. Or distracting.

I'm kinda split about this. I understand the benefits of having smart AI for NPCs in open world game but at the same time, I know the disadvantages of that.

I'll start with this: stupid AI although, as the name implies, is stupid, is actually a smart way for players to help player telling which NPCs are important and which aren't. NPCs who talk like a robot is not interesting and usually not important and players would avoid them. With so many NPCs, figuring which ones are important and which aren't, players have less NPCs to consider.  That's an advantage with stupid AI.

That being said, that advantage is for games in which NPCs aren't the main focus. If you are making game in which NPCs are the main focus and talking to them is the main gameplay, then yes, smart AI is essential.

Absolutely not.  If I wanted to actually talk to characters in a game, I'd find a LARP group where the characters I talk to are played by actual human beings.

No.

Would this kind of system make you more immersed?

Like was suggested above, I would give up the game to find real people to talk with.

Or do you think it would get weird or break the game flow?

It would be talking to an overhyped chatbot. My patience with those evaporated years ago.

in my case if the A.I. is good and was trained using content  free to use/or compensating the author. is a good idea in teory

But the current level of AI is quite poor. Leaving aside concerns about "how was the example AI trained?", all the IAs dialogue  I've seen have the following problems:

- They imagine and/or get lost in the middle of conversations.

- The voices are monotonous or have poor implementation of emotions.

- There isn't much diversity in the voices.

Note: I'm not an AI expert, so perhaps one I'm unfamiliar with could be wonderful without any copyright issues.

If I could figure out how to connect Unity to any generative Ai server (something has to do with api), my game would already had this meta game element in itself. The idea is simple, an NPC giving a slightly different answer every time players speak to them. 

imossible to implement on my current level of programming

I’d absolutely play a game where you can freely talk to NPCs using AI. It opens up dynamic storytelling and makes every playthrough feel unique. Of course, there are challenges—like tone interpretation and consistency—but if done well, it could be the next leap in immersion. I’d love to see more devs experiment with this beyond scripted dialogue trees.

Kind of removes intentionality out of the game. I don't really see what the point would be.