You don't even necessarily need to have them coming up with valid speech. Simply giving out random quests and rewards would keep people running on a loot treadmill for most open world multiplayer games.
I think at first even background NPCs that don't give quests and rewards would be nice. Sort of give everyone a character and let them just babble. It breaks the immersion to hear the same phrases repeatedly. You can still handcraft every important quest and interaction to achieve high fidelity, but I would like random NPCs you bump into to not just repeat things all the time.
You're more likely to see studios (who want lots of more varied content) use generative AI in the studio, where they might generate and review it before release.
Letting generators run free on the client sets up different kinds of immersion-breaking, where NPC's hallucinate misleading details about the story/world, can be tricked into reciting off-topic absurdities or age-rating violations, etc. AAA studios can't afford the embarrassment of that and smaller designers with pride of craft won't see their signature come through the art in it. Surely, some designers will figure out ways to make it work great for some specific idea, but it's not the best way to use the technology in most cases.
Sounds like there's a ton of money to be had to someone that can solve those problems though.
A version of fallout where I can go up to people/things and just start talking to them, instead of picking from a list of things to say? :shutupandtakemymoney:
To make this work, you need your LLM-based AI to outperform any other form of generating quests and rewards -- and that performance is measured on things like player enjoyment, game/story progression, exploitability, client system requirements or server operating costs, etc and most of those things are very hard to constrain or optimize for with an LLM right now.
While the costs are hidden from end users and are going down quickly, good LLM's remain very expensive to run and very hard to keep on track compared to other options.
You're trying to big brain something that isn't that complicated or special.
I never said that every interaction with an NPC must necessarily require AI to create a new quest and reward from scratch. Players aren't that savvy. You just generate a pool of quests and assign them to NPCs in the instance. Players who are addicted to loot treadmills will stay in the game and pay for boosts and other rewards as long as there is content to engage them. This more than pays for the AI service.
You could maybe pull this off in a game like Borderlands where the loot is basically just the same dozen guns but with different numbers and effects. But as is, the LLM text isn't going to be much different than a sufficiently large AdLib system.
I think there is value to be gained in having LLMs as part of the development process, maybe even the game itself, but I think conventional methods are about as sufficient for quests.