AI is here, and thanks to all the deepfaked clips and funny ChatGPT moments, many are wondering what the future holds in terms of AI. Almost every industry in the world is sure to be touched, in some way, by AI, but there's nothing that could be more revolutionized by AI tech than video games.
So, in this article, we'll explain how AI could change video games.
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AI Conversations With NPCs in Games
Imagine if instead of having a couple of preprogrammed things you could say to an NPC with a couple of preprogrammed responses adding up to a dialogue tree you could actually have real conversations with NPCs.
The backstory of a particular NPC could be used to train a particular AI, and you could feed in some choice lines to push the larger story forward, but in the end, you could have NPCs that you could actually talk to about anything. What's more is that you could pair this with some voice generation tech to allow NPCs to actually say anything, too.
It wouldn't work perfectly, of course, and some strange moments would definitely come up, but imagine being able to have real discussions about anything on your mind with any NPC in a game world. Sounds like a bright future if you ask us.
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AI Quests in Games
Say we did have AI conversations with NPCs, as discussed above, and say we could actually talk to NPCs about anything. But what if we could push that even further?
What if based on your AI conversations with NPCs the game could use that same AI tech to generate quests for you in the game? For example, say you're talking to an NPC, you get hungry, and so you ask what their favorite food was. Imagine the AI comes up with an answer relevant to the game world, and then imagine the AI is able to dynamically generate a short quest for you where you go and pick up that food for the NPC.
It could just be a fetch quest, nothing special, but being able to not only have unscripted conversations with NPCs as well as receive unscripted quests from them, however simple, could well make for an immersive gameplaying experience considering the emergent nature of the gameplay and how your friends may well not have the same interactions as you do.
Then, of course, this kind of tech could get even more advanced with the ability to generate even more complicated, more advanced quests, too.
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AI Art in Games
AI art is something, of course, that has a ton of applications outside video games, but within video games, it can change a lot, too.
Tons and tons of art goes into video games. Whether it's for an environment, a character, objects in the game world, or simply concept art, a big video game is going to come with loads and loads of art carefully handmade by dozens if not hundreds of artists over the course of years. Put simply, it takes a lot of manpower and it takes a lot of resources.
However, AI can make this process easier. Using AI tools to help artists generate the art they need faster and more efficiently could help to make building games easier and more efficient, and it could even make big open-world games take less time to develop. If artists used AI as a tool, too, there isn't much reason to expect the quality of art, overall, to go down, either.
AI Worldbuilding in Games
So much of gaming comes down to worldbuilding, comes down to creating a believable world that is filled with characters, lore, books, and so much more hidden around every corner and within every chest.
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However, actually creating interesting lore and doing worldbuilding well is no easy task. But what if AI could be used to help lighten that load? Imagine in-game books that would otherwise take a writer days or weeks to write just a single book that could be created by an AI instead that a writer just has to edit down and check over rather than write theirself.
So much more depth could be added to in-game worlds with just about the same time, energy, and effort that goes into worldbuilding now if developers start to leverage the power of AI.
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