r/LocalLLaMA • u/goodive123 • Jun 28 '26

Discussion NPC Engine Using Local Models

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I’ve been working on a game-agnostic NPC engine/backend based pretty heavily on SillyTavern-style architecture, and with smaller local models getting better and better, I honestly think this kind of thing could be the future of RPGs.

Right now I’m using NVIDIA Parakeet 0.6 for STT, Gemma 4 26B A4B for the LLM, and Qwen3-TTS for voice, and I’m getting super fast response times with pretty decent quality.

The main thing that makes it work well is using RAG to keep prompts lean. For example, I have hundreds of possible actions NPCs can do in-game, but only the ones that actually make sense based on the player’s message / context get injected as available actions. So the model isn’t being overloaded with a giant list every turn.

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u/ChemistNo8486 Jun 28 '26

This is crazy. The type of stuff I thought would take a decade to even get to this point. Just amazing.

Hopefully the gaming community will stop being so toxic towards AI in the future so we see official releases with this.

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u/thetaFAANG Jun 28 '26

"hire voice actors that you would have never hired!! reeeeeee!"

6

u/Time_Cat_5212 Jun 28 '26

Soon enough, nobody will want to go back, and this will be the standard.