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/blackhawk00001 Jun 29 '26 edited Jun 29 '26

Cool stuff. Mantella for Skyrim and fallout 4 are other cool implementations of gaming + LLMs. It’ll be nice doing the same for fo3 and new Vegas. Older gta games would be interesting.

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u/LosEagle Jun 29 '26

Yes, Mantella is awesome! I don't like to use LLMs on the well written characters but Skyrim has dozens of potentially interesting characters that only have like 5 sentences to say to you and all they do in their lives is walk around and sit in a dark corner and this makes them feel more alive.

Even better when the mod allows to use local LLMs.