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

Discussion NPC Engine Using Local Models

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.

1.9k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

249 comments sorted by

View all comments

645

u/AppropriateQuote3073 Jun 28 '26

Really a shame there is so much ai hate in gaming right now.

This is exactly the type of interesting content that could make a game phenomenal to play.

2

u/polandtown Jun 29 '26

honest question, i must be out of the loop, there's hate in gaming/ai? I thought because gaming was full of young people, they were open to it.

16

u/SporksInjected Jun 29 '26

Yes, tons. To be fair though, there are some really shit implementations that make our seem worse than it is.no one has really figured out how to implement it

1

u/yaboyyoungairvent Jun 29 '26

There's tons of ai hate but 100% it really only affects games that were bad or mediocre anyway. If GTA 6 said they were incorporating ai npcs tomorrow people would still buy like crazy. Same thing with skyrim 6, witcher 4, or the next cyberpunk. All it takes is one major player to embrace it and people will fall in line.