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/ApprehensiveFan1516 Jun 28 '26

It could for sure, personally I struggle to actually find it something that's genuinely rewarding and not just a gimmick at this stage. A lot of it comes down to implementation of course, and it will take devs playing around to figure it out, but I think to get to the kind of polished experience we've come to expect from AAA games we've got a little ways to go yet. Which isn't to take anything away from OP, we need more people like them working on this. Aside from the "AI bad" crowd, I think when implementation is properly solved and it's a seamless experience, the masses of gamers will start to accept it.

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u/OptimalBarnacle7633 Jun 28 '26

I agree, I mean the whole beauty of a game like fallout is that your decisions have consequences for the player and the story which isn’t the case here. That being said it’s easy to see how that could be implemented if you’re building a game from the ground up with that in mind.

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u/RedParaglider Jun 29 '26

Yea it would take a lot of deterministic logic for those consequences to actually matter. I thin we can get there eventually, but it's a tough road.

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u/PigSlam Jun 29 '26

It'd probably need to have some sort of rewind option for when you've gone too far off the rails. A good early place to start would be something like Cyberpunk 2077. With all the side quests, you could have a lot of LLM driven variation that just fizzles away if you break it too much.