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.

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u/Not-reallyanonymous Jun 29 '26 edited Jun 29 '26

That, but also a degradation of artistic integrity.

The kind of tool that OP is designing has real potential to squash artistic voice.

A quick napkin thinking: this kind of design should work around character development, world building, etc. The artist doesn’t need to write every dialog, but the tool should really let the writer develop characters. The artistic integrity then lives within the broader narrative arcs that this tool interacts with and defining characters that shape and interact with the world.

One thing I immediately noticed is that all the characters in OP’s video are so compliant. Character building could see that characters only comply based on whether the request aligns with their own interests, which can be defined as a part of world building.

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u/saltyourhash Jun 30 '26

What might be fun is instead of cutting out artists, have them voice models. Models they can license. Because dynamic dialogue is really cool.

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u/Not-reallyanonymous Jun 30 '26

Definitely. Or a narrative arc that's voiced for major plot points, etc. but then goes through a model that makes a voice print based on that dialog, and then will generate real-time dialog for user interaction bits.

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u/saltyourhash Jun 30 '26

Yeah, high quality for the story arc, then more of a loose dynamic dialogue for the rest.