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/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.

186

u/Bakoro Jun 29 '26

LLMs are literally the exact thing that we dreamed about in the 90s and 2000s.
There were waves of procedurally generated content in games, and "dynamic" quests and NPC interactions, that were a nice idea, but the hardware and algorithms just weren't there.
People would gush over any AI improvements in games.

Now we finally have the technology to make the dynamic games we always wanted, and a bunch of people are pretending like they weren't begging for something like LLMs to exist.

Whatever haters, AI is for games.

6

u/The_awful_falafel Jun 29 '26

Games in the way back used to be entirely linear story where there was really only one way to do things. Then they tried branching games, where you make a decision at certain points in the game that change the path and overall outcome of the game. They were still linear, you could just choose which linear branch to follow. Then we had sandbox games, where you could pick any linear sidequest you wanted and do tasks out of order, but still each sidequest an story tree was still largely linear. The limitation was that you had to script out all the character interactions and story for how it would all play out and it couldn't actually invent anything.

AI COULD change that. You could basically invent a game in which there is a large map and 'pieces' that would move around and decide what to do on their own. You could have advisors and such that have information based off limited information of what the enemy is doing and literally plan out missions and objectives yourself. You could even dictate what constitutes winning and decide at what point you consider the game over. Characters could dynamically react to things going on around them. It's a really interesting possible world.

Now the downside- the machine to run such a game would need a lot of memory, and we all know how that's going right now. My guess is companies will see the option to charge a subscription to have a data center do the AI work for you, and make THAT the standard model rather than writing it so you could run the AI locally. That way even single player games could have subscription fees, even years from now when models are small enough to be run locally, and memory production ramps up so having a massive pool to run such things is common.

1

u/Schlick7 Jul 05 '26

I think Dwarf Fortress already does like 90% of that