AI and the future of FFXIV.

[Iscah]

What Square Enix could do with AI is use it to make NPC characters feel more real and I don't mean battle-related stuff but personality, it would be really nice to be able to hold conversations with any NPC in the game as if they were real people.

I know SE won't do it because it would cost them too much money [...]

For the amount of work required versus the amount of enjoyment the average player would derive from it? Absolutely too much work, money or not.

These aren't just casual chatbots, they're characters with particular experiences and knowledge, and presumably it will need fine tuning for each character to stay within the right bounds on what they will and won't say, which will mean developing actual personalities for every minor NPC, plus probably develop a new two-way conversation interface so players can talk to them, all so players can have a deep (or likely still shallow) text-based conversation with the airship ticketer or random villager?

Where does that actually bring us in the end? What percentage of players would seriously want to engage with NPCs in that way once the novelty wears off?

Personally it sounds like the conversational equivalent of the uncanny valley for me – having to engage in a "realistic" conversation to maybe glean some new information about the world setting (hopefully not hallucinated by the AI) that would likely get highly repetitive from one NPC to the next.

I would much rather stick to the current system where each NPC has a small amount of deliberately written dialogue and you can be confident that you've exhausted everything they are capable of saying to you.

[Saraide]

For the amount of work required versus the amount of enjoyment the average player would derive from it? Absolutely too much work, money or not.

These aren't just casual chatbots, they're characters with particular experiences and knowledge, and presumably it will need fine tuning for each character to stay within the right bounds on what they will and won't say, which will mean developing actual personalities for every minor NPC, plus probably develop a new two-way conversation interface so players can talk to them, all so players can have a deep (or likely still shallow) text-based conversation with the airship ticketer or random villager?

Where does that actually bring us in the end? What percentage of players would seriously want to engage with NPCs in that way once the novelty wears off?

Personally it sounds like the conversational equivalent of the uncanny valley for me – having to engage in a "realistic" conversation to maybe glean some new information about the world setting (hopefully not hallucinated by the AI) that would likely get highly repetitive from one NPC to the next.

I would much rather stick to the current system where each NPC has a small amount of deliberately written dialogue and you can be confident that you've exhausted everything they are capable of saying to you.

Time to ask the AI chatbot npcs which amogus character is the sussiest of them all.