Obviously we don't want experience averaging NPCs.
> Mad Hatter’s first goal is to ask the player to humor him with a joke.
This is ok for simple stylized, small world, single storyline games, but not for open worlds.
For that, NPCs need their own motivations, so they essentially play the game too. With needs like maintain their smithy, so they can build quality armor, so they can make customers happy, so they can make money, so they can feed their family. I.e. not just being props.
And flexible in how they adjust subgoals to meet their core goals, relative to player interaction: such as being convinced to go on a trek as an armorer, or on a search to find and extract rare materials for a magical shield. Willing to fight in revenge for their home town's sacking.
Ah Westworld is a good example! I liked the series and the premise, but I still wouldn't liken the park to a good game - it's a theme park with nice attractions.
As c048 said best (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40316308), good art needs direction and focus, and AI NPCs being able to do anything they want in an open world doesn't make for a good story. It could make for a good sandbox with emergent gameplay, sure. But my point was that there are people who yearn for a good story, and a good story doesn't have many options in it, otherwise the story's beats would become meaningless.
Hmm. Maybe with this the problem Rockstar has with their linear missions mixed with open world could be fixed a bit - i.e. the open world NPCs could react in story missions to what you've done in free roam. This would lessen the cognitive dissonance the NPCs seem to have when you can now blow a town into pieces and then start the story mission and no one cares.
I like the idea of challenging uber goals, that progress in a series, but each with a deep tree of alternate subgoals/solutions.
Subgoals that are resource, constraint defined, could make very flexible solutions. For instance, if you need help with some subgoal, it is going to play out very different depending on what NPCs you have established credibility with before, and their skills and dynamics.
If you need money, then how you get that money is also going to depend on your history, knowledge of a city, previous connections, etc.
That could provide an overall story arc, but with a very open world and fully functional NPC experience.
So: organized series and trees of goals. Open ended solutions.
> For that, NPCs need their own motivations, so they essentially play the game too. With needs like maintain their smithy, so they can build quality armor, so they can make customers happy, so they can make money, so they can feed their family. I.e. not just being props
So you want a system like rimworld, and a LLM doesn't really help on that front. It can power the dialogues, but that's it, all the logic you describe would need to be encoded somewhere else.
Obviously we don't want experience averaging NPCs.
> Mad Hatter’s first goal is to ask the player to humor him with a joke.
This is ok for simple stylized, small world, single storyline games, but not for open worlds.
For that, NPCs need their own motivations, so they essentially play the game too. With needs like maintain their smithy, so they can build quality armor, so they can make customers happy, so they can make money, so they can feed their family. I.e. not just being props.
And flexible in how they adjust subgoals to meet their core goals, relative to player interaction: such as being convinced to go on a trek as an armorer, or on a search to find and extract rare materials for a magical shield. Willing to fight in revenge for their home town's sacking.
Westworld got NPC dynamics right.