How much reactivity should there be in games? Is it practical?

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Primarily thinking about NPC and quest dialogue here, and the practicality of recording voicelines for all of these reactive lines. If you have NPCs changing their dialogue depending on what race/class/guild you are (let alone KCD stuff like NPCs reacting depending on how you dress, ie if you look like a dignified aristocrat or a bloodstained knight or a suspicious person dressed all in black). That could become a humongous amount of voicelines that have to be recorded that most people will not hear because they will only do one playthrough, and recording that much dialogue could be difficult given that devs only can a limited amount of time in a voice recording booth, and professional voice actors have other gigs scheduled and you can't keep them past what you scheduled (unless you are hiring people from local theater or radio clubs, might be better quality than "professional" voice actors as seen with FF12), etc.

[DagothGeas5]

From my experience when there is a lot of reactivity, it is usually time/effort taken away from another part of the game, so, though I really like having reactivity to what I do in games as I love to have the world feel "alive", I would say that having a game with depth and that is fun to play matters more than having reactivity, however sad it is to not have anyone bat an eye to some things. So I would say to limit it to things that truly matter (like wearing Necromancer robes inside the Mages Guild in Oblivion) is better than to start strong and then end up half-assing it like it was in Baldur's Gate 3, for example, which had somewhat of a reactivity at first, and then it becomes next to nothing, saving any real reaction to the main quest for "impact moments" and if a member of the same race you are playing is met. I usually always play whatever race would give a strong negative reaction (like drow for example) just so I can test this before I get too attached to a game and expect too much from it.

[Dorateen]

Seems to me, the problem isn't reactivity, but voice actors.

Why do we need SAG involved in our role-playing game hobby anyway? Fire them all.

[DagothGeas5]

Seems to me, the problem isn't reactivity, but voice actors.

Why do we need SAG involved in our role-playing game hobby anyway? Fire them all.

I think it also comes down to all the branching of things. When I did mods for myself for the likes of Skyrim and Oblivion I really wanted to make large quests with reactions to what guild one joined, the race, etc, but it became convoluted very fast, especially to keep track of all the reactions. For example, in Oblivion I wanted a character to recall how he was first greeted throughout the adventure, I had to make different conditions for each greeting, and then apply that to his every line when it mattered referencing said happening. It is fun, but it truly would need a map and I can see why people would prefer to cut on those not only for voice actor budget costs.

[Unhelpful Contrarian]

Seems to me, the problem isn't reactivity, but voice actors.

Why do we need SAG involved in our role-playing game hobby anyway? Fire them all.

I think it also comes down to all the branching of things. When I did mods for myself for the likes of Skyrim and Oblivion I really wanted to make large quests with reactions to what guild one joined, the race, etc, but it became convoluted very fast, especially to keep track of all the reactions. For example, in Oblivion I wanted a character to recall how he was first greeted throughout the adventure, I had to make different conditions for each greeting, and then apply that to his every line when it mattered referencing said happening. It is fun, but it truly would need a map and I can see why people would prefer to cut on those not only for voice actor budget costs.

I never forget one of the interviews from Obsidian in the post mortem for Alpha Protocol where one of the main the narrative designers was talking about staring at a huge Excel spreadsheet for months in making sure all the different conditions work properly.

[rusty_shackleford]

I never forget one of the interviews from Obsidian in the post mortem for Alpha Protocol where one of the main the narrative designers was talking about staring at a huge Excel spreadsheet for months in making sure all the different conditions work properly.

This could be solved with proper tooling.

[Acrux]

That implies that getting to mess around in Excel all day isn't proper tooling.

[UltraFan123]

I do agree that reactivity is only as good as the game that implements it, because you would want to try multiple runs of a good game so you would have a higher chance of trying different things and see different reactions, while a "meh" game you would only finish it once, assuming you even finish it in the first place.

[rusty_shackleford]

reactivity has nothing to do with replaying a game

[DagothGeas5]

reactivity has nothing to do with replaying a game

True at least in my case as while I love seeing different reactions, I prefer to replay a game I truly enjoyed just to play it again. There are games I know mechanically, yet I replay them again every so often even if they have no different choices or even a reaction mechanic. If we talk RPGs, though, I am more likely to replay one only if the choices truly interest me as I usually feel like I made my choices when playing blind and do not usually feel the need to visit the others.

[trurebel1]

Deff a feature that im hoping can be greatly expanded with AI

[Element]

I'd rather the quests themselves were actually good. If there's reactivity then that's a bonus. But even without reactivity there's no excuse to have fedex postman larp as gameplay.

[J1M]

Generative AI is going to solve the voice acting side of this.

Might also solve the writing side of it.

I think the market prefers more of a theme park experience than true reactivity. The choice of what to do first, and what to ignore, like rides at a theme park. For example, Mass Effect 2. There's an element of discomfort for players when they think that minor choices they make will cut them off from something they in-theory would like to experience.

[gerey]

I want a cRPG where I can call NPCs slurs based on their (fantasy) race, stats, sex, sexual orientation, profession, religion and ideology, with appropriate reactions from them.

This should be the golden ideal of reactivity in video games.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I'd rather the quests themselves were actually good. If there's reactivity then that's a bonus. But even without reactivity there's no excuse to have fedex postman larp as gameplay.

Why do you think this is so common? Surely it can't be too hard for a quest designer to conceptualize and implement a quest in a week or two. Multiply that by 3 or 4 quest designers working over the course of six months and you could have 50+ interesting quests for a box game.

[Tangerine]

I'd rather the quests themselves were actually good. If there's reactivity then that's a bonus. But even without reactivity there's no excuse to have fedex postman larp as gameplay.

Why do you think this is so common? Surely it can't be too hard for a quest designer to conceptualize and implement a quest in a week or two. Multiply that by 3 or 4 quest designers working over the course of six months and you could have 50+ interesting quests for a box game.

They don't give a **** and are doing the bare minimum to get their Jira ticket moved from "In Progress" to "Done" so they don't get yelled at by management.

[rusty_shackleford]

Reactivity is the ultimate rpg spice. It's how you can turn a game from an action or strategy game into an rpg.

I still need to do my writeup on this.

[Xenich]

Generative AI is going to solve the voice acting side of this.

Might also solve the writing side of it.

I think the market prefers more of a theme park experience than true reactivity. The choice of what to do first, and what to ignore, like rides at a theme park. For example, Mass Effect 2. There's an element of discomfort for players when they think that minor choices they make will cut them off from something they in-theory would like to experience.

This is what I was talking about a while ago, definitely once it gets tuned and improved will be the solution for a lot of NPC interaction. Some of the reactions the AI had was funny though. It got annoyed with a player and sent them on a fake quest to get rid of them. LOL


https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2023/04/aetol ... atgpt.html

I've talked about ChatGPT being used to make NPCs in MMOs and virtual worlds more intelligent, but far as I know, veteran developer Matt Mihaly of Iron Realms Entertainment is the first to do so with an active MMORPG called Aetolia.

As he explained on social media recently:

We just wrapped up an experiment in which we hooked NPCs in one of our games up to AI (ChatGPT). Super successful. Players absolutely loved it, unsurprisingly. We basically feed the AI all sorts of info about the game world and the NPC itself, so it knows about what we need it to know about to say (or act out if it chooses) something relevant.
My favorite part of the experiment was players realizing that suddenly city guards (one of the types of NPCs in the experiment) would actually react to what you say. Previously, unless you attacked one, or were an enemy of that city, they'd leave you alone. Now, you could say something offensive or disrespectful, completely free-form vs. dialog trees or something, and drive them to violence if they get ****** off about it. It's hilarious and absolutely amazing at the same time.

We even had an NPC spontaneously give a player a quest that would send them to the other side of the world in an apparent attempt to get the player to go away and stop bothering it.

Now we're working on a more permanent design, in which we'll be able to scale all sorts of personality traits that NPCs can have so they'll respond in line with their personalities.
Emphasis mine, because wow. See some of the pretty impressive conversations with ChatGPT-powered NPCs below!

[NotAI]

Infinite reactivity is possible with some pretty simple loops. Catch: you must be able to generate (AI) animation rather than text.

That is what limits reactivity in the end. Not so much any other part of graphics.

In text based games, with loops, there was often enormous reactivity, and then it actually declined.

[trurebel1]

xAI is making a game studio that will most likely use alot of AI if they use it for real time AI to generate stuff on the spot we could be in for a treat