Dialogue systems vary by game and are generally custom. But they amount to hard coded if-else branches if you squint. The only one I ever wrote was a simple announcer for a sports-ish shooter.
Your question is weird. Every video game ever made has shipped using not LLMs. Not a single commercial game has ever shipped with an LLM. So I’d say what makes classic NPC systems better is they’ve shipped tens of thousands of commercial successes over 50+ years. And what makes LLMs worse is they haven’t once been proven viable for even a single title. Nor have they produced even a compelling tech demo.
My question was genuine as I'm not from the gamedev domain and I might have missed the real state of the art.
Hard coded dialogs often feel very unnatural and limiting. I can see why people want to explore LLM to try to make new experiences possible.
I can see it becoming a new dimension of game design, open vs closed dialogs, like there is currently open vs closed world. And as in the open vs closed world, they will probably coexist instead of one type replacing the other.
First you were talking about those games just existing, now you want me to prove to you that "they don't suck". That doesn't seem fair. Anyway, here you go:
Those are the two that I could easily remember, there are much more games (already in the 10s) that embed the LLM APIs for things like dialogue generation for some parts of the game, e.g. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2530950/
Your question is weird. Every video game ever made has shipped using not LLMs. Not a single commercial game has ever shipped with an LLM. So I’d say what makes classic NPC systems better is they’ve shipped tens of thousands of commercial successes over 50+ years. And what makes LLMs worse is they haven’t once been proven viable for even a single title. Nor have they produced even a compelling tech demo.
Geez people.