I've worked in game development (AAA and large indie games) for almost eight years and I would generally take the narratives on game subreddits with a healthy helping of salt. They're largely speculative and uninformed. Gamasutra is better, but often game journalism is full of simplifications and rough analogies.
The main problem with this type of content is that it needs to be solid enough that it adds to the experience. If you're allowed to have a conversation with any NPC you need to keep track of what they know, their responses need to be consistent with the world, and the time to generate the response needs to be reasonable.
Old RPGs such as The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall used to allow you to go up to any of thousands of NPCs and ask them about anything! And practically all the results were uninspiring cookie-cutter replies either saying they don't know or relaying some vague common knowledge on the subject. For me it lost its novelty very quickly. In Dwarf Fortress you can play Adventure Mode and go to any randomly generated NPC to talk about anything! Those NPCs are highly complex with intricate personalities, relationships, and emotional states. Their responses are... mainly the same type of response you'd get from Daggerfall. With a good helping of completely inconsistent replies. I once asked someone about another NPC, they said it was their husband. So I asked where that NPC was and they replied "I do not know who that is". Trying to talk to characters in AI Dungeon is similarly frustrating, with the added hilarity of the AI sometimes getting mixed up about who is who between you and them.
There have been a lot of experiments with more ambitious use of AI in games. The most well-known publicly disclosed failure being Oblivion's Radiant AI which was meant to be a lot more impressive than it turned out, because they had to seriously scale it down due to random irrational behaviour.
Do you have any sources on the development process of the Radiant AI that I could read up on?
I’ve only heard the marketing speak (“amazing!!!!”) followed by the actual product (“get X for Y at Z, 5 times”). I’ve never seen anything that explained the disconnect, aside from Todd just being a sheister.
I remember some anecdotes including how they couldn't stop NPCs from randomly going from town to town and steal or buy everything in every shop so there was never anything left for the player. I believe this was mentioned in the making of documentary which came with the collector's edition of Oblivion.
The main problem with this type of content is that it needs to be solid enough that it adds to the experience. If you're allowed to have a conversation with any NPC you need to keep track of what they know, their responses need to be consistent with the world, and the time to generate the response needs to be reasonable.
Old RPGs such as The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall used to allow you to go up to any of thousands of NPCs and ask them about anything! And practically all the results were uninspiring cookie-cutter replies either saying they don't know or relaying some vague common knowledge on the subject. For me it lost its novelty very quickly. In Dwarf Fortress you can play Adventure Mode and go to any randomly generated NPC to talk about anything! Those NPCs are highly complex with intricate personalities, relationships, and emotional states. Their responses are... mainly the same type of response you'd get from Daggerfall. With a good helping of completely inconsistent replies. I once asked someone about another NPC, they said it was their husband. So I asked where that NPC was and they replied "I do not know who that is". Trying to talk to characters in AI Dungeon is similarly frustrating, with the added hilarity of the AI sometimes getting mixed up about who is who between you and them.
There have been a lot of experiments with more ambitious use of AI in games. The most well-known publicly disclosed failure being Oblivion's Radiant AI which was meant to be a lot more impressive than it turned out, because they had to seriously scale it down due to random irrational behaviour.