While Bethesda is still hard at work on Elder Scrolls 6, and Elder Scrolls Online enjoys endless additions of content, Skyrim lives on in the hearts of fans and is kept fresh with a ripe modding community.
Skyrim VR is a virtual reality edition of the fifth installment in the Elder Scrolls series and lets you experience the game’s open world and legendary quests in a more immersive format. To take that immersion even further, a talented modder has used a combination of ChatGPT, xVASynth and Whisper to tailor NPC interactions to the player.
In this fascinating Reddit post the user details how he’s used these three tools to create a memory system for each NPC. As demonstrated in the above video, ChatGPT is given the basic background of the character and then asked to roleplay as them. Whisper converts the player’s voice to text, which is then passed to the NPC to respond appropriately using ChatGPT.
A memory system has been set up so that these NPCs will remember their past conversations with the player, so your conversations will feel based in reality (well, reality with dragons). The talented modder has used ChatGPT to create a system that summarizes the conversation you’ve both had upon exit so that each past conversation is remembered in a condensed form. Very much a TL;DR situation but it does mean that NPCs can recall certain tidbits of your previous encounters.
In addition to these memories, the AI tools simulate natural language and voice input with xVASynth.
There are limits to what the AI is capable of currently, in a similar fashion to most publically available AI-chat tools it can struggle with certain topics, and understanding context and emotions. The simulated voices do also sound quite stunted and unnatural, however, it does display what’s possible for the future of gaming when it comes to adding variety and diversity to environments. Some posters suggested the use of ChatGPT in other games like Fallout, GTA or Cyberpunk 2077 and how NPC encounters could be more immersive in these games with this technology.
Now we just need an AAA studio to pick this up and refine it, so we never need to speak to real people again.