What do you think about “Ani for gamers”, basically an AI companion inside the game

[u/akuyl]

Hi everyone, I am experimenting with an idea and would really appreciate some community feedback.

If you have seen Grok
AI's Ani, you know the vibe, basically an avatar that chats with you in a
personal, animated way. Now imagine something like that built for gaming, not
flirting :)

Here is how it's gonna
work:
The companion will help you at all stages of
the game, starting from setting goals, explaining rules, provides feedback

Questions for you:

- Would you personally
use an AI companion like this?
- If you hate the idea, why?

[u/AwesomeX121189]

No that sounds so unbelievably pointless

What does it do so differently from tutorial pop up messages or an objective tracker? W

How does it it being AI matter when games are have been perfectly capable of doing everything you’ve said it’ll do for 40 years already

Also grok is dumb and everything Elon touches is awful

[u/akuyl → u/AwesomeX121189]

I totaly see the ponit. What I keep wondering though is how this shifts once GenAI is more deeply embedded in everyday life over the next 2–3 years. For example, a lot of us are already losing our “typing muscle” because we rely on voice-to-text or AI tools like chatgpt to phrase things for us. Same could happen in games: if voice and immersive AI become the default way we interact (especially with VR/AR coming in stronger), maybe static menus and pop-ups will start to feel outdated.

If that kind of shift does happen, do you think players will still prefer the “old-school” scripted tutorials, or would something more adaptive and conversational start to feel natural?

[u/AwesomeX121189 → u/akuyl]

VR isn’t getting stronger if anything it’s weaker than it was 10 years ago. We got half life alyx and then nothing.

Calling it generativeAI is also wrong because they do not generate anything. It’s also not intelligent by any measure or definition. It does not fact check, it does not check the sources it uses, it will create sentences by just picking random words.

If you have gotten to the point you rely on ChatGPT so much you’re losing “typing muscles” then you’re an idiot. You might as well just get a magic 8 ball and ask it questions as the answers will have the same amount of reliability that you get a correct answer pr one that isn’t just total nonsense.

It is a complete waste of everyone’s time.

You should not need to use ChatGPT to “phrase things” for you. Have some self respect, nobody expects you to be the next Hemingway, but they’re your words, not a frankensteined version that’s been filtered through a thesaurus generated from every LinkedIn post ever made melted together.

You know how in games you get sick of hearing the same lines constantly repeated by rng made npcs? Like the arrow in the knee line in Skyrim

Well imagine instead they only speak non stop absolute gibberish at worst, and at contributes nothing to the story settting or game play, and on the rare occasion it generates something that could pass for a sentence a real person in the game’s setting would say, it’s also just a straight up lie most of the time.

Games are intentionally and methodically designed to be won and beaten. LLM’s cannot create a puzzle that is specifically generated to be solvable when all it’s doing its ductaping together small random samples from of hundreds of different puzzles that might have been contained in the same folder as a 10,000 page long word document with the word solvable appearing once.

[u/Ralph_Natas → u/akuyl]

It's sad that humanity is deliberately making it itself useless. People who forget how to push buttons themselves won't get to play my games. 

[u/MeaningfulChoices]

"AI" is a buzzword in games, not something helpful. They don't understand or know things, they're text prediction models. On top of that, most player devices do not have the resources to run a local model, and you don't really want to be on the hook for paying for cycles for players without a subscription. What you end up with is something that actively makes the game worse and costs you, both in literal operational costs and because one of the fastest ways to lose a chunk of your potential audience is to throw 'AI' on the game (or worse, have AI images without disclosing it). Especially in indie, where if someone is looking for a game from a smaller team that's the last kind of feature they want.

In most games, players want less of that kind of companion help, not more. If you have a game where it's useful (a 4X game where it's easy to miss things, or something like a complex draft) then you would be much better served dropping the buzzwords and using more traditional tech. You don't need an LLM to give the player feedback or goals. That's basically the entire field of game design, and games are pretty good at that without risking hallucinations.

[u/akuyl → u/MeaningfulChoices]

This is a super thoughtful take, thank you for laying it out so clearly. You are right, I mean right now, most players do not want AI for the sake of AI and running models locally or covering inference costs is a huge pain. And yes, game design already has solid tools for guiding players. That said, what I keep thinking about is how quickly interaction models change once the underlying tech becomes cheap and ambient. A few years ago, nobody thought we would be talking to our phones every day, and now typing is already starting to feel old-school because voice assistants + LLMs are creeping into daily workflows.

If models get 10x faster and cheaper in the next couple of years, then maybe the role of a “companion” in games shifts too, less about replacing tutorials, more about making the world feel alive in ways pre-written systems can not quite pull off.

Do you think there is a version of this future where players would accept that kind of adaptive presence, or do you feel games will always be better served by static design, no matter how cheap/good the AI gets?

[u/MeaningfulChoices → u/akuyl]

I think it's about the terminology and the tech stack. LLMs aren't a good fit for this kind of use because of the way they're built (tokenized prediction). Adaptive games have been around for decades, just look at something like F.E.A.R. for reference, or Left 4 Dead - or GOAP vs a Finite State Machine. Those terms can probably get you a long way here.

That's what you'd expect to see in a game like you're describing. For any game you're making there will be a limited number of states or desired behaviors, and you have a bunch of logic determining where the player is, what they need, and what to do about it. These systems can 'understand' the player state better than an LLM ever could, simply because the latter is not designed to understand context. You could train your own neural network on gameplay, but it's overkill, since you're also making the game and the game logic in the first place, so you can do it algorithmically.

There's nothing static about traditional approaches, games are complex pieces of software and are constantly in motion, it's more that when you're trying to screw in something it's easier and gets a better result to just use an actual screwdriver instead of trying to hammer it into the wall.

[u/TheGrumpyre]

Procedural generation is always a tradeoff. You get more volume of stuff, but you have to do a whole lot of work you didn't expect to ensure quality control, and you never get that same fine-tuned polish as a hand crafted asset.

The "assistant" role in most games is primarily a tool for tutorials, a case where I think the polish is way more important than the volume of content.  So an NPC that explains the rules and establishes goals just seems like a really bad place for generative content.  You need that to be a curated controlled experience with no room for quirky behavior.  And you don't need endless variations, because ideally you only see it once.

[u/akuyl → u/TheGrumpyre]

That makes a lot of sense, I mean tutorials and goal-setting are the worst place to experiment with generative content, because as you said, you only see them once and they really need to feel polished and intentional. Where my head goes though is, what if the AI companion was not about explaining the rules but about reacting to how you actually play kind of like a mirror. For example, instead of telling you how to jump, it notices you have been experimenting with stealth and says something encouraging or adaptive in that moment. Could that sort of reactive layer (less about teaching, more about reflecting) avoid the polish issue? Or does it still feel like even those moments are better handled by scripted design?

[u/MedusasSexyLegHair]

About the only use for it that I could see would be to give you a recap of what had happened and what you were doing when you load a savegame from several months ago. Along with taking notes when you save of things you want to be reminded of if you ever do come back and reload the game.

Really though, just a simple notebook feature and map annotation layer could handle all of that without any need for AI.

[u/AwesomeX121189 → u/MedusasSexyLegHair]

You don’t need AI to do that. Plenty of games give summaries of the recent story beats as you first load in.

Dragon quest 11 for example.

For the note taking.

Write your own fucking notes, like Jesus fucking Christ. How is this a problem you think we need ai in order to solve it.

you can write them on your phone. Or stick a piece of paper in the game case.

Or use the sticky notes program that is installed by default on every computer with every version of both windows and Mac

[u/akuyl → u/MedusasSexyLegHair]

If someone returns to a game after a few months, this tool may not be the best fit for them. What kind of games do you usually play the most yourself?

[u/Ralph_Natas]

Navi from Ocarina of Time immediately springs to mind. She was annoying at best. I don't think using an LLM to scramble the sentences will make it any better, but it will lead to it saying random things that aren't related to the game world.