I get what this is saying, and I partly agree, but at the same time, I still think that open world video game npc dialogue is one of the few cases where “program that generates plausible sounding strings of text” could actually be mildly useful. Yes, if you generate everything procedurally, especially the actual story, the result is going to feel rather flat, but I think this misses any middle ground between having all dialogue dynamically generated and having it all be a prewritten human script. For example, suppose that an NPC had conventionally human-written dialogue for the most plot-important conversations, like giving a quest, cutscenes, a player’s first visit to a location, etc, just as these sorts of games have now, but during less important conversations or once the prewritten dialogue was exhausted, it would switch to generating new dialogue, using a human-written backstory and the prewritten dialogue for that character as part its prompt to keep every character from sounding exactly the same. Such a “shift” past what the writers had written for a character would be noticeable, sure, but so is just having that character repeat itself over and over, the utility wouldnt be to have AI write the story instead of the devs but instead to make the point in which that character’s part in the story is done less immersion breaking.
honestly I think no mans sky would be one of the worst examples for what Im thinking of. it goes back to the bit about how a purely generated story would be pretty flat and that I suspect that to make npc’s distinct, there would need to be a good bit of existing character lore and unique dialogue for the AI to work with; most no mans sky NPCs are so similar to eachother that even with not-repeating dialogue, they’d still sound stale. I think you’d want something like skyrim, where the world is big and open but not so big and open that each character cant have a writer give them a little bit of backstory to build off of.