

My personal issue with the idea of “infinite NPC dialogue” is that it defeats the purpose of minor NPCs. They’re just there to give you a nudge in the right direction or give flavor text (“Bandit activity sure has been picking up!” or “The king? He’s probably in his castle to the west.”). Turning them into a chatbot just means a player potentially spending all their time there with nothing to gain that they couldn’t get from Character.AI instead of playing the game.
I’m also curious about the implementation. AI API use isn’t free so you’d likely be requiring players to pay if they don’t meet the hardware requirements to host locally.
For all the gripes I have for it, Monster Hunter Wilds (PS5). It’s really streamlined to the point of being auto-pilot at times, but damn if I don’t like seeing the weapon and overall world changes, especially as a Gunlance main. I just really hope they can get more of the “friction” back, getting multiple gems on the first hunt is dumb, wound popping devolves into stunlock, and autopilot-bird encourages not playing the game. But man do I love hunting and lots of systems and odd encounters encourage doing that in this, hopefully they can scale the rest of the roster like in Sunbreak.