LLM-Based NPCs in Video Games: A Systematic Mapping Study

With this review, I wanted to see how far AI has taken the capabilities of NPCs in video games.

For many years, I went from being someone who not only enjoyed playing games as a kid, wondering how they magically made the NPCs fight the player or help them in some way, to learning how to program them bit-by-bit in university.

Now, with the rapid emergence of AI and LLM-based applications and characters, I constructed this review to explore what researchers have done to potentially enhance the realism of NPCs. The review has been designed to show what can take a simple conversation or encounter and make them feel similar to a true interaction.

Can LLMs improve the experience of players? Or do they diminish their enjoyment? Can NPCs be efficiently created with current technology, or do they imply that manually crafted behaviour trees/dialogue are the most optimal?

Read the paper here!