I think that it would be highly dependant on how the AI model is trained and what genre of game it is implemented into. For example, games that more heavily rely on dialogue or social interaction.
Take Danganronpa, which is a series if linear narrative games about students trapped in a school forced to kill each other (and get way with it) to escape. You as the player have to investigate each murder and arrive at who the culprit was to win the game. They are fun on your first playthrough, but on any subsequent playthrough you already know the solutions. Like playing Clue but the game only ever has one outcome: Mr. Green, in the Library, with the Lead Pipe. You wouldn’t even have to open the game box and you already know. Absolutely zero replayability.
With an AI in such a game, you could have a new gamemode, like a New Game+, which players can play after the hand-crafted story. This is where I think something like a very carefully trained LLM could be useful, because it could create these kinds of situations at random, making them unpredictable and therefore adding replay value. Now, I don’t think AI is currently sufficiently advanced for this use, but if it continues to develop I could see that niche making good use of it.
Well as I said, this would be for an additional game mode for replayability, not the primary story mode.
Randomized content for a game like Danganronpa would be significantly more complex than Blade Runner. If a human/humans were programming it, each NPC (of which there are at least 18) would need their own randomizable schedule of daily activities, each would need their own dialogue lines which would easily number into the tens of thousands at least, and each would need the capability to commit a crime which is not witnessed by the player. The necessary variety of crime events would need to be very large to avoid the standard problem of procedural generation always feeling samey/generic, written by a human or not. Without large variety, it would feel like dungeons in Daggerfall.
I mean yeah, a human probably could make that, but by the time they actually finished the content, the hardware their game is designed to run on would be considered “historically significant.” It would easily take so long to develop that that it would not be worth the time investment. Unless they made serious content cuts, which would result in a pretty repetitive feeling final product. I dont see a reason that a specifically trained AI could fill in for the immense level of variety needed for that.
Not that it really matters anyway, because I don’t think anything exists that could run that performantly on a local device. Also the amount of time and data required to train something like that is probably not worth the time or cost investment either. Like I said before, I don’t think current AI is sufficiently advanced enough for implementation. It would need further development, and if it did get further developed I could see a potential for it. But not right now, as I previously stated. And honestly it would probably need so long to develop that businesses will probably either have given up on AI (hopefully) or I won’t be alive anymore to see it happen.