One of the best games I've ever played was Baldur's Gate 3. It really made me feel like it was reacting to the things that I did. It felt like an actual game of Dungeons and Dragons, and I'm a big fan of Dungeons and Dragons. I'm a dungeon master who's been running games for 10 years. I crave games where I feel like the things that I do really matter. I've never been able to pause in the middle of a traditional video game and think, "Wait, is this reacting to me?" Well, the year is 2025, and that's no longer magic. It's artificial intelligence. We're finally at an age where AI is no longer just a utility in games, it's become the game.
In this article, we'll talk about some of the major trends in AI gaming today, explore how voice visuals and nodding are changing, and consider where this all might lead. We'll talk about both the good and the bad.
Right now, game studios are already facing enormous pressure from their budgets, deadlines, and player expectations. Instead of manually creating every NPC line, environment, balance and curve, or art asset, a lot of them are turning to AI models to generate these elements.
The GDC 2025 "State of the Game Industry" report states 1 in 3 developers are using generative AI to streamline development. This means that if you look at three different game studios, chances are that one of them is already using AI tools to make their games faster and easier. They aren't drawing every single tree or writing thousands of lines of NPC dialogue by hand. Their developers can use AI to create a first draft and then polish it up. This saves them time, lowers their costs, and gives smaller studios the ability to compete with bigger ones. This doesn't mean that humans are gone, it just means that AI is helping take care of the busy work so designers can focus on the fun parts of their game making.
A survey of Japanese game companies was done by Japan's Computer Entertainment Suppliers Association (CESA). In their "2025 CESA Video Game Industry Report," they received responses from 54 different Japanese game companies. In the report, about 51% of these game companies use generative AI in their game development. Most of the AI was being used for generating images, visual assets, story/text, and code.
The gaming industry is just reacting to the market. Market reports estimate that AI in the gaming sector will see continued expansion in 2025 and beyond. This is thanks to the demands for smarter NPCs, real-time content, and procedural world generation. A couple of years ago, AI used to just be nice to have. Now, AI is almost essential.
Many games used to use fixed scripts and branching dialogs. Now, everything has changed so that systems adapt dynamically. This is only possible because of AI. With AI comes adaptive difficulty and balancing, where the AI monitors your play patterns and can dial up or down the challenge in real time. Emergent NPC behavior is now possible, where NPCs don't just follow paths anymore. NPCs can have goals, learn patterns, and interact with each other and the environment. Content in games can be generated procedurally. Not just levels or maps, but entire quest lines, item descriptions, world events, and even the weather.
AI can now be used for automation and control. Things like bug detection, question and answer assistance, and optimization are now being offloaded to AI agents. According to a Google Cloud Survey of 615 game developers, 87% of game developers now use AI agents for tasks like voice, code, processing media, and more.
One of the places where we see AI a lot in games is through voice and dialogue. It's one of the most noticeable places where we can see it, too. If a character can sound real or improvise, that's powerful. Modern tools allow game developers to reduce reliance on human voice actors by using AI models to generate, clone, or adapt voices. These systems can:
I've personally used a lot of AI-generated voiceovers and scripting. I've created a voice clone of myself for different YouTube videos and projects that I've worked on. Although this can be useful and a lot of fun to play with, voice cloning also carries some risk. Fraud, deepfake, and general abuse are common, and AI is another tool that can be used for evil as much as it can be used for good. An article by The Guardian reported on this problem, and talked about the different ethical issues that come with AI voice synthesis.
With the power of AI, voices can also sync to animation. If a character speaks, the lips and face should match. This used to require a lot of painstaking motion capture or hand animation, but now there are ways for you to convert speech input into realistic facial animation. I've personally tested out several different AI image-to-video generators and have found them to be very good at tracking facial animation. Runway is a good example of an AI video generator that can accomplish this. By recording myself standing in a similar position as an Actor in an image. I can speak and the actor mimics not only my mouth movement for lip-syncing to the voice lines, but also my expressions if I were to make a sad, angry, or excited face.
Modding communities are already experimenting with AI voiceovers to transform games. Fans of a game can add voice lines using AI tools, especially in different kinds of legacy or indie games. Some mods can even give silent NPCs voices or expand dialogue of already beloved characters. There are some risks with this that come with licensing and abusing voice clones. Just to name a few examples, these kinds of mods have already made their way into popular games such as Fallout 4, Skyrim, and Baldur's Gate 3.
With AI, you no longer have to hand-paint every texture, concept, or background. AI can create all of the art assets that you'll ever need, but there is a catch. AI-generated art is very easy to notice right away. AI-generated art also struggles with style consistency. AI can generate a texture or environment, but it might not always fit with the rest of a game's visual language. Although it has its problems, AI-generated art can transform the future of gaming. We're starting to see AI that doesn't just assist, but lives inside the game. Imagine walking in a forest that evolves its foliage, lighting, or even terrain.
AI is currently being used for a lot of asset generation, but it can also be used for in-game image generation. We're starting to see a lot of in-game image generation with some AI RPG games. Some AI RPG games that feature in-game image generation are ones like RPGGO, AI Realm, AI Dungeon, and Friends & Fables. The list of games that are adopting in-game image generation is only growing. This allows RPG games to offer visuals for locations, items, and NPCs, which allows for an ever more immersive experience than ever before.
RPGs usually rely heavily on dialogue trees, quest scripts, and branching choices. I dabbled with RPG Maker in the past, and I could see how difficult it is to really flush out an RPG. If you're trying to create a text-based RPG game, you'll find that it is quite time consuming. From dynamic NPCs that have to have their own personal goals, memory, relationships, and agendas reflected in their characters, to narrative scaffolding where major plot, dialog, side quests, and world events have to be written out. Making an RPG can be very difficult if you're doing it alone or with a small team of people.
AI has made it possible to speed up the process. A game designer can set up different NPCs and outline the major plot, while letting the AI fill in all the narrative that happens in-between. From there it just takes a little proofreading and some light editing to bring the game to life sooner rather than later. But if you take it a step further, you could even let AI run the RPG for you by building your games on popular AI RPG platforms.
AI offers:
I'm currently running a D&D game for my friends as their Dungeon Master. I took all of my campaign notes one day, and just for fun, put them all into a text document and plugged it into ChatGPT. I gave ChatGPT a simple command, asking it to write me a chapter of a book featuring all of the notes and lore that I plugged into the project. ChatGPT was able to take all of my notes for my D&D game and turn it into a book. I read the first chapter, and it was incredible. There was obvious evidence that an AI had written that chapter. I had read it and was very impressed by what it had written, but there was a lot that could have been added to make it even better. AI will never be able to replace a good storyteller or a good game master, but that doesn't mean there's no place in gaming for an AI storyteller. I read the chapter and was very much entertained. It did not meet expectations I would have for an actual author, but what it did accomplish was arguably better. I had written many notes for a game that I had written for my friends, and AI was able to tell me a story based on the work I had written that I got to experience. This is the future of AI, where a game designer can build a game and experience it not knowing what they will encounter when they play.
Generative game engines might become more common. As models become cheaper and faster, we might see games where the world grows around player choices continuously and endlessly. Games where someone could just prompt an entire location and the engine generates it live. Games where NPCs think, plan, relate, and act autonomously without any pre-scripted paths. NPCs can think, plan, relate, and act autonomously without prescriptive paths. We're already starting to see some of this with Friends and Fables and their Generative TTRPG. Seamless voice, animation, and world integration might be possible as well. Where you move or speak and your avatar moves and reacts realistically. The world can listen and change in real time with no breaks or stutters. NPCs might even become more like companions that react to your playstyle, form relationships, and evolve over time. In live games, NPCs might even be persistent across sessions, keeping track of their own memory and story arcs.
The point is, AI is no longer science fiction. In 2025, it is the scaffolding behind a lot of the creative process. It shapes how worlds are built, voices are spoken, environments evolve, and stories are told. For RPGs and storytelling creators, AI opens doors. The moment I found Friends & Fables, I fell in love with the game. I was finally able to take all of my ideas and turn them into a game where I could finally be a player. I always wished that I could run a TTRPG game for myself set in a world that I built, but I could never do that. Now, I can have Franz be my AI Game Master, and run games in worlds that I design.