Look, let's be honest: in an industry that loves a buzzword, AI is currently the hottest topic in town. It’s reached a point where finding a studio not dabbling in AI to cut costs or trim the labour fat is harder than finding a decent pub on a Sunday afternoon. Its reach is expanding daily, from core engine development to granular user research.

But can we really hand over the reins of narrative design—the very soul of a game—to the machines? We got a proper look at this during the NDC 26 (NEXUS Developers Conference) held on the 16th, featuring insights from NEXUS Co., Ltd. narrative planner Lee Ji-young.

Lee broke down AI-driven storytelling into three pillars: world-building, scriptwriting, and quest design. World-building showed genuine potential. When crafting the fictional gambling city of 'Eldale', a brief prompt of roughly 100 characters spat out over 10,000 characters of raw draft, with more than 70% being genuinely usable. This, of course, was only possible because it was fed high-quality foundation data—years of collective expertise and structured documentation.

However, it wasn't all plain sailing. When tasked with fleshing out a single character without enough context, the AI lost the plot, churning out nonsensical dialogue. To get anything worth shipping, you need an incredibly rich background, and crucially, a human eye to play the role of the ultimate 'hallucination' filter.

When it came to scriptwriting, the cracks started to show. While the AI was a dab hand at polishing existing dialogue with a bit of humour, it failed spectacularly at writing comedy from scratch. Since AI is designed to calculate the most statistically probable outcome, it fundamentally struggles with the subversion of expectations—the very lifeblood of comedy.

Lee put it bluntly: "Asking an AI to 'just make it funny' is a fool's errand." Ultimately, the heavy lifting of designing situations and defining the standard for humour remains a human endeavour; the AI is merely a glorified text processor.

Quest design, however, is where the AI really flexed its data-processing muscles. By feeding it prompts that mapped text to game engine values, the system could automatically generate parameters for NPC placement and objective conditions. It effectively offloaded the mind-numbing busywork, freeing up developers to focus on what actually matters—fine-tuning combat feel, balancing difficulty, and ensuring the game is actually fun.

Lee concluded with a sobering reminder: "AI is just a tool; it lacks the capacity to truly comprehend the complex, shifting variables of a game environment." The ability to grasp the ever-changing nature of 'fun' across different cultures and eras is a uniquely human trait.

She added that future narrative planners will need to sharpen four key skills: insight, imagination, judgement, and expression. You need the insight to read the context, the imagination to materialise fun, the judgement to curate the results, and the expressive power to craft the perfect prompts. Best of luck out there.