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There's nothing in there that can't be improved as prose, but are you entirely sure that the changes will be improvements as game writing?
I like Table Top RPGs, despite them being worse than some Computer RPGs in every way but one, and the one way they're better is the way that matters here: in a TTRPG, your players don't have to be railroaded nearly so strictly. When the players try to dig deep into the interactions with some character, there can always be something rewarding they can dig deep into. Once the Game Master runs out of official quest writeup material, he can start to improvise, and those improvisations can actually affect all subsequent gameplay. It's quite common for players to develop an attachment to someone like that elderly forgotten veteran NPC, who the GM can then slot into other parts of the story, on the fly, as a recurring side character, making the story much more fun and interesting. In the longest-running game I run, my players have one originally-mid-level mook who's managed to escape enough fights to become a recurring villain (with some hilarious banter), and even have another three mooks who (via vast interleaved efforts of diplomacy and subterfuge) they've managed to semi-reform and (despite some lingering head-butting with PCs and each other) recruit as underlings. The written adventures for this campaign included some designed-as-recurring-character NPC friends and villains, too, of course, but these four were all characters who were written with at most a short backstory but who were expected to be eliminated in the first encounter if the players had been aggressive enough and their dice rolls lucky enough. We're all glad they weren't.
In a CRPG ... do you want to let the AI rewrite your game on the fly, like a GM does, not just write things you can review in advance? Writing on the fly is probably an AGI-complete problem. If you've got an LLM that you trust not to make its part of your game worse than your part then you might as well let it write your part too. But if all your writing is done in advance, that won't let you have long-term effects on the story. The possibilities you'd have to write for grow exponentially with elapsed gameplay, as more story elements arise and more combinations in which they might affect Ascended Extras' actions accumulate. If you instead do a lot of writing in advance without letting the now-fleshed-out side characters have long-term effects on the story, that just tricks the player with false affordances: instead of interacting with a world where ten characters have deep dialogue trees and obviously are critical to the story and another hundred characters quickly get to a loop with nothing new to say and are obviously scenery after that, you'd be giving them a world where ten characters have deep dialogue trees and are critical to the story while another hundred characters have deep dialogue trees but are still going to be plot dead-ends after those trees are finally exhausted.
Roger Ebert infamously took the stance that "video games can never be art", which was nonsense, but the interactivity of games is a bit of a two-edged sword: on the one hand it's an additional capacity that can make video games much better art than non-interactive media, but on the other hand it puts the artist even more at the mercy of the audience than is the case in other media. Someone may fail to understand what you intended them to understand from your painting, but at least once they're part of your painting's audience they'll see what you intended them to see. If you want to make art in the form of a game, however, everyone in your audience is also your collaborator, and your job isn't just to make them understand a finished product, it's to guide them into helping properly finish that product with you, and part of that guidance is making it easier to see which parts of the work they should focus on the most and which are just intended to be out-of-focus background. Making the background more beautiful would be an improvement, all other things being equal, but making it more beautiful without accidentally bringing it to a spot in the foreground where it shouldn't be is much trickier. The reason why new fiction writers always have to be told to be unafraid to "kill your darlings" is that it's true but non-obvious that most authors' writing can be best improved not by expanding it but by cutting it, removing the digressions and infodumps and red herrings and detached side plots and on and on until you're left only with the things that most contribute to the story. Game writers (and level designers, and so on) have a much harder problem, because even if you avoid handing the player a pointless distraction the player might seek it out anyway, and they'll enjoy the game less as a result even if they don't understand why. I recommend playing the Half Life 2 Episode 1+2 with Director's Commentary - some of the most interesting tidbits there are tricks with which they coax players into actions as simple as looking in the right direction at the right time to see a scripted event, while not actually taking any control away from the player or even letting most players realize they'd been maneuvered into making the decisions they did.
Absolutely not. I'm just pretty sure games haven't perfected process and that there is for improvement by using AI during their creation. No game developer should trust the consumer's wisdom. I would recommend they ignore gamers the most.
If it does it well because it's powered by the 200 million dollar Unreal Storytelling Engine, yeah, I'd try it out. I don't think we need procedurally generated stuff to have more choice and consequence in a game as mentioned. The best practices reasoning ignores all the limitations, constraints, industry standards, general audience, and on and on. Pressures that can be mitigated by an always on, if not always deferred to, modest writer.*
Can we not provides clues or even tell the player what they can expect from the 100 'non-essential' characters? Don't many games already do this when they choose to include such content in the experience?
I don't need to they were clearly an innovator if not a pioneer in "show don't tell" for video games. I'm not saying to take creators, artists, and innovators out of the equation or to cede your storytelling role to a robot. Guard rails are good and necessary in many cases. Based on my experience with LLM (prose, given) and my experience with video games: there's already a role for tapping LLMs and it would be an improvement in many games-- including big budget titles. But I appreciated the perspective!
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