I've wanted an RPG like this for years.
Imagine a game where every NPC has their own personality, memories, emotions, and opinions. You can talk to them about anything. They remember what you've done, change how they feel about you, and make their own decisions.
KORRO just open-sourced Kinloom 1.0, and it's already showing what this could look like.
In a Pokémon FireRed mod, you can freely talk to trainers, and a conversation can lead to an actual battle.
In The Box, a suspect can lie to you, react to evidence, and eventually confess.
In another demo, NPCs react to crimes, guards can arrest players, and information spreads between villagers.
I dug into the source code to understand how it works.
Kinloom is an open-source framework that connects games to existing LLMs, including DeepSeek, Claude, OpenAI, or local models running through Ollama.
Each NPC gets a character profile containing their personality, background, goals, fears, and secrets. Kinloom also maintains their memories, emotional state, and relationships with players and other characters.
When you talk to an NPC, the framework sends the relevant information and current game situation to the LLM.
The model generates a response and can also propose changes to the character's mood, memories, and actions.
Here's where it gets interesting.
If a developer gives NPCs access to game functions like trading, giving items, opening doors, or starting battles, they can decide to use those abilities during conversations. Kinloom validates those decisions before the game executes them.
Routine combat decisions, relationship changes, and the spread of rumors can also run locally, without constantly calling an LLM.
It already supports Godot, Unity, and several other development environments. Mods can bring some of these features into existing games, too.
The framework is free and open source. Using cloud LLMs may cost money.
Personally, I'd love to see this in a game like Skyrim or Fallout.
Imagine cheating a merchant, then returning days later to discover he remembers you and refuses to trade.
Or saving a villager who later tells others what you did. Someone you've never met might already trust you because of that story.
Maybe an NPC you offended starts working against you while you're busy doing something completely different.
I think this could become one of the most exciting directions for RPG development.
The hardest challenge, I suspect, will be keeping hundreds of NPCs, their memories, relationships, and decisions consistent with the game world over hundreds of hours.
If developers can solve that, we could eventually have RPGs where two players experience completely different stories in the same world.
Even the developers might not know exactly how those stories will unfold.
KORRO