“Horrible”, “boring”, and “cheap”: Experts pan new chatbot NPCs, but some leave room for optimism

LLM-fed NPCs may be here to stay

Image credit:NetEase

This year, generative AI seeped into mainstream gaming. Though it didn’t so much shimmer, as smear. It mispronounced lines in Arc Raiders , “drew” a smudgy loading screen in Anno 117 , voiced a sweary Darth Vader in Fortnite – perhaps its least subtle appearance was in Where Winds Meet, the wuxia-themed open-world RPG that plugged some of its minor NPCs into AI chatbots. The results were predictably beige and sometimes absurd .

But a segment of players and of RPS readers did like the idea. One commenter on Reddit said it creates NPCs that “you can truly interact with, you can’t achieve this without AI”. Where Winds Meet continues to peak at more than 100,000 daily players.

I can’t imagine a 2026 where we don’t see more in-game chatbots. GenAI’s dribbling into every crevice of our lives, including the art we enjoy, appears uninterruptible – or at least, uninterrupted. More is coming. Indeed, as 2025 draws to a close, Larian founder Swen Vinke revealed the studio is using generative AI in pre-production of Divinity , its first new game since Baldur’s Gate 3 . The news caused such a stink that he’s committed to an open Q&A in the new year .

With that thought of the approaching wave of AI use in game narrative in mind, I contacted five experts to get their perspective: two AI researchers and three narrative designers. I wanted to know if there’s something I’m missing. Could future AI chatbots, more carefully prompted and constrained, enhance a game’s world? Does this technology open any doors? How will it evolve? And how should story-driven studios respond?

Image credit:Inkle / Cape Guy

For Meghna Jayanth, writer and narrative designer known for 80 Days , Thirsty Suitors and Sable , the chatbot in Where Winds Meet sounds “both horrible and boring” and LLM chatbots are “the least interesting, most resource-hungry, most corporately controlled version” of procedurality and generation, a field games narrative has pioneered.

“I made something for you, without even knowing you. You, in playing, reading, listening, experiencing, know a part of my humanity without knowing me.” - Meghna Jayanth

Chatbots are toys with “novelty value” for some players – but the fact they can answer anything is “more of a disadvantage than an advantage”, Jayanth says. Games are not about giving players as much agency as possible, they’re “about designing agency in pleasurable or thematically interesting ways”, she explains.

“What the player cannot do, what the player cannot say, what the game says and leaves unsaid, these limitations convey what the story and the world mean to the player. What the chatbot says or doesn’t say is not intentional,” she says. And for Jayanth, human connection is intrinsic to art: “I made something for you, without even knowing you. You, in playing, reading, listening, experiencing, know a part of my humanity without knowing me.”

For those reasons, “I don’t see a genuine place for the LLM chatbot in fiction, apart from some specific cases where the affordances and failures of the technology are part of the narrative or thematic conceit,” she says.

And this is all before you consider the myriad ethical problems she describes with AI and LLMs: the climate impact of data centres; the privacy dangers of “sharing intimate details of your life with a corporately-controlled chatbot”; creators having LLMs trained on their writing without being paid and then watching LLMs replace their work; and chatbots hallucinating reality, “driving us further away from truth at a time where the information landscape is hopelessly fragmented, polluted, politicised and delusional”.

“I think the question is as simple as: do we want to live in an alive world, or a dead one?” she asks.

“We are all desperate for more connection, with nature, with each other, with life itself. We are increasingly atomised, overworked, underemployed, choked by toxic air, at risk of floods, earthquakes, heatwaves, while billionaires and elites consume the planet for profit and leave us to live in the wreckage. And their solution to all of this is for us to look deeper into the machine-vortex for friendship, validation and connection, rather than each other.”

Image credit:Ada Eden

Max Kreminski, an assistant professor of Design Tech at Cornell Tech university, questions the suitability of the technology itself, saying that LLM-based chatbots won’t tend to make good NPCs. They’re too unoriginal to come up with novel ideas in a conversation, and too uncontrollable to do what a narrative designer might want. “As a result, they tend to wash out the strong authorial intent that characterises really good narrative design, while also not really giving the player much to ‘work with’ if viewed as an open-ended improv partner,” they explain.

Kreminski – who until recently led the Storytelling Lab at Midjourney, which makes AI models and is known best for its image generator – believes developers are “awkwardly wedging [genAI] into contexts where it doesn’t really fit”, particularly in popular, proven genres. “On top of that, present-day executive-level interest seems to be mostly driven by a desire to cut production costs… even though pursuing this strategy pretty much always makes the resulting games weaker.”

“Present-day executive-level interest seems to be mostly driven by a desire to cut production costs… even though pursuing this strategy pretty much always makes the resulting games weaker.” - Max Kreminski

But they also believe LLMs could help create new, interesting experiences. They point to examples away from mainstream development: 1001 Nights is “designed around tricking the LLM-simulated character” into saying certain words.

“The designer didn’t just drop LLM-based NPCs into an established game genre, she put a ton of design thought into coming up with new handcrafted interactions around the LLM-based core gameplay loop.” They also point to Infinite Craft , praised by RPS’ former reviews editor Ed Thorn , a crafting game that uses an LLM to let players combine seemingly unrelated ideas.

Kreminski thinks there’s “a whole new category” of games that could be designed using LLMs not as chatbots but as “interpreters of open-ended player input”.

In Façade , the 2005 interactive story created by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern, players walk around an apartment, type whatever they want, and watch the game respond. LLMs weren’t around then, “so Michael and Andrew had to handcraft a super elaborate rules-based parser to make sense of these open-ended player utterances”. It broke often, but Kreminski still found the mix of scripted and improvised play compelling.

They can imagine LLMs sitting as one of many components in a designer-led system that supports this Façade-style play. Success would look a lot more like “inventing a new game genre” than “augmenting an existing one”, they say, before ending like a consummate academic: “more research is needed”.

Image credit:Inflexion Games

Dan Griliopoulos, writer and narrative designer, formerly of Inflexion Games, Improbable, and Proxy Studios, shares the same ethical concerns around AI as his peers – including energy usage, copyright and ownership, the risks of structural unemployment, and the difference in values between CEOs and workers – but from a purely practical perspective, he believes chatbots will become more common and better over the next decade.

He acknowledges this would be a “cultural shift” from writing to curating, and it also requires programmers who can better implement chatbots into games so that NPCs can react to player choices in the world.

Massaging a chatbot’s voice to make it less generic would be similar to prompting an AI in your daily life, he says. “You can say to it, write this in the style of a noir detective from the 1930s, but stay within our world, or, use an out-of-copyright or character voice, like Dickens, a character from Bleak House. And then you might have something more interesting.”

While his ethical concerns are very real, and immediate, he is perhaps a lick more optimistic than others. “I’m anxious about the people whose careers can get wiped out, and I’m anxious about the structural unemployment that comes with technological shifts. I’m excited to live in the future, and I’m excited to play games where there are AIs who are smart enough to have learned from the world and to react properly to what I’ve done. It’s been a dream for a long time.”

And he also believes that the industry needs to wake up to the inevitability of genAI. In other sectors it is being used to make junior staff redundant and “we can’t just pretend it’s not going to happen”.

“Instead of having these angry conversations about, how do we stop it, the conversations really could be more productive. How do we retain jobs? How do we retain creativity? How do we avoid this stuff being power-hungry and copyright-infringing? Can we make a version of this that we’re happy with? Can we work towards that? That conversation isn’t happening because the CEO class and everybody else is scared of engaging with AI.”

When asked, he says can’t think of anybody doing these things right at the moment.

“If you hold yourself up as a flagship and go, we make all of this stuff ourselves, everything is handcrafted, there are people who are willing to pay the extra price for luxury goods” - Dan Griliopoulos

One reason for optimism, he says, is that studios relying purely on human writers might more starkly stand out. Players may even be willing to pay more for those games, he says. “If you hold yourself up as a flagship and go, we make all of this stuff ourselves, everything is handcrafted, there are people who are willing to pay the extra price for luxury goods,” he says.

“Going out there and finding the strangeness and finding weird little edges that the AIs aren’t going to dig into, those are the bits of storytelling we can do better still. They can’t copy something if there’s nothing to copy. So, find the new stories, go and do your own research, read weird old books, watch strange films from other countries, before it all becomes an average block.”

Image credit:NetEase Games / Everstone Studio

To Younès Rabii, an indie developer and AI researcher, currently studying for a PhD at Queen Mary University in London, the chatbot in Where Winds Meet feels like a “black box commercial industry grade model”: a “cheap gimmick” that was never going to feel coherent with the world. “It felt like, in a way, avoiding the work of writing dialogue for a game and instead externalising this work to a system that doesn’t even seem adapted,” they say.

“There’s a sort of wish fulfillment thing behind this technology.” - Younès Rabii

LLMs have the advantages of generality and a giant knowledge base, but one of their disadvantages, as seen in Where Winds Meet, is specificity. “There’s a sort of wish fulfillment thing behind this technology: I can say whatever and I will get an answer. But honestly, you can do that with a dice. It doesn’t mean that the answer is relevant to you. That’s relevancy, that’s precision. That’s work that has been put in there by humans.”

Rabii believes it is theoretically possible to make a chatbot that is relevant and adapted to a specific game world, but it would take lots of work – human work. And at that point, you’re going beyond an LLM chatbot to what is effectively a procedural generation system, they say.

“Say we have a game set in a specific era in China or evoking specific folktales and stories. We want a genAI but we want to train it on sources that are from this era. Either historical sources that you have found and have translated, or texts that you have curated, cleaned and reformatted. Or, you’re hiring writers who write new stories and scenarios that you want to feed in. And all of this, it takes work and specificity. And this specificity is something that you do have to pay for,” Rabii says.

“It’s the cost of research. It’s the cost of writing and everything that is behind writing a good novel or a good story. If you avoid paying these costs, why would you have in any way the advantages of them?”

The industry, they say, needs to slow down. We must first understand the technology, its limitations, its costs – including a “catastrophic amount of energy” and creators not being paid for the work LLMs are trained on – and then “domesticate it”.

“It’s not impossible that one day AI systems will have a very interesting voice that is relevant and adapted, but behind it, humans will be putting in the work to make sure that this voice is interesting and relevant. And in a way it will be their voice too, because they’ll make decisions in that system.”

Image credit:Failbetter Games

Chris Gardiner, narrative director at Failbetter Games, says it’s easy to see the appeal of LLM-powered chatbot NPCs. The “cynical appeal”, he says, is cost: squeezing the most words from the fewest writers, which could ultimately “manifest as layoffs and lost institutional knowledge”.

But he also sees an idealistic appeal. “The promise of the fully-immersive game, where you can do anything and the world responds appropriately. Being able to talk to any NPC about any topic sounds like a big step towards that, right?”

That ideal – and the notion that LLMs move us towards it – is misguided, he says, because the product of writing is not words but meaning. “And generative AI can’t understand meaning, or perspective. It can’t have insight or appreciation. It can only algorithmically guess at what you expect to hear, with varying levels of success.”

Human writers can make the kind of deliberate choices that AI chatbots can’t, he says, inflecting incidental NPC lines “to imply something about the game’s society or recent events. They could add a joke, or tie it to the theme of the game, or foreshadow a future event, or contrast another piece of content elsewhere. All of which adds to the richness of the game.”

“[An LLM] doesn’t understand what a player might want or need. It doesn’t respect the player enough to give them what they didn’t know they wanted.” - Chris Gardiner

AI chatbots do give players agency of a sort: the freedom to say anything to an NPC and get a response. It lets players go “off the rails”. But writers already reward players who want to do this, he says. “Games like Baldur’s Gate 3 enable their players to go off the rails in the most wild, ambitious ways, and then give that meaning because a human writer hand-crafted a wicked or delightful consequence to it.

“An LLM couldn’t, because it doesn’t have interiority, or motive, or a sense of the wider and deeper truths of the game’s world. It doesn’t understand what a player might want or need. It doesn’t respect the player enough to give them what they didn’t know they wanted.”

More widely, he says, “even if I could set aside the ethical issues with generative AI that was scraped without permission or payment from creators (I can’t) or the environmental consequences (I won’t) or even the quality issues (I don’t want to) I still come back to the fundamental question of ‘why’? Why would we want less of those things I just talked about in our art and our games? Why have less ingenuity and craft in them? We deserve games that people worked on with passion.”

<img loading=“lazy” src=“https://assetsio.gnwcdn.com/coauhs.jpg?width=2048&height=2048&fit=bounds&quality=85&format=jpg&auto=webp" onerror=“this.onerror=null;this.src=‘https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhe7F7TRXHtjiKvHb5vS7DmnxvpHiDyoYyYvm1nHB3Qp2_w3BnM6A2eq4v7FYxCC9bfZt3a9vIMtAYEKUiaDQbHMg-ViyGmRIj39MLp0bGFfgfYw1Dc9q_H-T0wiTm3l0Uq42dETrN9eC8aGJ9_IORZsxST1AcLR7np1koOfcc7tnHa4S8Mwz_xD9d0=s16000';" alt=““Horrible”, “boring”, and “cheap”: Experts pan new chatbot NPCs, but some leave room for optimism - 9”>

Where Winds Meet

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All 75 Arc Raiders Blueprints and where to get them

These areas have the highest chance of giving you Blueprints

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Looking for more Arc Raiders Blueprints? It’s a special day when you find a Blueprint, as they’re among the most valuable items in Arc Raiders. If you find a Blueprint that you haven’t already found, then you must make sure you hold onto it at all costs, because Blueprints are the key to one of the most important and powerful systems of meta-progression in the game.

This guide aims to be the very best guide on Blueprints you can find, starting with a primer on what exactly they are and how they work in Arc Raiders, before delving into exactly where to get Blueprints and the very best farming spots for you to take in your search.

We’ll also go over how to get Blueprints from other unlikely activities, such as destroying Surveyors and completing specific quests. And you’ll also find the full list of all 75 Blueprints in Arc Raiders on this page (including the newest Blueprints added with the Cold Snap update , such as the Deadline Blueprint and Firework Box Blueprint), giving you all the information you need to expand your own crafting repertoire.

In this guide:

• What are Blueprints in Arc Raiders?
• Full Blueprint list: All crafting recipes
• Where to find Blueprints in Arc Raiders Blueprints obtained from quests Blueprints obtained from Trials Best Blueprint farming locations

What are Blueprints in Arc Raiders?

Blueprints in Arc Raiders are special items which, if you manage to extract with them, you can expend to permanently unlock a new crafting recipe in your Workshop. If you manage to extract from a raid with an Anvil Blueprint, for example, you can unlock the ability to craft your very own Anvil Pistol, as many times as you like (as long as you have the crafting materials).

To use a Blueprint, simply open your Inventory while in the lobby, then right-click on the Blueprint and click “Learn And Consume” . This will permanently unlock the recipe for that item in your Workshop. As of the Stella Montis update, there are allegedly 75 different Blueprints to unlock - although only 68 are confirmed to be in the game so far. You can see all the Blueprints you’ve found and unlocked by going to the Workshop menu, and hitting “R” to bring up the Blueprint screen.

It’s possible to find duplicates of past Blueprints you’ve already unlocked. If you find these, then you can either sell them, or - if you like to play with friends - you can take it into a match and gift it to your friend so they can unlock that recipe for themselves. Another option is to keep hold of them until the time comes to donate them to the Expedition.

Full Blueprint list: All crafting recipes

Below is the full list of all the Blueprints that are currently available to find in Arc Raiders, and the crafting recipe required for each item:

Note: The missing Blueprints in this list likely have not actually been added to the game at the time of writing, because none of the playerbase has managed to find any of them. As they are added to the game, I will update this page with the most relevant information so you know exactly how to get all 75 Arc Raiders Blueprints.

Where to find Blueprints in Arc Raiders

Below is a list of all containers, modifiers, and events which maximise your chances of finding Blueprints:

• Certain quests reward you with specific Blueprints .
• Completing Trials has a high chance of offering Blueprints as rewards.
• Surveyors have a decent chance of dropping Blueprints on death.
• High loot value areas tend to have a greater chance of spawning Blueprints.
• Night Raids and Storms may increase rare Blueprint spawn chances in containers.
• Containers with higher numbers of items may have a higher tendency to spawn Blueprints. As a result, Blue Gate (which has many “large” containers containing multiple items) may give you a higher chance of spawning Blueprints.
• Raider containers (Raider Caches, Weapon Boxes, Medical Bags, Grenade Tubes) have increased Blueprint drop rates. As a result, the Uncovered Caches event gives you a high chance of finding Blueprints.
• Security Lockers have a higher than average chance of containing Blueprints.
• Certain Blueprints only seem to spawn under specific circumstances: Tempest Blueprint only spawns during Night Raid events. Vulcano Blueprint only spawns during Hidden Bunker events. Jupiter and Equaliser Blueprints only spawn during Harvester events.

Raider Caches, Weapon Boxes, and other raider-oriented container types have a good chance of offering Blueprints. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blueprints have a very low chance of spawning in any container in Arc Raiders, around 1-2% on average. However, there is a higher chance of finding Blueprints in particular container types. Specifically, you can find more Blueprints in Raider containers and security lockers.

Beyond this, if you’re looking for Blueprints you should focus on regions of the map which are marked as having particularly high-value loot. Areas such as the Control Tower in Dam Battlegrounds, the Arrival and Departure Buildings in Spaceport, and Pilgrim’s Peak in Blue Gate all have a better-than-average chance of spawning Blueprints somewhere amongst all their containers. Night Raids and Electromagnetic Storm events also increase the drop chances of certain Blueprints .

In addition to these containers, you can often loot Blueprints from destroyed Surveyors - the largest of the rolling ball ARC. Surveyors are more commonly found on the later maps - Spaceport and Blue Gate - and if one spawns in your match, you’ll likely see it by the blue laser beam that it casts into the sky while “surveying”.

Surveyors are quite well-armoured and will very speedily run away from you once it notices you, but if you can take one down then make sure you loot all its parts for a chance of obtaining certain unusual Blueprints.

Blueprints obtained from quests

One way in which you can get Blueprints is by completing certain quests for the vendors in Speranza. Some quests will reward you with a specific item Blueprint upon completion, so as long as you work through all the quests in Arc Raiders, you are guaranteed those Blueprints.

Here is the full list of all Blueprints you can get from quest rewards:

• Trigger Nade Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Sparks Fly”.
• Lure Grenade Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Greasing Her Palms”.
• Burletta Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Industrial Espionage”.
• Hullcracker Blueprint (and Launcher Ammo Blueprint): Rewarded after completing “The Major’s Footlocker”.

Alas, that’s only 4 Blueprints out of a total of 75 to unlock, so for the vast majority you will need to find them yourself during a raid. If you’re intent on farming Blueprints, then it’s best to equip yourself with cheap gear in case you lose it, but don’t use a free loadout because then you won’t get a safe pocket to stash any new Blueprint you find. No pain in Arc Raiders is sharper than failing to extract with a new Blueprint you’ve been after for a dozen hours already.

One of the best ways to get Blueprints is by hitting three stars on all five Trials every week. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blueprints obtained from Trials

One of the very best ways to get Blueprints is as rewards for completing Trials in Arc Raiders. Trials are unlocked from Level 15 onwards, and allow you to earn rewards by focusing on certain tasks over the course of several raids. For example, one Trial might task you with dealing damage to Hornets, while another might challenge you to loot Supply Drops.

Trials refresh on a weekly basis, with a new week bringing five new Trials. Each Trial can offer up to three rewards after passing certain score milestones, and it’s possible to receive very high level loot from these reward crates - including Blueprints. So if you want to unlock as many Blueprints as possible, you should make a point of completing as many Trials as possible each week.

Best Blueprint farming locations

The very best way to get Blueprints is to frequent specific areas of the maps which combine high-tier loot pools with the right types of containers to search. Here are my recommendations for where to find Blueprints on every map, so you can always keep the search going for new crafting recipes to unlock.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Dam Battlegrounds

The best places to farm Blueprints on Dam Battlegrounds are the Control Tower, Power Generation Complex, Ruby Residence, and Pale Apartments . The first two regions, despite only being marked on the map as mid-tier loot, contain a phenomenal number of containers to loot. The Control Tower can also contain a couple of high-tier Security Lockers - though of course, you’ll need to have unlocked the Security Breach skill at the end of the Survival tree.

There’s also a lot of reporting amongst the playerbase that the Residential areas in the top-left of the map - Pale Apartments and Ruby Residence - give you a comparatively strong chance of finding Blueprints. Considering their size, there’s a high density of containers to loot in both locations, and they also have the benefit of being fairly out of the way. So you’re more likely to have all the containers to yourself.

Buried City

The best Blueprint farming locations on Buried City are the Santa Maria Houses, Grandioso Apartments, Town Hall, and the various buildings of the New District . Grandioso Apartments has a lower number of containers than the rest, but a high chance of spawning weapon cases - which have good Blueprint drop rates. The others are high-tier loot areas, with plenty of lootable containers - including Security Lockers.

Spaceport

The best places to find Blueprints on Spaceport are the Arrival and Departure Buildings, as well as Control Tower A6 and the Launch Towers . All these areas are labelled as high-value loot regions, and many of them are also very handily connected to one another by the Spaceport wall, which you can use to quickly run from one area to the next. At the tops of most of these buildings you’ll find at least one Security Locker, so this is an excellent farming route for players looking to find Blueprints.

The downside to looting Blueprints on Spaceport is that all these areas are hotly contested, particularly in Duos and Squads. You’ll need to be very focused and fast in order to complete the full farming route.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blue Gate

Blue Gate tends to have a good chance of dropping Blueprints, potentially because it generally has a high number of containers which can hold lots of items; so there’s a higher chance of a Blueprint spawning in each container. In my experience, the best Blueprint farming spots on Blue Gate are Pilgrim’s Peak, Raider’s Refuge, the Ancient Fort, and the Underground Complex beneath the Warehouse .

All of these areas contain a wealth of containers to loot. Raider’s Refuge has less to loot, but the majority of the containers in and around the Refuge are raider containers, which have a high chance of containing Blueprints - particularly during major events.

Stella Montis

On the whole, Stella Montis seems to have a very low drop rate for Blueprints (though a high chance of dropping other high-tier loot). If you do want to try farming Blueprints on this map, the best places to find Blueprints in Stella Montis are Medical Research, Assembly Workshop, and the Business Center . These areas have the highest density of containers to loot on the map.

In addition to this, the Western Tunnel has a few different Security Lockers to loot, so while there’s very little to loot elsewhere in this area of the map, it’s worth hitting those Security Lockers if you spawn there at the start of a match.

That wraps up this primer on how to get all the Blueprints in Arc Raiders as quickly as possible. With the Expedition system constantly resetting a large number of players’ Blueprints, it’s more important than ever to have the most up-to-date information on where to find all these Blueprints.

While you’re here, be sure to check out our Arc Raiders best guns tier list , as well as our primers on the best skills to unlock and all the different Field Depot locations on every map.

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ARC Raiders

PS5 , Xbox Series X/S , PC

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