Everstone Studios’ free-to-play action-adventure-RPG Where Winds Meet is a game that gives over many of its NPC conversations to chatbots. But these NPCs aren’t necessarily smarter because they’re AI. In fact, players have discovered some easy-to-exploit loopholes in the chat model that convinces NPCs to hand over their side-quest loot or money even when you haven’t done anything at all.
Players on Reddit noticed that the AI-powered chatbot NPCs often put their emotional responses and actions in parentheses. That led to the discovery that telling an NPC that you did something to fulfill their quest inside of a parentheses will cause the NPC to believe you’ve already done it. And the game rewards players for that deception by having the NPC hand over whatever item they promised the player for their help.
At first, I tried to speak normally to the chatbots, but then I realized you have the power of (divine truth)
byu/Proximis inWhereWindsMeet
While Everstone may eventually fix that workaround, it’s not the only way to mislead the NPCs. Another user on Reddit found that repeating the NPC’s last statement as a question can eventually wear it down until it hands over the item. The user called it, “the Metal Gear method.”
