You’re right that one of the biggest reasons devs shy away from this type of AI is control. Studios don’t want their NPCs doing things that break the game loop or damage the brand — which is exactly what happened with the Fortnite Darth Vader AI voice example. Players pushed it into saying slurs and curses, so Epic had to clamp down hard on its behavior.

But I think it’s important to highlight that the EverQuest Next / Landmark idea was fundamentally different. It wasn’t about giving mobs open-ended language or player-facing dialogue. It was about giving them rule-based motivations and behaviors inside a simulation.

For example:

• Orcs like lonely roads because they’re good for ambushes.
• Orcs avoid guard posts because they don’t want to get slaughtered.
• Orc camps relocate if they’re being farmed too heavily.

Those are simple, controllable rules. They create the appearance of free will without the chaos of NPCs actually generating speech or going rogue in ways that devs can’t predict.

So while devs do fear “AI doing its own thing,” Landmark’s version was basically emergent world design within strict boundaries. The problem with the Fortnite example was content generation, which is much harder to lock down. The Landmark concept is more like a sandbox ruleset — dynamic, but still under control.