I heard chatGPT play rebuild 3 gangs of Dennisville and it worked surprisingly well actually. And if you want my credentials, I have 260 hours in this game and I’ve beaten the story mode probably four times by now, so I know what’s going on.
I started it off by playing quick play and asked it what profession it would like to be. It showed scavenger, which isn’t in the game, so I made it choose between shop clerk and hobo. I forgot to tell it the equipment that came with the classes, however, it wouldn’t actually decide. I had to trick it into deciding, so I asked it to leave it up to a coin flip and we came out with hobo.
I also asked it the gender of the main character and the name. It showed a gender-neutral name, Max, and a male protagonist. So we have a male hobo named Max. I used to know a male hobo IRL named Max. I didn’t give him any money and I don’t think he liked me very much.
Moving on, I asked it to decide the difficulty and map size we could play on. It showed a big map, so I left that up to a coin flip as well. The robot won’t make choices, so we played on normal mode.
Now, let me explain the survivors that we have. We have a level 5 scavenger, a level one soldier, a builder, and another scavenger who is also level one. You start with this every time. I also explained the buildings outside of the walls, which are basically a bunch of farms, a residence, and an empty lot.
The first action the bot took was to send the scavengers to scavenge a nearby building. It didn’t specify where, so that’s my fault. I didn’t lay out where the resources were. I asked the builder to reconstruct the empty lot into a more useful structure, but it got mixed up because the empty lot is outside the walls. The soldier was told to stand guard in the base, which is a complete waste of time at this stage in the game.
I messed up by reflexively sending the soldier to kill zombies, but I fixed it before it impacted the game. Since the scavenging squad finished their task quickly, I asked the bot to reallocate them and it decided to send them to assist in the construction project. It specified that the useful building should be a housing thing, which I had on the farm before because it didn’t specify.
While the apartment was being constructed, a horde of four entire zombies attacked. We shattered the zombies into a trillion pieces because at this stage in the game, a level one leader could kill four zombies by himself. The bot didn’t understand the mechanics of the game and asked me to coordinate repairs on the walls and assess damages, which are not game mechanics. I let the bot know that the attack left us undamaged and asked for further instruction.
The bot got confused and asked me to coordinate repairs on the walls and assess damages again. It also asked me to play the game by myself, considering scouting and scavenging nearby locations, and to keep the soldier on patrol. I sent Max and the level one scavenger out to scout, and left the soldier at home patrolling.
The bot clearly doesn’t understand the mechanics of the game, but it made an attempt to keep everyone alive. It seemed to have a penchant for keeping survivors alive, as it had our soldier constantly patrolling the base. It was terrified of expanding and didn’t fully grasp the fact that you could rebuild buildings. It didn’t attempt to expand whatsoever.
In conclusion, this experiment shows that if you sat down and had risks of steel or voice input, you could probably have the bot play through the entire game. However, it’s suicidal to input every single thing, especially when the game scales so rapidly. The bot doesn’t fully understand the mechanics of the game, but it still made an attempt to keep everyone alive. It was a wholesome challenge, but it would be better to play with someone who fully grasps the mechanics.
I was inspired by a video on the same concept and I would like to explore this more in-depth on Fallout 2. I just completed Fallout 2 with a 40-hour playthrough, getting to level 24 and everything. I would maybe like to make a video about this on Rebuild. It’s kind of like being the dungeon master for someone who doesn’t fully grasp the game. It’s a wholesome challenge, but you’d rather DM for someone who grasps the mechanics.
Here are some bloopers because I did this all live in DaVinci Resolve. All the audio recording, I can hear myself echoing. And yeah, I hear some bloopers. The bot sends him back to reinforce the wall as it is literally shaking in its boots. Since cinch cinch, what do you mean cinch? Since the scavenging holy and the robot decided to send them to…
