"Have you ever dreamed of having a real conversation with an NPC in a video game?" asks a new blog post by Ubisoft. "Not just one gated within a dialogue tree of pre-determined answers, but an actual conversation, conducted through spontaneous action and reaction?"
Ubisoft is currently working on bringing AI NPCs into games. So far, this is just a creative experiment by a small R&D team in Ubisoft's Paris studio. Collaborating with Nvidia and Inworld, the game developer is working on characters that are able to respond to you in real time.
These characters are sculpted with personalities, backstories, and more, before their language is then tweaked until they fit Ubisoft's vision of the character. It sounds a bit like Westworld, where the androids are each given story parameters to follow.
"For the first time in my life, I can have a conversation with a character I've created. I've dreamed of that since I was a kid," said narrative director Virginie Mosser.
What do you think of AI NPCs?