Ubisoft will use AI to improve the realism of NPCs in games

Artificial intelligence can be applied in the world of video games in many different ways. NVIDIA was one of the first to take advantage of this to build an intelligent image scaling and reconstruction system, as well as GPU-independent image generation. Ubisoft has also seen the potential of this technology and wants to take advantage of it improve playability and realism in games.

To achieve this goal Ubisoft confirmed the creation of Ghostwriterwhich is an AI-based tool that will help its authors create a first draft dedicated to the comments, reactions and sounds that NPCs produce when we interact with them in the game, either in a more complex way (long dialogues with different conversation and response options) or simple (linear responses that offer no further development).

In addition to making the job easier for writers, Ubisoft also hopes the tool will help improve the realism of interacting with NPCss, generating different responses that best suit the particularities of each scene and each conversation. I find the last one the most interesting of all, as conversation and interaction with NPCs are the two things that have improved the least in games over the years.

We will have to wait and see what results Ubisoft achieves with this tool, but the truth is that it is promising, especially considering that the French studio tends to develop primarily sandbox-type games, and that in these interactions with NPCs are constant and occur at different levels.

The Assassin’s Creed saga is an excellent example, but it is not the only one, also remember The Division, where we have the main NPC and the random ones that we find on the map, and normally they respond with the classic two or three phrases that they repeat over and over. Enhancing these interactions with this AI-based tool would add a greater level of depth to the game, enhancing immersion and realism.

I personally think that this approach by Ubisoft is successful and that the improvement in the realism of interactions with NPCs in general is one of the great backlog of video games. Take a moment to think about how dialogue with NPCs worked in classic games like Fallout and how they work today in contemporary titles and you’ll realize what I’m saying, we’ve evolved very little.

Artificial intelligence could also be used to improve many other aspects of a video game, though there are certainly two that would be particularly interesting. one of them is creating real-time and chained random events Tracing a cause-and-effect relationship that doesn’t repeat monotonously, but rather changes depending on the game itself and our actions. The second would be adapting enemies to our character developmentand their skills.