AI in Gaming: Smarter NPCs, Endless Worlds, and New Challenges
AI-Driven NPCs: Talking and Evolving Characters Video game characters are getting a brain boost. New AI-driven NPCs (non-player characters) can carry on conversations almost like real people. For example, Nvidia’s Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) uses a small language model running on your graphics card to let you chat naturally with in-game characters. The upcoming mech game Mecha Break is one of the first to showcase this tech, allowing players to ask an NPC for advice on which mech to pick, just by talking, instead of picking dialogue from a menu. Sony is even experimenting with an AI version of Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn , where the character’s responses are generated on the fly by GPT-4 and other AI models. In a leaked demo, Aloy recognized voice questions via OpenAI’s Whisper and answered with a synthesized voice and facial expressions—all powered by Sony’s in-house tech. It’s a big step toward game characters that remember and respond with more personality, instead of repeating can...