NVIDIA has been working on adding generative AI to non-playable characters (NPCs) for a while now. The company is hoping a newly-announced partnership with Ubisoft will accelerate development of this technology and, ultimately, bring these AI-driven NPCs to modern games.
Ubisoft helped build new “NEO NPCs” by using NVIDIA’s Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) technology, with an assist from dynamic NPC experts Inworld AI.
Characters that don’t repeat the same phrase over and over, while ignoring the surrounding violent mayhem.
These NEO NPCs are said to interact in real time with players, the environment and other in-game characters. NVIDIA says this opens up “new possibilities for emergent storytelling.” To that end, Ubisoft’s narrative team built complete backgrounds, knowledge bases and conversational styles for two NPCs as a proof of concept.
These are fully-fleshed out characters with “environmental and contextual awareness” along with conversational memory. NVIDIA says each character excels with “collaboration and strategic decision-making.” The company also incorporated its Audio2Face technology to allow for appropriate facial animations and lip syncing. NVIDIA suggests that these characters push “the boundaries of game design and immersion.”
The company just unveiled its next-generation of GPUs, an evolution of the chips that are used to train large language models. The company promises that its Blackwell chips are seven to 30 times faster than the H100 series and use 25 times less power.