Ubisoft Is Creating NPCs With Real Hopes & Dreams, Capable Of Full Conversations

Ubisoft has changed the way players will be able to interact with NPCs going forward. While serving the purpose of making a game world feel more lived in and immersive, NPCs could sometimes become one of the more annoying parts of an open-world title, spewing the same dialogue time and time again as players interact with them, with one of the most infamous examples being in Bethesda's, where players would hear the like "" many times on their adventures, because archers clearly seem to favor knee-shots in northern Tamriel.

As revealed by Ubisoft, a small R&D team at Ubisoft’s Paris studio has collaborated with Nvidia’s Audio2Face application and Inworld’s Large Language Model (LLM) to create NPCs with whom players can have real, spontaneous interactions, rather than following selected dialogue trees of pre-determined answers. Their project, NEO NPC, has been achieved by using generative AI, something that Ubisoft previously announced it would be using for select titles going forward, but has been a point of controversy within the game industry, due to many believing it could replace developers, actors or writers.

Ubisoft is currently presenting NEO NPC at the 2024 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco event.

According to Ubisoft's announcement, NEO NPC will "." The studio states that the project is a «hugely collaborative effort» across artistic and scientific disciplines to ensure this "" is present, meaning that human creativity is still needed at its core. Generative AI is used on the technical side to help expand this in the game to add value to the player and enrich their interactions.

Characters are programmed to react to player behavior, so if a player is behaving aggressively toward an NPC, the character will notice this and may be less collaborative in response.

To do this, the core personalities of these NPCs aren’t created by a machine, but by a writer. This writer is responsible for initially shaping their character, backstory, conversation style,