The author appreciated that Ubisoft gave him a reason to interact with the chatbots, with in-game objectives like learning more about the megacorps and the NPCs' pasts. However, he found the responses from the NPCs to be slightly awkward and stunted, with lag before replies and occasional vocal stutters. Despite these issues, the author enjoyed the experience and is looking forward to seeing how this technology evolves in the future.
Key takeaways:
- Ubisoft has been experimenting with AI NPCs, or non-player characters, in a collaboration with Nvidia and Inworld.ai. The company has developed a prototype called "Neo NPCs".
- The Neo NPCs are designed to have "real-time emotion and animation," "contextual awareness," and "collaborative decision-making," but the author found the demo to be somewhat awkward and not much of an advancement from Nvidia’s previous cyberpunk ramen shop demo.
- One of the NPCs, named Bloom, was able to engage in a conversation with the author, responding to questions and comments in a way that suggested a level of contextual understanding and emotional response.
- Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot emphasized that the goal is not to make the AI NPCs human, but to make games more intelligent and reactive to player actions. However, it's still a prototype and Ubisoft has not committed to shipping them in a full game yet.