Ubisoft knows that investors are still all・in on AI-generated Npcs, according to a recent Q&A session (accessible on Ubisoft's website), fielding Queries after financial reports, CEO Yves Guillemot said that creepy NPCs need to be able to deliver nasty, stilted performance. He insisted that there is still a bright future.

Okay — it's not entirely fair. The practical use of AI in game development is one of the boring, immersive, and not-so-grunting tasks that no one else wants to do - as Ghostcrawler, the former WoW lead, puts it - "shitty" tasks such as "continents make sloping cliffs into the ocean." Or you could point to the wondrous nature of the said voice line while making sure the actors whose AI is trained get decent royalties from the deal.That is, what Stellaris is doing with the recent DLC.

However, when Ubisoft promoted NEO Npc during the GDC, I didn't see exactly convincing evidence of revolutionary new technology, and certainly "even of a great paradigm shift, Ubisoft seems to be doing everything in its power to make these things happen (thanks, Gamesradar)."

"We have 2 groups working on [generative] AI," Guillemot says, but for efficiency and automation, 1 team is working on potential use cases for "marketing, sales, IT, legal and all other jobs." "It's going very well.

"On the other side, we can improve the quality of our games to make those games more vivid — we announced NEO Npc at the last meeting, but that's what I expect a lot from the [generated] AI of our games to make our games more interesting and for people to have a truly personalized experience." It will be.

When I look at this (certainly early) prototype, I don't exactly think of the phrase "more alive and richer". Maybe I'm just curmudgeon — here's courtesy of Corbin Brown's demo on YouTube, so you can judge for yourself — but the whole cloth AI generated ca

that rolls my eyes every time I hear Cage AI in these fervent terms is that it's always quoting the exact weakness of the technology. I think it's just bad at delivering content that actually feels detailed, deliberate, deliberate, or rich — and praises it as a potential strength. Why are we trying to turn the printing press equivalent to the bestselling author because the developers already feel like it's figured out by now

In the end, the good story is deliberate, and prudence is what AI lacks in sky spades. The asterion in Valders Gate 3, for example, is buzzing with life and abundance, and as far as he is concerned, there is no AI generation in sight — every handwritten story is really reactive to sacrifice. Personally, I don't think it's worth getting rid of a charming Mien like Gail about getting a burger after saving Sword Coast. 

But there may be a grunt job equivalent to these NEO Npcs — even then, I find it hard to think of anything. 

Take a random NPC joke, for example. At first glance, it may seem like something you can get an AI to do. But even the most random background conversations (at least in well—written games) were deliberately used by worldbuild to inform story beats and specifically target off-screen NPCs

Anyway, maybe Ubisoft proved me wrong, and after 10 years I've cranked straight out of the algorithm for a touching performance. You'll be playing an eternal game that makes me cry every minute with a performance - but I still think the idea of a game that you can play forever is what a lot of people think they want, but you'll get bored very quickly.