These days, you can’t even walk into a ramen shop without hearing the topic of AI being mentioned. It’s only fair that we talk about our new, hopefully not evil, overlords and all that they have to offer.
AI has most recently taken over Nvidia, and they have revealed a new tool that can be used in game development called ‘ACE for games’. ACE for games gives developers the ability to provide NPCs with AI chat features, allowing for a deeper, unscripted and hopefully more realistic conversation between players and in-game characters.
They have combined this with another piece of programming called Audio2Face, which is meant to allow the facial features of the NPC to match the unscripted dialogue.
While the video showing off all this fantastic, new software is excellent, it still feels a little underwhelming. If I didn’t know this was AI, non-scripted text, I would’ve very easily guessed so. The conversation still feels very monotonous and flat. At least we can still spot our overlords out in the wild, for now.
Of course, this AI technology is still very new and will improve tenfold before it hits any non-modded games. I do have a few concerns, though. Is this the death of storytelling in games? Will every story just be generated by some internet-gathered data? How will I be able to cry over the death of a character in the arms of my gaming brothers and sisters if, in their story, the character didn’t even exist?
For now, we have not been given a date as to when developers will have access to ACE for games, but Audio2Face is already in use, and we should see it soon in the upcoming Fort Solis and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2.
What do you think of AI being used in gaming? Let us know in the comments below.