Ubisoft has in recent years vigorously developed the Generation AI, its product Neo NPC prototype, which was officially published on November 22, following the first appearance of GDC 2024, the first Generation AI Experiment Project ” Teammates ” (Teammates) to be experienced by players.
Ubisoft, based on a first-person shooting game, shows how the NPC, which imported Teammates, can become a teammate who can communicate naturally with the player through large language models, voice recognition and instant decision-making.
The core function of Teammates revolves around instant voice commands, and the experimental focus is not on making a complete game, but on exploring AI to change the way the game interacts, raise the feeling of insinuation and create narratives and games that were not possible in the past.
According to Ubisoft official reports, the player acted as a member of the resistance in the game experiment and went to the enemy base to find five missing mates. There are three AI rolemates in the process, including
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Gaspar: Voice Assistant + Tactical Guide (pure AI, non-entity)
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Pablo: NPC teammates
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Sofia: NPC teammates
Jaspar has far more functionality than a general voice assistant, who can proactively mark the enemy or objects, provide player worldviews and mission alerts, and help you adjust HUD, set options, open selection lists, assist color-blind models or interfaces, or even talk to players in a natural way.
Ubisoft states that the bottom-up technology of Jaspar, Teammates, understands environmental information, even the tone and intent of a real player, and the context of the game, and thus provides an instant response that is extremely natural and has a role character.
Pablo and Sofia in the experiment also imported Teammates, but unlike Jaspar, the first two are NPCs that are present and understand relatively vague voice instructions and do not need a player to deliver them word to word.
The practical examples include two NPCs who, while the player has not yet acquired a weapon, command the enemy with a bunker, asking Pablo to “screw on the left deck” and then Sofia to “deal with the other enemy” and, after the battle, ask for mutual praise.
Foreign media Game Devloper points out that the NPC is very flexible in its understanding of the content of the speech, is completely free of the strict rereading of the command format and is able to react immediately in complex battles, even with the help of the NPC to solve riddles, remove threats and support combat.
Ubisoft describes the ” Teammattes ” , which was built by 80 researchers, combined with the Google Gemini model with the Ubisoft home-mediated software (middleware) and compatible with the Snowdrop engine, which is used in games such as the ” Nationwide blockade ” , Avanda: Pendora Border)
Ubisoft’s input on the generated AI significantly multiplied compared to the development of the prototype AI in 2023, which had only 25 people.
Xavier Manzanares, the director in charge of the AI game, said that the team wanted to get the generated AI out of the label “Punal Words” and become a real tool to influence how it feels.
In the face of doubts that AI would replace the developers, Ubisoft Narrator Virginia Mosser stressed:
Ubisoft says that the real objective of this technology is to strengthen human creativity, to allow players to experience more “so-built” narratives, and to enable NPC to respond more naturally to the scale of interactive games that have never been seen before.
At this stage, Teammates has invited hundreds of players through Ubisoft Connect for a closed test. Ubisoft has indicated that feedback from the player will have a direct impact on the way forward, and the development team has recently released a narrative film to present more complete information to the public.
