Ubisoft’s neo NPCs interact with players in real time.
Courtesy of Ubisoft
The next two parts of the demo are not nearly as engaging. In one, I’m watching a drone feed with an NPC who answers my (many) questions and keeps me updated about what’s happening. I’m far less interested in the extraction in progress and more in poking the NPC to find his guardrails—being rude, asking deeply personal questions, or simply declaring “I’m pretty sleepy” at a critical point in the mission. This urge to troll, to distract, and to test, it turns out, makes me like every other player.
“I think it’s a normal part of things. And we are not naive,” Malet says, well aware that some players are going to get very ugly with their characters. “We want to make it interesting. You’re playing with a toy.”
This cuts both ways. These characters still exist within a box, where narrative designers have created their backgrounds and personalities. As AI characters get closer to becoming a part of mainstream games, their creators will need to keep them from going completely off-the-rails, to learn from AI bots that can mislead their conversation partners or be lured into NSFW discussions. Ubisoft isn’t ready to release its AI into a video game, and the demos it has shown aren’t yet playable by the public, where the real stress testing can begin.
For now, its work remains something of a curiosity. The final portion of the demo is more about strategy, where I’m left to discuss the pitfalls of a potential plan, from escape routes to distracting guards. The current NPC has already heard all about me. A note nearby proclaims me “eager but clueless,” and that I ask a lot of questions. “Watch out for his sleepy spells though,” it warns, the specificity of which delighted me. Malet says the team has barely scratched the surface on what they can do.
Playing along, it was easy to see the promise of AI. My first thought was how well it could work for dating sims, or in a series like Mass Effect where so much of the game’s allure is bonding with teammates. The novelty of it all and the potential for role-play is enticing, but there’s still something uncanny and wooden about the experience. Bloom still has some growing to do.
