With Nvidia's new AI technology, there will be no more arrows to the knees.
At Computex in Taiwan, Nvidia presented two new AI technologies at once. Firstly, the DGX GH200 AI supercomputer for a gigantic memory with 144 TB for equally gigantic AI models. The other is their new service "Nvidia ACE for Games", which is aimed at the video game industry, but which offers incredibly exciting possibilities for gamers.
Nvidias Unique AI Technology: ACE
ACE is primarily intended to make the NPCs act and speak more realistically and, above all, more naturally. This way, the AI would be responsible for the background story of each individual character and also for ensuring that there is a suitable answer to the player's question. And this question can even be asked via voice input with Nvidia's technology.
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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang demonstrated this at Computex with a short dialog sequence with a ramen shop owner. The video shows you the whole Computex keynote, the demo starts at 10:51 and ends at 11:50, if you are just curious how the dialogs might look like in the future.
Besides this scene having amazing graphics, Huang furthermore explains they haven't scripted the conversation, they just gave the NPC his backstory and infused him with the AI. Thanks to Large Language Models (LLM) the AI is capable of understanding what you're saying and responding reasonably to that.
What It Means For Future Games
In the future, AI could not only help with technical things like rendering, but also bring the NPCs to life. This would mean that we would no longer have to deal with generic, repetitive sentences.
So to the well known "Once I was an adventurer like you, but then I took an arrow to the knee." you could reply, "For f*cks fake, I know! You've told me thirty times already! Why don't you tell me something about your adventures." And would even get a short anecdote, maybe even with a side quest. The game worlds would be a lot more lively, and maybe it would prevent players from becoming the greatest villain if there was a story behind every NPC.
The approach would therefore also be interesting as far as enemies are concerned. Maybe it would be possible to learn more about their intentions, and I'm not talking about the bosses, but about their minions. Why do they work for him? Do they have family? With the AI behind the NPCs, it would be conceivable that you could also persuade them instead of fighting them, which would offer significantly more options for your own personal play style.
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Not to mention games where the player already has a closer bond with one or more NPCs anyway. Like Master Chief and Cortana or the protagonist of the Dragon Age series with their companions. The bond you build with some NPCs can be quite strong. This usually happens when these characters are well written and seem more human than the generic faces that always tell you the same thing.
What it means for the gameplay when all of a sudden all NPCs have their own character, story and life is an exciting idea. However, it will still take some time until this is the case. Because even if the demo is impressive, it still seems a bit robotic and certainly needs some polishing before it is ready for the market and can fully exploit the possibilities. However, considering the rapid pace of development in AI research, we can assume that this could be the case sooner than we currently think.
