Ubisoft has unveiled Teammate, a new experimental research project in the field of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI).
The company says it intends to explore “how artificial intelligence can be used to deepen the player experience through real-time voice commands and enhanced gameplay.”
To demonstrate this research, the game Teammate was developed as a first-person shooter on the Snowdrop Engine (which powers Department And Star Wars Outlaws) featuring two AI squadmates, Pablo and Sofia, and an AI assistant named Jaspar. In this experience, the player controls a member of the resistance in a dystopian future as he fights through an enemy base to find missing team members.
Voice commands play a big role here, with players telling Sofia and Pablo how to use environmental cover and who to attack. On top of that, Jaspar can highlight enemies, provide additional narrative details, change game settings, and even pause the game simply if the player talks to him.
According to Ubisoft, these AI tools are designed to help players interact with the game in different ways.
“We hope that players will feel like they are shaping the story rather than just following it,” said Ubisoft narrative director Virginie Mosser. in a Ubisoft blog post. “When I talk to [my AI squad mate] Sophia, she responds to what I tell her and it changes my experience. For me, this is a real breakthrough, allowing players to experience the story in their own way.”
Xavier Manzanares, GenAI's director of gameplay, said in a blog post that Jaspar “helped players when they were lost or didn't know what to do, he could access menus and settings, tell players more about the world and the story.” According to him, this made the team think about “how a system like this could be interesting for a variety of games.”
Of course, anything related to generative artificial intelligence immediately attracts attention, and this is even acknowledged in the blog.
“The team is aware of criticisms of AI in games,” Ubisoft writes. “The goal is not to replace creatives, but to find ways to improve them by combining the strengths of technology with the human creativity and ingenuity that is critical to making games.”
Mosser said in a blog post that she, too, had concerns, but found that it was “the exact opposite of taking the human out of the process,” as she still wrote the story and characters' personalities while setting “fences” for the AI to stay within. “They can improvise, but we still set the rules and direct the story and characters,” she said.
On the one hand, improving companions in CPU-driven games isn't inherently a bad thing. After all, the more realistic the ally behaves, the more immersed you can be in the experience.
But on the other hand, there are still many concerns about the use of GenAI. While Ubisoft will theoretically do its best to train models using special writing prompts, there is still no guarantee that GenAI is selecting content ethically. In particular, we have seen cases of A.I. stealing people's art or even voices.
There is also always the fear that companies will use AI to replace artists such as writers, especially now that they continue to tighten their belts. (Ubisoft itself laid off hundreds of employees in recent months as part of broader cost-cutting measures.) While someone like Ubisoft's narrative director Mosser may still play an active role in game development, who's to say that management won't eventually make those roles redundant for AI?
At the moment, many questions remain about artificial intelligence, and, of course, not only about Ubisoft. The French gaming giant, for its part, says its teammates have already tested with several hundred players in a closed play test and plans to continue improving the technology. It remains to be seen what will come of this, but Ubisoft has hinted that it plans to share an “explainer video” about the teammates at some point.
Image credit: Ubisoft
Source: Ubisoft
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