Players have to look for openings in the back-and-forth and use those to find out more about the world and Bloom, my fellow resistance fighter. When I asked him, why he wanted to fight the megacorporations, he mentioned that he had a son, so I asked about his name. He said the child was named Evrand. That effort increased the trust level between us at the same time a robot beside us commented on my interviewing prowess.

The chat between me and the NPC showed how players will have to figure out ways to artfully bring up subjects and investigate the the character in front of them. I learned that Bloom was nonviolent and was a generally positive person. If I went beyond the boundaries and asked a random question, the AI would steer the conversation to be on mission in a subtle way.

During one of the more surreal answers, Mosser said the Neo NPC was hallucinating. Sometimes, when a question pierces the knowledge base, they come up with vague answers that sometimes sound normal.

Planning a heist

The other part of the demo led me to Iron. She’s a female leader of the resistance and asks for my opinion on a mission to break into a villa and steal some files. Around the front yard, there are several possibilities. A tree nearby could allow access to a window and a grappling hook was one of the tools. I brought up the tree first but she had hesitations about it because she didn’t know if a branch would hold up both of us. She took to the grappling hook idea.

Looking over other tools available, I saw a note where Bloom was supposed to praise or mention what he thought of you based on your prior talk, according to Mosser. It’s another generative twist in the gameplay that shows how players impact the characters.

The next section dealt with the guard, and the first thing I asked was if we knew anything about him. She said he had prior military experience so I knew maybe a tranquilizer dart may not be a good idea. I suggested sleeping gas and she liked that idea. The last section was the surveillance camera and I brought up the idea of an EMP but she said it would cause too much of a ruckus. It also wasn’t on the list of tools. The most obvious answer was a smoke bomb but I also saw a diagram, where we could cut the electricity. I went with that.

She then asked what should we do if things went awry and the guards found us. I responded, saying, “I’m going to curl up in a ball and cry.” Iron actually got my sarcasm but wasn’t amused by my joke.

Unfortunately, the AI demo took what I said literally and it showed you the result of the attempted heist in the third part. We failed. That joke had serious repercussions as Bloom gave a run down in the after-action report. He said that my bawling did provide enough distraction for us to escape, but we didn’t get the files. Again, the technology isn’t perfect it showed some fascinating gameplay opportunities and unexpected responses.

Final thoughts

It seems as though AI in games is still a bit of a ways off, but there are moments where it could be used in subtle gameplay ways. That Bloom note is an example of generative AI creating a summary of your actions. That could be helpful if you’re returning to a game after a few months and need to know what you did previously. For some of the more ambitious elements such as the Neo NPCs, that’s going to be much more impactful when it comes to story-driven games.

It fundamentally changes how video games are written. Although branching dialogue doesn’t need to be written, the characters that game studios create have to be more nuanced and have a deeper background. They need to have stories and motivations behind their actions and respones. Writers will need to come up with whether they grew up with pets, who their parents were, what matters to them and how the perceive the world. It’s up to the writers to put the ghost in the machine.

In order to bring characters to life, studios need people who can create compelling characters, and if they don’t, they will appear off to players who are bound to ask them all sorts of questions. Mosser said they’ll hallucinate answers that may not jibe with the fiction.

That in turn will require deeper lore from which the AI bots need to draw from. Games have bibles worth of stories that never reach the masses, but having AI bring that up through conversation would be a more immersive way to expose players to that narrative than through walls of texts or random pickups.

As for the acting, there’s a long way to go before AI can capture the nuance and subtlety of human performances. Many of the character’s performance felt flat compared to human voice acting. It’s notable though that the characters that stood out in my mind were the confrontational ones. Diego Martinez and WENDY the robot left more of an impression than the polite and nice NPCs.

Although having a game full of Neo NPCs seems a little daunting or far in the future with amount of storytelling involved, it could be good and doable in spurts. It would be a way to bring more narrative depth in the down moments of a campaign. It would create more compelling moments that match the realism that players see in the graphics.

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