PUBG teammates not good enough? Nvidia's new generative AI-led 'Co-Playable Character' aims to offer you an alternative

Nvidia has announced a partnership with a handful of developers to create AI teammates, which is informed by Nvidia's own generative and responsive AI. This is to say that the AI teammates here are a little more intelligent than those you may have come across before.

AI that is used to dictate what NPCs do and what paths they take is generally fairly different to the AI used in creating images with six fingers and generating documents. However, Nvidia is combining the two, alongside PUBG publisher Krafton to make PUBG Ally.

This new AI system allows you to chat with an AI-led teammate, who can take orders and fire at enemies. In the YouTube clip (via The Verge) showing it off, the player asks for some ammo and a better piece of armour, and the bot not only finds it and pings it, but says it has done so. So far, so good. It is already more communicative than the average player I come across in PUBG.

As well as this, the AI teammate spotted an enemy, let the player know, and laid down covering fire. Of course, this is just a proof of concept and highly scripted so we don't know how it will shape out in actual games but this could be a genuinely good use for AI in games.

Just last year, Ubisoft announced the potential use of generative AI for NPCs in singleplayer games and I've always thought this feels like a gimmick, replacing the bespoke experience of talking to scripted NPCs with something I'd get bored of very quickly. However, being able to dynamically communicate with a bot could be good for when my friends are offline and I just want one more game. And adding a multiplayer chatbot doesn't run the risk of pushing artists out of games like other uses of generative AI.

However, we don't quite know how that will affect ranked mode and similar competitive play as having a teammate who is literally designed by AI to do everything you want it to could result in complaints of cheating. In the blog post for this new tech, Nvidia announced it would also be used for battle royale game Naraka: Bladepoint, AI characters in Sims-like Inzoi, and as smart enemies in MIR5.

Nvidia ACE, first announced at Computex 2023, is also powering conversational AI, like that in the Ubisoft post earlier on in the murder mystery game Dead Meat, AI People, a sandbox game, and ZooPunk, the follow-up to F.I.S.T: Forged in Shadow Torch.

Generative AI is worming its way into many facets of gaming and, though I rather dislike the prospect of AI-generated dialogue and art, slapping a chatbot onto multiplayer bots feels like it could work with some finetuning. Though Bladepoint's AI companions are set to launch in March this year, we don't yet have word on the rest.

We'll need to test out this tech for ourselves to see if its gets close to the chaos of playing with a few buddies.