Ubisoft


Fielding queries after a financial report, CEO Yves Guillemot insisted that there's still a bright future for uncanny NPCs delivering awkward and stilted performances with precious little intention behind them.

Alright—that's not entirely fair. There are some practical uses for AI in game development, either for boring, non-immersive grunt work that no-one else wants to do—as former WoW lead Ghostcrawler puts it, "crappy" tasks like "making the cliffs where the continent sloped into the ocean". Alternatively, you can make the uncanny nature of said voicelines the point, while making sure the actors the AI is trained on get decent royalties out of the deal, I;E, (sic) what Stellaris is doing with its recent DLC.

But when Ubisoft touted its NEO NPCs during GDC, I didn't exactly see much convincing evidence of a revolutionary new technology, and certainly not a "start of a fantastic paradigm shift". Still, Ubisoft appears to be all-in on making these things happen (thanks, Gamesradar).

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