A few days ago, Grape Jun went to Shanghai and participated in an RTX 40 series media tasting held by NVIDIA, and saw a lot of interesting things at the venue.
For example, four games that support NVIDIA DLSS 3 or ray tracing were showcased: NetEase's Marvel Brawl, Xishanju's Limit-Breaker, Kurlo's Rising Tide, and Tencent's Delta Action. Powered by RTX 4090 D graphics cards and DLSS 3-AI-powered frame insertion, the performance and gameplay experience are among the best in their genre.
In addition, they showcased a variety of AI-related technologies. But what I cared about the most was a mysterious cubicle that was arranged in a separate corner...... After reading the content of the demonstration, I was really a little scared.
Why is there such a compartment? When you go inside, it turns out that what is shown here is a game demo created by NVIDIA ACE, an AI technology - Covert Protocol, which was jointly developed by NVIDIA and Inworld AI. In terms of gameplay, this game requires you to use the microphone and NPC real-time voice dialogue to unlock the process and complete the task. In order to experience the effect better, there is such a setting.
It is no exaggeration to say that the gameplay content shown in this demo may be the most cutting-edge technology, the clearest thinking, and the most complete experience in the application of AI x games I have seen.
In this game, you play as Marcus ·, a private detective in the year 2062. The demo uses a small level flow to show the basic gameplay: your mission is to investigate Martin · Davis, the CEO of a company. He's currently staying in a hotel, and he's going to give a presentation tomorrow, and you'll need to get his room number by talking to other people in the hotel, gathering information, and even finding a way to get his room number.
There are currently only three characters in this hotel, but each one has their own personality and personality. For example, the doorman above, he is more cheerful and humorous, will answer your questions honestly, and sometimes will say some witty things.
When you press F, you can record your voice to speak. The game demo on display also currently supports multiple languages, so you can understand it directly by speaking Chinese NPCs. After that, about 1 second or so, the NPC will reply to the corresponding question. For example, if you ask the doorman for tomorrow's event, he will tell you that Martin · Davis is going to give a speech.
But if you put it aside and say that there is a killer in the hotel, he will say that you have watched too many crime movies......
The most powerful part of this process is that the NPC receives the dialogue information, generates emotions, states, and reply content in combination with the character and context, and then matches the corresponding voice, action, expression, and lip animation, all of which are completed in less than 1 second. A complete and mature pipeline has been formed on top of the Inworld AI engine, which integrates Riva's automatic speech recognition and NVIDIA Audio2Face to provide realistic facial animations.
In addition, the NPC's personality performance is really expressive, and the dialogue process is also not dramatic, which is quite immersive.
Another character in the hotel, for example, is another company executive, Diego Menendez, who is also a friend of Martin · Davis. Just look at this identity, you can know that he must be a key player in unlocking information. But his personality is to only keep a basic politeness to you, but he doesn't care too much about you. If you speak presumptuously, he may also politely slap you up. For example, if you say that you are a staff member and need information, he will say that you are a staff member and go to work, don't bother me.
The combination of these characters' personalities, settings, and the setting of the level objectives results in a unique puzzle-solving experience that can be beaten in more ways than one.
For example, in this level, you'll have to find a way to get Menendez's attention and get him to put down what he's doing and talk to you. The solution may be to talk head-to-head; It may be to inquire about him with the doorman and the front desk first, and then go to the information gap; may have stolen a press card and disguised his identity to approach him; It could also be investigating a bottle of red wine next to you and finding out that he is a wine lover, and if you talk to him about red wine, he will even pull you to take two sips......
After that, you can either side or alarm with him, and you can get the key information. Like Grape Jun's presence, the solution of the on-site staff is to eavesdrop on Menendez's conversation with the front desk and learn Martin · Davis' room number.
Although this whole experience process is not very long, it seems to have solved a very big pain point of AI x games: if you just talk to the player, what kind of fun can AI NPCs provide for gameplay? The official answer given by Nvidia is this:
To put it in layman's terms, it's one word: freedom. It's not the freedom of an open world, it's a narrative and puzzle-solving level, a new kind of free exploration experience. You don't need all of them, even if only some NPCs have such self-logic and personality, I believe that many teams can design very interesting levels and stories. Assuming that NPCs can have a longer memory and can remember what they have said before when communicating with the player, then there is more room for imagination.
And a game like this, it is not difficult to imagine that it must also be born with an out-of-the-circle physique. Every kind of snack, every strange cliché and way of passing the game that players say in the face of AI may spread on the Internet.
This has been proven for a long time - Dan went viral on the Internet earlier. Dan means Do Anything Now, which is a command mode after ChatGPT lifted some of the restrictions. To put it simply, he is no longer holding it like a robot, but will say all kinds of snacks, love words, and dirty words...... Very has its own ideas, more real than real people. But many times, he makes you feel a strong sense of care and emotional value, which is hard to resist.
Results of a search for "Dan" on Xiaohongshu
It has been less than two years since large language models began to be invested in the research of various game applications. What will happen in another three or five years? I'm a little scared.
Of course, at least for now, this is something to be happy about. After all, after AI became popular, most teams thought of using AI technology to reduce costs and increase efficiency, and there were very few that could really be applied to the game experience, and even fewer could come up with such a complete and mature demo. So no matter what, I'm still looking forward to playing a game that is truly driven by AI technology.