AI in Gaming - NPCs with Generative AI

A new era of indie games: In terms of building massive, socially immersive worlds, AI voice systems may soon enable independent game studios to more easily compete with the industry’s big names. Games made by major companies (often called AAA studios) can feature tens of thousands of lines of dialog. For example, Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption 2, which had an estimated budget upward of $500 million, contains 500,000 lines of recorded dialog spoken by more than 1,000 voice actors.

Using AI, independent studios could affordably hit that kind of quantity. Quality is a separate issue. Professional human voice actors still outperform synthetic speech systems in terms of sounding natural, emotive, and compelling. But gamers might not care much about the realism of NPC speech. After all, independent games are becoming increasingly popular even though they generally lack the kind of hyperrealistic graphics seen in AAA games.

Nonlinear narratives: The biggest evolution that voice AI could bring to games — whether indie or AAA — arguably lies in story. Today’s games often use sophisticated tricks to give players the illusion that they’re controlling their fate, such as karma systems that track your behavior and give you a reputation that influences how NPCs interact with you. These tricks can change the storyline and trigger certain lines of NPC dialog, but in reality, this “branched storytelling” strategy only ever lets players select from a small batch of predetermined fates.