Ubisoft unveils AI-powered ‘Teammates’ project

Ubisoft has unveiled Teammates, a new experimental generative AI (GenAI) R&D project.

The company says it’s intended to examine “how AI can be used to deepen the player experience through real-time voice commands and enhanced gameplay.”

To demonstrate this research, Teammates has been designed as a first-person shooter in the Snowdrop Engine (which powers The Division and Star Wars Outlaws) featuring two AI-powered squadmates, Pablo and Sofia, as well as an AI assistant named Jaspar. In this experience, the player controls a resistance member in a dystopian future as he fights through an enemy base to locate missing team members.

Voice commands play a big role here, with players directing Sofia and Pablo to use environmental cover and who to attack. On top of that, Jaspar is able to highlight enemies, provide additional narrative details, alter game settings and even pause the game, simply by the player speaking to him.

According to Ubisoft, these AI tools are intended to help players interact with the game in different ways.

“We hope players will feel like they’re shaping the story themselves, not just following it,” said Ubisoft narrative director Virginie Mosser in a Ubisoft blog post. “When I talk to [my AI squad mate] Sofia, she reacts to what I tell her and it changes my experience. For me, this is a real breakthrough and allows players to experience the story in their own way.”

Xavier Manzanares, director of gameplay GenAI, told the blog that Jaspar “was helping players when they got lost or weren’t sure what to do, he could access menus and settings, tell players more about the world and the story.” According to him, this has gotten the team to think about “how a system like this could be interesting for many different kinds of games.”

Of course, anything involving generative AI immediately draws scrutiny, which is something the blog post even acknowledges.

“The team is aware of the criticisms around AI in games,” writes Ubisoft. “The goal is not to replace creatives, but rather to find ways to enhance it by combining the strengths of the technology and the human creativity and ingenuity that are crucial to making games.”

Mosser told the blog she also had concerns but discovered it’s “the exact opposite of removing the human from the process” as she still writes the story and character personalities while also imposing “fences” that the AI must stay within. “They can improvise, but we still set the rules and direct the story and characters,” she said.

On the one hand, improving CPU-controlled companions in games isn’t inherently a bad thing. After all, the more realistic an ally behaves, the more immersed you can become in the experience.

But on the other hand, there are still many concerns surrounding GenAI application. While Ubisoft will, in theory, do its best to train the models using specific writing prompts, there’s still no guarantee that GenAI is ethically sourcing content. In particular, we’ve seen cases of AI stealing people’s artistic works or even voices.

There’s also always the concern that companies will use AI to replace artists like writers, especially as they continue to tighten the belt. (Ubisoft itself has laid off hundreds of employees in recent months as part of broader cost-cutting measures.) While someone like Ubisoft narrative director Mosser might still play an actively role in game development now, who’s to say higher-ups don’t eventually make those roles redundant for AI?

For now, many questions remain about AI, and not just with Ubisoft, of course. The French gaming giant, for its part, says its already tested Teammates with a few hundred players in a closed playtest, with plans to continue to iterate on the technology. It remains to be seen what will come out of it, but Ubisoft teased that it plans to share an “explainer video” about Teammates at some point.

Image credit: Ubisoft

Source: Ubisoft