Alongside releasing Ray Reconstruction for DLSS 4.5, Nvidia have announced that their ACE tech best known for powering PUBG: Battlegrounds' generative AI team mates will be coming to another game early next year. Said game is Aniimo, a creature-catching open-world RPG from Chinese devs Pawprint Studio, which looks to be following the legally distict Pokemon-like formula established by the likes of Palworld. With help from the Nvidia tech, it'll also let players chat with their creatures.
"In early 2027, Nvidia ACE will be running on RTX GPUs and it will allow players to speak naturally to their Aniimos," Nvidia senior product marketing manager Ike Nnoli announced in a pre-Gamescom press briefing attended by RPS. "You can chat with them, you can teach them new skills like crafting and mining, and you can discover their distinct personalities."
It feels a bit more in the traditional AI chatbot mold than the ACE tech's use in PUBG's allies initiative, which is aimed at having NPCs use their AI brains to react to combat scenarios and play a role in tactical maneuvers on the battlefield.
In the Q&A section of the briefing, Nnoli was asked how Nvidia are preventing instances of genAI-powered NPCs being manipulated by players into giving out rewards for quests or tasks prematurely, as happened in Chinese RPG Where Winds Meet last year. "[With] our technology, developers have full control over the extent of how their characters respond to players, including action and respose guardrails and model instructions," he responded. "Specifically for the Aniimo integration, Pawprint have decided to limit it to your homeland, which is your home base where you will do crafting, mining and resource gathering. [It's also] where the Aniimos themselves can only perform select activities." The creatures sound like they'll be responding with "specific actions and emojis", rather than voiced lines.
Given that context, Aniimo's use feels akin to AI-powered Nintendogs. It's certainly not a surprising thing to see a company attempt as this sort of tech continues to spread, but it does come with the caveat that, unlike PUBG's AI soldiers, I'd assume lots of kids might end up interacting with these AI-brained creatures. Here's hoping they are indeed less prone to mid-convo mask slips and manipulation into reacting in naughty ways than Fortnite's AI Darth Vader was.
Nvidia teased the ACE tech as coming to Aniimo in early 2027, so I'd assume that's around when the game releases, despite its Steam page only declaring that it's "coming soon" as of writing.
Source: Read the original article on www.rockpapershotgun.com
