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Nvidia's AI game demo shows potential

Translate from : Nvidias AI-spil demo viser potentiale

Nvidia did what we all knew was coming - they made an AI-powered game demo. In Convert Protocol, you play as a detective trying to track down a certain person in a high-end hotel. The idea is to solve puzzles through conversations with non-playable characters (NPCs). But in this demo, you use your microphone and voice to ask questions instead of choosing from a list of preset options.

The demo was shown in a small private online preview. Everything could be asked without restrictions. This is the dream of many in this type of detective game. You are not given the role of a detective with a preset list of dialogue options. You can ask about what you want, when you want.

The doorman could politely welcome you and perhaps make a few comments about the need for a break. Inside the hotel, the detective's main area, you could ask the receptionist about room numbers or how the hotel works. There is even an executive nearby who knows a little about your target person.

All of these conversations are real conversations. They are done through a microphone and you use your voice to speak as you wish. In an instant, the NPCs can react through the AI model. It's a different way to play a dialogue-driven game. I just don't know if it's a better way. The NPCs stayed locked on topic, never risking confusing themselves.

It's Nvidia's technology at work, but it doesn't really change the gaming experience. What you experience through the demo is that this technology simply opens up more dialog trees. It gives you more opportunities to explore the dialogue options you usually skip in a complicated RPG. It's interesting, but it doesn't make the game itself better. Asking about console or PC gaming, or about a certain NPC's favorite RTX GPU, it was clear that the AI had no understanding of what Schneider was talking about.

They could give an answer that made sense in the context of a question, but not an answer that was significantly different from an answer you could get with a preset list of dialogue options. It's easy to look at Nvidia's demo and get carried away by the possibilities. There are many possibilities here and it will be exciting to see how developers utilize this technology in real games.

However, it is probably not something that will immediately change how games are designed and played. There are many advantages to having a preset list of dialogue options. NPCs often have interesting things to say, and with endless options, there's not always a guarantee that you'll ask the right question. It's hard to imagine a developer being content to hide critical information behind an AI that might not reveal the right information. One idea would be to use the AI to enrich a world with more NPCs that are not essential to the game - but do we really want more infinite dialogue trees in our game?"