We’ve been covering Nvidia’s ACE AI NPCs for a while now, and the company has announced it will be officially coming to a few games later this month.
The first titles out the gate are life sim inZOI and hack’n’slasher Naraka: Bladepoint, with shooters Black Vultures: Prey of Greed and Fate Trigger coming soon after.
Alongside this, we've seen demos of this running as an ally in PUBG, and even giving an enemy boss a voice in MIR5.
Now, a big part of me is excited to finally see this become a reality after being a prototype over the past couple of years.
But now that it’s real, I’m a little nervous about whether I’m going to be playing story-driven games, or hopping into AI therapy sessions.
What is Nvidia ACE?
Nvidia’s Avatar Cloud Engine (or ACE for short), has been in its prototyping phase for a while now. In fact, the first time I got to try it was all the way back at Computex 2023 for Laptop Mag.
Put simply, it’s the answer to all those constraining and repetitive non-playable character (NPC) dialogue trees — simply a bunch of pre-packaged AI models (called NIMs) that can be run on the GPU to give your standard NPC more life than the pre-built options they have today.
It starts by developers giving the character a backstory that can be written in pretty plain text (as you can see), which is then used to train a small language model (SLM) to locally handle the conversation side of things on-device.
Think of it as an LLM, but…smaller, so it can run without dragging down your GPU’s performance too much.
After that, other NIMs help with the rest — text-to-speech giving them a voice and Audio2Face making their lip movements and facial expressions match what is being said. It’s a full generative AI solution to NPCs, and the results have been impressive over the past couple of years.
But what about the bellboy?
Tony Polanco got to see a demo involving talking to the owner of a cyberpunk café, but (not to show off) I played something way cooler.
In partnership with Inworld AI, I got to try and uncover the mystery of Covert Protocol — four characters to talk to in order to try and get to a private hotel suite. The experience was, frankly, insane. I just walked up to someone, and could say whatever I wanted to say.
Sometimes they were confused, but most of the time, they would answer whatever random or inane questions I had for them. It got to the point where I spent about 20 minutes talking to the bellboy about his favorite recipes.
And I knew there was a whole other thing I needed to do — understand what the main target Diego cares about through well-worded questions to get myself into that hotel room. But I didn’t move on for ages, much to the annoyance of everyone else waiting to have a turn. And therein lies a problem.
Can NPCs become a whole other side quest?
This reminds me of my time being a Dungeon Master in Dungeons & Dragons… Bit of a weird comparison, but let me explain.
You see, I have to describe the location to my players — tell them what is currently surrounding their characters. To help them on their journey, I try to place emphasis on the things they should interact with, from a certain book on a book shelf or a half-written note on a desk.
But instead, for reasons I cannot explain, there’s a particular Half-Elf Bard in my campaign that seems dedicated to just investigating shoes and nothing else — to the point that I’ve had to stay up for hours writing a whole side campaign to keep him busy.
And that is where Nvidia ACE could be problematic. You read about it from above, as I was too interested in finding out the hotel clerk’s entire life story to even realize I needed to talk to the main suspect sitting by the fire.
Curiosity is undeniable, and with this expanded level of conversation, it’s hard not to explore how far you can take a chat with someone.
The potential to get sidetracked could be huge, and I know that some of my favorite moments in games are indeed when things go slightly off the rails. But can it get in the way of the structure of a story if all the NPCs are loaded with lore? I think so.
Outlook
Given it seems like we’re taking baby steps into the world of AI NPCs, it’s going to take a bit of time to get to the point of an inconsequential character taking over your entire game. Not only that, but developers can wire in barriers of how far a conversation could go.
But as time goes on, and the amount of AI compute power increases in those GPUs doing the calculations, we could see ACE’s capabilities continue to grow.
Seeing it come to a life sim like inZOI gets me pretty damn excited — keen to see what chaos I can bring to this virtual world. And to watch it utilized for an agentic ally in Naraka, and a companion in the upcoming Black Vultures is certainly an interesting way to keep these games moving along.
All I’m saying is that when traditional dialogue trees are torn down in favor of essentially an LLM for each NPC, you may find some players getting a little lost on their way to finding what they need to move on.
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