The rise of ai NPCs has felt like an imminent threat for years, as if developers couldn't wait to get rid of human writers and offload NPC conversations to generative ai models. At CES 2025, NVIDIA made it abundantly clear that the technology was just around the corner. PUBG Developer Krafton, for example, plans to use NVIDIA's ACE (Avatar Cloud Engine) to power ai companions, who will help you and joke with you during matches. Krafton doesn't stop there: it also uses ACE in its life simulation title InZOI to make characters more intelligent and generate objects.
While the use of generative ai in games seems almost inevitable, as the medium has always toyed with new methods of making enemies and NPCs seem smarter and more realistic, seeing several NVIDIA ACE demos in a row made me feel really bad. of the stomach. This wasn't just slightly smarter enemy ai: ACE can create entire conversations out of thin air, simulate voices, and attempt to give NPCs a sense of personality. It also works locally on your PC, powered by NVIDIA's RTX GPUs. But while all that may sound great on paper, I hated almost every second I saw the ai NPCs in action.
TiGames' zoopunk is a prime example: it relies on NVIDIA ACE to generate dialogue, a virtual voice, and lip-sync for an NPC named Buck. But as you can see in the video above, Buck sounds like a stilted robot with a slight country accent. If he is supposed to have some kind of relationship with the main character, it is not obvious from the acting.
I think my visceral aversion to NVIDIA's ACE-powered ai boils down to this: there's just nothing compelling about it. No joy, no warmth, no humanity. Every character in ACE ai feels like a developer taking shortcuts in the worst possible way, like you see their disdain for the audience manifest in a boring NPC. I would prefer to scroll through the text on the screen, at least I wouldn't have to have conversations with strange robot voices.
During NVIDIA's Editor's Day at CES, a media gathering to learn more about the new RTX 5000 series GPUs and their related technology, I was also disappointed by a demo of PUBG Ally of ai. Their responses were similar to those you would hear on a prerecorded phone tree. The ally also couldn't find a weapon when the player asked, which could have been a deadly mistake on a crowded map. At one point, the PUBG The companion also spent about 15 seconds attacking enemies while the demo player yelled at him to get in a car. What good is an ai helper if you play like a newbie?
Flip through NVIDIA's YouTube channel and you'll find other disappointing examples of ACE, such as the basic conversation animations in the MMO. Jade Dynasty World (above) and Alien: Rebel Raid. I'm sure many developers would love to skip the task of developing decent lip-sync technology or adopt someone else's, but for these games, relying on ai seems horrible.
To be clear, I don't think all of NVIDIA's ai efforts are useless. I've loved watching DLSS steadily improve over the years, and I'm intrigued to see how DLSS 4's multi-frame generation could improve 4K and ray tracing performance for demanding games. The company's neural shading technology also looks convincing, particularly its ability to apply a realistic glow to materials like silk or evoke the slight transparency you'd see on skin. To be clear, these aren't huge visual leaps forward, but they could help provide a better sense of immersion.
Now I'm sure some ai boosters will say that the technology will only improve from now on and that, at some indefinable point in the future, it could approach the quality of human ingenuity. Maybe. But I'm personally tired of being sold ai fantasies, when we know that the key to good writing and acting is giving human talent the time and resources to hone their craft. And on some level, I think I will always feel like the director Hayao Miyazakiwho described an early example of an ai-generated creature as “an affront to life itself.”
ai, like any new technology, is a tool that could be implemented in many ways. For things like graphics and gameplay (like the smart enemies in FEAR and the last of us), makes sense. But when it comes to communicating with NPCs, writing their dialogue, and designing their performances, I've come to appreciate human effort more than anything else. Replacing that with lifeless ai doesn't seem like a step forward by any means.
