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After revealing strong financial results, especially for Assassin’s Creed Mirage, Ubisoft announced a new AI-based research project called Teammates, a pilot project that shows the company’s new direction towards integrating interactive intelligent systems into games.
Historically, the role of AI in games has been to animate NPCs according to static code, but the rapid development of AI technologies has opened the door to radical changes from art generation to sounds and even full games.
With Teammates, Ubisoft seems to want to explore this area more deeply with an experience that relies on an intelligent voice assistant and characters that can be programmed and directed in real time.
According to Ubisoft’s post, the project presents a model closer to shooter games, where the player controls his character and two companions, Pablo and Sofia, who can be directed through direct voice commands such as determining where to go, selecting targets, and influencing the story structure and its branches
A voice assistant named Jaspar provides tips on gameplay, missions, and even adjusts settings with just a voice command.
The project’s narrative director Virginie Mosser said:
“We hope that the player feels like they are creating the story themselves, not just following it. “When I talk to Sophia, she responds to what I say and that changes my whole experience. For me this is a real shift.
This kind of dynamic interaction signals Ubisoft’s attempt to create a style of gameplay that gives the player more control over the narrative via AI.
So far, there are no plans to release Teammates to the public, but Ubisoft has confirmed that a demo will be released soon, and internal play tests have already taken place and more are planned for the coming period, and despite the company’s assertion that human creativity is at the heart of the project, the heavy reliance on intelligent systems raises questions about the role of traditional developers in the future of the game.
Previous reports have surfaced about Ubisoft’s new Project Scout, a team-based shooter in development, and some speculation suggests that Teammates may be the technological foundation upon which the leaked project was built.
Project Teammates introduces a new and controversial idea in the world of gaming: Programmable AI buddies in real-time, will this be the future of cooperative gaming, or just an experiment in the current AI wave?
