Ubisoft's Generative AI Gaming Experience "Teammates"

Ubisoft is accelerating its research and development (R&D) of generative AI with a new, short gaming experience from the team behind Neo NPC from 2024, which was recently honoured for promoting French innovation as part of the France 2030 programme. In the original prototype, the Neo NPCs remained in a static environment. In Teammates, however, the NPCs (here Pablo & Sofia) are placed in a first-person shooter environment where they can respond to real-time voice commands given by a player thanks to new AI functions. They can also adapt their behaviour to the situation and even exhibit different personalities. From mission briefings to commands on the battlefield, the NPCs can adapt to players' strategies, moods, and personal slang.

"It's all about experimenting with brand new ways of creating interactive stories. Our task is to imbue AI with meaning, make it more narrative-driven, and ensure that logic does not replace soul. We designed Teammates to allow for player creativity, striking a balance between emotion and unpredictability." - Virginie Mosser, the project's Narrative Director at Ubisoft

The Teammates experiment acts as both a playable prototype and a testing environment for the underlying technology.

The team also introduced Jaspar, an in-game companion and personal assistant designed to support players during their missions. Jaspar recognises players by name, assists with onboarding, understands the game's backstory and can highlight threats or important objects in the environment. The companion can remind players of mission objectives, suggest next steps and act as a tactical guide when players are unsure what to do next. Jaspar can manage HUD elements, open menus and control settings, enabling flexible customisation of the player interface - for example, to accommodate colour blindness or modify visual elements.

"Tomorrow's games will listen to, understand and respond to players far more than they do today. Our research provides insight into how adaptive, generative gameplay could enhance proven game systems. This is the first time we've shared an experiment with players this early on. However, our goal is to use a robust technological foundation to pave the way for our developers to recognise the potential benefits for their projects and players." - Xavier Manzanares, Director of Gameplay GenAI at Ubisoft

To this end, the team has developed an application programming interface (API) that abstracts the complexity of generative systems and embeds safeguards against AI hallucinations, bias, toxicity and other issues. It also helps to control performance, putting these systems at the service of human creativity and play. "You can think of it as agnostic middleware for GenAI that we can easily connect to our in-house game engines, Anvil and Snowdrop," adds Xavier Manzanares. "This opens up a whole new range of possibilities for our teams."

"We are making exciting progress in developing tomorrow's tools for our teams. This work reflects the direction we want to take in the coming years. Creativity remains a deeply human trait. AI provides tools that can bring creative visions to life in new ways. It can be a powerful means of creating even more meaningful and immersive experiences for players." - Yves Guillemot, Ubisoft's co-founder and CEO

A prototype is currently available to a select group of participants in a closed game test, who are providing valuable feedback on how these systems perform in live game scenarios.