Ubisoft made a prototype game with voice-controlled AI teammates

Ubisoft has announced a new game prototype featuring voice-controlled AI teammates that understand visual context and natural language. This “Teammates” project builds on the Neo NPCs Ubisoft showed off with Nvidia in 2024 to demo in-game AI that can naturally respond to players. A key difference this time, besides the complexity of the interactions the prototype supports, is that Teammates is already being played in a closed playtest with “a few hundred players,” Ubisoft says.

Teammates, even if Ubisoft describes it as a playable “experimental research project,” still uses the basic concepts of a first-person shooter. The prototype casts players as “a member of the resistance in a dystopian future, tasked with moving through an enemy base to locate five missing members of their team,” where directing in-game AI characters is key to success. Ubisoft came up with three AI NPCs for the project, “Jaspar,” an AI assistant with awareness of in-game lore and the ability to adjust game settings on the fly, and “Pablo” and “Sofia,” robotic characters that are physically present in the game and can respond to commands.

Based on footage shared with Engadget, Ubisoft’s AI characters not only understand voice commands, but also have a visual awareness of what the player is seeing. A direction to “stand behind a barrel” prompted Sofia to take into consideration where the player was looking and position itself appropriately. In the version of Teammates available in the closed playtest, Ubisoft also uses Jaspar to onboard and teach players about the basics of the game. In most cases, the AI characters seemed overly chatty and verbose, but Ubisoft is experimenting with letting players choose sets of personalities for Sofia and Pablo — including an option curiously labelled “Bad Cat and Good Boy” — that can change up how each character expresses itself.

“This technology opens doors to new, personalized experiences,” Ubisoft’s Data & AI Director Rémi Labory shared in the Teammates announcement. “Player input shapes character reactions in real time, something traditional development can’t achieve. We’re also delivering a full pipeline, with the experience taking players from onboarding to debrief, which is a first.”

Ubisoft has explored applying generative AI to other parts of the development process in the past. The company’s Ghostwriter tool, introduced in 2023, uses AI to generate first drafts of in-game dialogue. Ubisoft also recently adimitted to publishing Anno 117: Pax Romana without removing its AI-generated loading screen art.

Ultimately, the underlying technology powering Teammates could appear in other Ubisoft projects in the future. The company is collecting feedback from its playtest to apply towards future research, but Ubisoft suggests the middleware it created for Teammates already works with both its Snowdrop and Anvil engines, opening up the tool for future teams to use in their games.