Impossible to miss or not hear it all day long: AI is now an integral part of our daily lives. First put forward (in the eyes of the general public) for the production of images (Midjourney, SLAB…), here are now that software like ChatGPT offer to answer your questions and discuss with you. Now, it’s time for the video game media to take an interest in it!
Of course, when it comes to associating artificial intelligence and video games, we come to the top of the RPG where NPCs could behave more humanelyby responding in a personalized way to our requests. We could also imagine a dialogue system using voice synthesis and which could allow us to converse with a video game character, which would constitute a better immersion. Last point, the integration of AI could procedurally and randomly generate anything we could imagine (admittedly within a predefined framework), where each part would no longer look like any other !
Well, at first, you’re going to be hypebecause a real-time demonstration does existthen, in a second step, surprised, because the first game to take advantage of it is a sports title in virtual reality, called Golf+. After the surprise comes the reason! The integration of AI being new, it must be tested in an environment and a gameplay restricted. It would have been far too dangerous to release the beast in a Skyrim VRwithout having to multiply the safeguards.
In Golf+, the caddy (the person who carries a golf player’s clubs, not the one in your supermarket) speaks to you in VR like a real person. The AI will be able to create training courses based on your real abilities, but also on your own desires. Ryan Engledirector of the studio behind Golf+shared a video demonstrating his abilities :
Of his name arthurthe virtual shopping cart is based on a Large Language Model (LLM), the same technology as ChatGPT And Google Bard. Thus, it will be possible to ask the NPC to automatically create predefined challenges or even to configure his route by dictating information such as the distance of putting or the size of the land. Only downside so far arthur needs a few seconds each time to respondas is the case with textual AIs. The developers are aware of this and are working on the possibility of reducing this time. We think that if possible, it should be added to facial expressions and other hesitations, which could make conversations more realistic while making the wait for the answer more acceptable.
We don’t yet know when players will be able to talk to arthur for the first timebut there is no doubt that sales of the title should soar with such feature. Golf+ is available on the Oculus Quest, as well as the Meta Quest 2 and Quest Pro.
And you ? What do you think ? Is this “the” future of video games or just one of them? Do not hesitate to indicate your point of view in comments. On our side, we are already won over, a world of infinite and dizzying possibilities is now open to players, provided that most studios take it up!
Know that you can afford a Quest 2 to the Fnac, Darty or Amazon for €449.99 (128 GB) or €549.99 (256 GB).