AI characters are coming to video games perhaps sooner than many people imagined. Just after it emerged that Sony was testing an AI-generated Aloy in Horizon Forbidden West, Nvidia has announced that its ACE AI game characters will make their debuts in real games this month.
With thoughts and behaviour governed by an on-device Nvidia ACE Small Language Model, autonomous game characters will be launched in Krafton's life simulation game InZOI (a kind of AI Sims 4 for 2025) and in the mobile version of 24 Entertainment's free-to-play wuxia action battle royale game Naraka: Bladepoint. And Nvidia says that more developers will quickly following suit.
inZOI players will be able to transform the simulated city's NPCs, called Zois, into ACE autonomous game characters with higher levels of artificial intelligence by activating a 'Smart Zoi' experimental setting. We're told that enhanced Zois will adapt and respond more realistically and intelligently to their environment based on their personalities.
For instance, a Smart Zoi with a considerate personality might decide to help a lost character with directions. Inevitably, some are already wondering if SmartZOI's will be able to commit crime. After all, we're still waiting for GTA 6.
Nvidia says players will also be able to observe their Smart Zoi’s inner thoughts in real-time as they go about their day, and influence them directly with a free-form text input to modify their actions and life goals.
The innovation, whether you're a fan or not, has the power to change how we conceive video games, making them potentially richer and more surprising as AI NPCs, teammates or enemies act freely. Applying this to an open-world game could open endless possibilities.
In Naraka: Bladepoint Mobile, ACE-powered teammates will help players battle enemies and hunt for loot. The AI Teammate can join your party in Free Training, battling alongside you, finding you specific items that you need, swapping gear, offering suggestions on skills to unlock, and making plays that’ll help you achieve victory.
ACE characters will be added to Naraka: Bladepoint Mobile from 27 March, while inZOI will launch in early access on 28 March at 00:00 UTC. Only gamers with GeForce RTX GPUs will be able to use Smart Zoi feature.
Nvidia ACE is a suite of RTX-accelerated digital human technologies designed to bring game characters to life with generative AI. The tech continues to advance, now incorporating new vision and audio language models, enhancing facial animation with new model architectures, and accelerating game development with updated ACE plugins for Maya and Unreal Engine for offline authoring.
Two more upcoming games using the tech are Black Vultures: Prey of Greed and Fate Trigger. In the former, an FPS being developed by Wemade’s THISMEANSWAR Studio, ACE will power an in-game AI companion. Saroasis Studios’ Fate Trigger, a 3D anime-style, hero-based tactical shooter made on Unreal Engine 5, is using ACE's Audio2Face-3D to generate real-time facial animations and lip-sync for all dialogue.
