NVIDIA ACE Autonomous Game Characters Debut This Month In inZOI & NARAKA: BLADEPOINT MOBILE PC VERSION

NVIDIA ACE is a suite of RTX-accelerated digital human technologies that bring game characters to life with generative AI. Earlier this year, we unveiled AI-powered NVIDIA ACE Autonomous Game Characters, adding autonomous teammates, NPCs, and enemies to games, unlocking a whole new set of gameplay possibilities.

These ACE autonomous game characters make their debut later this month in two titles. In the life simulator inZOI, players can customize ‘Smart Zoi’ NPCs with life goals that in turn use AI to guide behavior and interactions with other NPCs.

In NARAKA: BLADEPOINT MOBILE PC VERSION, NVIDIA ACE-powered teammates help players battle enemies, hunt for loot, and fight for victory.

Two upcoming games are also leveraging the power of NVIDIA ACE: Black Vultures: Prey of Greed and Fate Trigger - more details below.

Additionally, NVIDIA ACE technologies continue to advance, 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.

KRAFTON's inZOI is one of the top 5 most wishlisted games on Steam. The upcoming life simulation game enables players to customize their family, home, work, and game world to create unique stories. Just like in the real world, your Zoi can find jobs to make a living while forming deep relationships through interactions with NPCs.

inZOI players can transform the city's NPCs (Zois) into ACE autonomous game characters with higher levels of artificial intelligence by activating the "Smart Zoi" experimental feature setting. Enhanced Zois are designed to 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 assist a lost character with directions, or offer food to a hungry stranger. And at the end of each day, Smart Zois will adjust their personal schedule of activities based on their experiences, further enhancing gameplay.

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 actions and thoughts of Smart Zoi are governed by an on-device NVIDIA ACE Small Language Model, making it possible to have interactions that more closely mimic reality, and make the day-to-day life of your Zoi more engaging.

The NVIDIA ACE technology that powers Smart Zoi is a .5B billion parameter Mistral NeMo Minitron small language model. NVIDIA’s unique distillation methods provide high quality outputs at low latency in a very compact footprint, which is GPU-accelerated exclusively on GeForce RTX GPUs.

inZOI launches into Early Access on March 28th 00:00 UTC. Gamers with GeForce RTX GPUs can enable the Smart Zoi experimental feature and leverage AI for the ultimate inZOI experience.

NARAKA: BLADEPOINT is one of the top 10 most played games on Steam each week, and NARAKA: BLADEPOINT MOBILE boasts millions of weekly players on phones, tablets, and PCs. On March 27th, NetEase will add an on-device, NVIDIA ACE-powered AI teammate to NARAKA: BLADEPOINT MOBILE PC VERSION.

This Chinese-exclusive game, enables up to 40 players to fight in melee-focused Battle Royale environments, using a unique set of traversal abilities, combat skills, and Far Eastern-inspired weapons, which players use to combo, parry, and counter enemies in their quest for victory.

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.

“NVIDIA enables game developers to push past expected boundaries with AI technology. NVIDIA ACE in NARAKA: BLADEPOINT MOBILE PC VERSION allows us to create AI autonomous teammates running on the device locally that naturally assist the player in their epic battles.” – Zhipeng Hu, Head of Thunder Fire BU, SVP of NetEase corp.

Later this year, NVIDIA ACE will also be added to NARAKA: BLADEPOINT.

Black Vultures: Prey of Greed is a new, upcoming FPS, currently in development by Wemade’s THISMEANSWAR Studio, set in a world where modern warfare has dragged on for years. Players fight for three independent factions, leveraging vehicles and a range of weapons in the hopes of escaping safely with cash and prizes.

In the game’s debut trailer, the player utilizes “Viper” AI combat gear mounted to their helmet to analyze the battlefield in real-time through the player’s tactical cam, headset, and drone. Powered by NVIDIA ACE’s suite of technologies, Viper provides strategic guidance, optimal movement routes, and tactical advice to enhance survival.

Viper leverages NVIDIA ACE speech models to understand voice commands from the player and an ACE small language model powers its reasoning capabilities, to execute actions such as tagging an enemy, and responding to the player with a situation report.

Take a first look at this in-development technology in action in the debut Black Vultures: Prey of Greed NVIDIA ACE trailer:

Head to the Wemade website for future development updates.

Saroasis Studios’ Fate Trigger is an upcoming, 3D anime-style, hero-based tactical shooter powered by Unreal Engine 5. Dive into a dynamic world of floating islands, become a sharpshooter with extraordinary special skills, craft your own strategies, and engage in thrilling, spectacular life-or-death showdowns.

Fate Trigger is using a NVIDIA ACE technology, Audio2Face-3D, to generate real-time facial animations and natural lip-sync for all dialogue.

Head to Steam to sign up for future Fate Trigger playtests, and be sure to add the title to your wishlist to be notified when Fate Trigger is released.

Generative AI will unlock new games and genres powered by autonomous game companions, enemies, and systems.

inZOI and NARAKA: BLADEPOINT MOBILE PC VERSION arrive later this month as the first games to showcase the possibilities of NVIDIA ACE autonomous game characters, with other developers quickly following suit.

Check out the NVIDIA ACE website for the latest developments, read our previous ACE article for details about upcoming game integrations, and stay tuned to GeForce.com for all future updates about ACE games, and other titles that leverage the power of GeForce RTX to deliver an enhanced experience in your favorite games.