Forget non-playable characters, the upcoming inZOI life simulation features co-playable characters. What are CPCs? After seeing the official breakdown, I'm still not too sure, but they are making use of Nvidia's AI generation technology to create more realistic and believable game characters. At least, that's the theory.
“Built with NVIDIA ACE, inZOI features Smart Zoi, co-playable characters (CPCs) that are more responsive and realistic than anything you've seen before,” as explained in an Nvidia blog post. “Players will experience a comprehensive community simulation, where each city ZOI acts autonomously, driven by their life goals and reacting to their environments and events happening around them, leading to deeper levels of immersion and situations. complex social conditions”.
NVIDIA ACE | inZOI: Create simulated cities with co-playable characters – YouTube
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The video above highlights situations like a empathetic character who “buys” food for a hungry man, or a “grateful” character who helps promote a street artist. These characters will reflect on their actions at the end of each day to shape a unique personality over time.
That all sounds great, but is it a tremendously massive advance on the system of personalities and preferences that The Sims has had since the beginning? Most notable here is a plain language description of the “thoughts” that occur to a Smart Zoi that appear to be generated through a language model, but the video doesn't even make it clear if that's the case or how that works. system.
Nvidia's promise of “profound edge impact on the device” [language model] technology” might be exaggerating a bit. Or maybe I'm just cynical about it, but it's hard not to be cynical about AI content generation when it has so far done little more than make browsing the Internet more annoying. To be Fair enough, inZOI's AI-powered “3D printing” feature is a fun little magic trick, but there's a lot of work to be done to convince a gaming community already tired of AI that the technology is actually adding something meaningful.
A new wave of life simulations is on the way, but here are a few games like The Sims to keep you busy in the meantime.