Teammates: Ubisoft's AI sidekick experiment

In the world of gaming, we've witnessed many experiments that have sought to expand the game interface to different or more realistic and immersive systems compared to the canonical handheld controller. Nintendo, for example, has always been a pioneer of such innovations, starting with the NES Zapper gun, moving through the 3DS's augmented reality, up to the current gyroscopic JoyCons, derived from the Wiimote. Microsoft, for its part, tried with Kinect [probably without much success] while Sony is notoriously immersed in the world of Virtual Reality with PlayStation VR [also with its limitations].

Ubisoft, as a software developer rather than hardware, has always closely followed these innovations and proposed titles that exploited whatever novelties hardware manufacturers offered. But when the new frontier shifts from hardware innovations to the potential of software, as in the case of Artificial Intelligence, the Franco-American company doesn't need to wait on the sidelines and can conduct its own experiments independently.

Thus, at the last shareholders' meeting, the company presented Teammates, specifying that – while playable – for now it is not a product intended for the market but rather the "first playable research project on generative Artificial Intelligence."

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What was shown of Teammates is a sci-fi FPS – a rather standard, no-frills product – which, however, made use of no less than three AIs to support the player. The first, called Jaspar, acts as a player assistance software, providing real-time information, lore, details, alarm signals, and advice to the user. The other two were instead integrated into the two teammates ["Teammates," precisely] Pablo and Sofia, who are able to recognize messages and orders that the player can give them via voice command. Yes, in short: in Teammates, you speak and Pablo and Sofia react.

"Our early experiments showed that players quickly connect with the AI-driven NPCs and the voice assistant concept – explains Xavier Manzanares, Director of Gameplay GenAI – Jaspar helps players when they get lost or when they're unsure what to do, has access to menus and settings, can tell players more about the world or the story. We really started to like Jaspar and it showed us how such a system could be interesting for many types of players."

"Initially I had the same concerns as many others – confesses Virginie Mosser, Narrative Director – but I found that it's the exact opposite of removing humans from the process. I still write the story and the characters' personalities, but instead of fixed lines, we create these kinds of fences within which NPCs improvise with the world but staying within the limits of the lore and motivations we've given them. They can improvise, but we always set the rules and direct the story and characters."

Undoubtedly, a tool of this depth and scope can lead to multiple scenarios, and we would be lying if we denied that many of these can be interesting. Obviously, however, we are still in the realm of experimentation, so don't expect to see Teammates, or anything closely related, on shelves anytime soon...