If the purpose of a tech demo is to induce a flash of thinking “Hey that’s neat,” then I’d be lying if I said Nvidia’s Covert Protocol – a playable showcase for their AI NPC tool, Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) – hadn’t worked on me. If, on the other hand, it’s to develop that thought into “Hey, I want this in games right now,” it’s going to take more than a slightly stilted natter with an aspiring bartender.
ACE, if you haven’t caught its previous showings on the tech/games trade show circuit, is an all-in-one “foundry” of AI-powered character creation tools – language models, speech, text-to-speech, automated mouth flapping and so on – that Nvidia is pitching as the future of NPC interaction. Plugged into the third-party Inworld Engine, which seems to handle the bulk of the actual AI generation, ACE aims to replace pre-written and recorded character dialogue with more dynamic lines that can respond accurately to any questions or statement you can mutter into a microphone.
Covert Protocol wraps all that up into a short social investigation game, tasking you – a private detective – with schmoozing/lying your way into a fancy hotel’s private suites. First up for an AI-assisted interrogation was cheery bellboy Tae Hyun, and first among a gathering of journos to hit the mic, it turned out, was me.
The conversation started, as most of mine do, awkwardly. Once I’d gone full Obsidian RPG protagonist mode by asking what the gossip around the hotel was, Tae deflected with a gag about some extraterrestrials checking in. But he could recommend the hotel bar, so I asked in turn about their best cocktail. This was a mistake. As it happened, Tae had designs on taking over the bar himself, and was so proud of his own Baltimore Zoo (with a Korean twist) that he managed to work in a plug for it to several successive responses.
It was weird. But it also… worked? As a game interaction, our question and answer session progressed perfectly logically. AI-generated answers were specific to the question, not hedged, and there were no “Could you repeat that?” or “I’m not sure what you mean” hiccups. Had someone walked in with no knowledge of the machine learning aspect, they might well have just thought ACE was feeding canned lines in response to preplanned queries. So yes, it was neat. A lot of responses even seemed to be taking previous responses into account, using them as context to avoid repetition.
Mostly, anyway. That man was consumed with Baltimore Zoo pride, slipping in endorsements to answers about his political views or his relationship with his mum like he was doing an SNL bit. In fairness, the segues were cheesy, but not entirely non-sequiturs, given I’d broached the subject of drinks to begin with. It’s also possible that this was more of an intentional character tic, of the AI’s making, than a glitch in the Matrix.
Still. I laughed at the time, but in hindsight there was something off about how readily this guy circled back to the exact same topic of his signature tipple. If meant as quirky joke, it was tonally out of whack with the slick detective story presentation, and if it wasn’t, then surely it betrayed how quite literally artificial these ‘performances’ are. As if ACE was clinging to this character detail like a safety blanket, scared of deviating when it knows it’s got the cocktail thing down, even when doing so makes everything seem more robotic – not less.
Not that the masquerade was particularly well-maintained elsewhere. ACE’s AI voices were more naturalistic than those of last year’s ramen shop demo but were still stiff, monotonous, and peppered with strange pauses and pronunciations. All the classic text-to-speech tells, basically. Tae spoke of his family leaving Korea “for a reason,” implied to be North Korean aggression, with the same gravity as when he cracked the rubbish joke about aliens. Another of Covert Protocol’s chattable NPCs, a bigshot keynote speaker from whom we needed to extract a room number, reacted with the same non-surprise both to a friendly greeting and to being told his speech was cancelled.
Some responses also only came after an extended pause, which an Nvidia handler quickly attributed to the venue’s slow Wi-Fi – so even if this whole system made it into a finished retail game, it would presumably be an always-online affair, relying on your ownership of a high-quality connection to make all these remote queries to Inworld.
Then there’s the writing. Nothing I heard curled my toes like the stinking dialogue of Ubisoft’s NEO NPC demo (even if, worryingly, that’s also based on a combination of Inworld and Nvidia tech), but it was also kind of just there. No sparkle, no playfulness, no real weight to the words. I did laugh at Tae’s incessant booze hype but only over the stark ridiculousness of it, not at any of the machine’s more intentional humour. And its attempt at a grizzled private dick-speak voiceover amounted to a tragically bland “A bar. Could go for an Old Fashioned right about now. But focus, Marcus, focus.” Nobody Wants to Die, it ain’t.
I’m still genuinely impressed by the reactivity of the question-and-answering, but as a whole, ACE feels at least a few years away from the point where it might power a game that could pass for human-authored. Thing is, game developers apparently aren’t keen on waiting. Besides Ubisoft, I’m told multiple companies have already approached Nvidia about using ACE to build their NPC casts. That’s not to say we’ll all be jabbering with robots before Christmas, but I do worry that the rush to grasp the benefits of AI – ideally of the “properly non-linear social play” variety and not the “now we don’t have to pay writers” variety – will end with a selection of equally half-baked games.
I don’t say that as some blanket AI disliker, either. Outside of generative AI, Nvidia themselves have made loads of useful, ethically unproblematic tools that employ machine learning to help players and developers alike. Upscaling darling DLSS, to give the obvious example, or the instant visual upgrades of Ray Reconstruction. Despite producing mods of varying quality, RTX Remix has been a net good so far as well. This actually does use a dash of generative AI to help produce higher-resolution models and textures, but I’ve never had a problem with these parts of, say, Portal with RTX. A room away from the Covert Protocol demo, I also got a rather promising glimpse of Half-Life 2 RTX in action, showcasing a mix of hand-crafted model and lighting upgrades as well as some AI-generated (but tasteful) texture replacements.
Yet there’s clearly a huge gap between having AI perform anti-aliasing, or touch up some brickwork, and going all-in on generative AI to recreate the behaviour of an entire human-ass being in real time. ACE has made progress since the iffy ramen shop visit, but still, I’m not convinced it’s ready to jump that chasm quite yet.
And even when it does, will enough players actually want to hear what AI voices have to say? For all the novelty of dynamic dialogue, the desire for emotive, moving, funny, scary, saddening, surprising stories isn’t going anywhere, and if Covert Protocol is any indication, the best ones will still be spun from human hands.
Even ACE’s own cogs and gears don’t suggest otherwise. Tae Hyun’s mood and speech may be AI-generated, but they have to be generated from something. In this case, it’s a character profile that Inworld Engine keeps for him, with every other NPC having the same: a potted, personal history of their life, loves, dreams, and fears. This is the source of everything that makes Tae interesting, or at the very least, capable of spouting more interesting responses than a British Gas support chatbot, be it his family’s flight from political tension or the formation of a bartending obsession that he now can’t shut up about. And all of it was crafted from scratch – not by AI, but by a human writer. Just saying.
