“Live” NPCs with AI from Nvidia have reached a new level – useful companions in PUBG: Battlegrounds and “smart” townspeople in Inzoi

At CES 2025, Nvidia introduced a new stage in the development of Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) for Games, a set of technologies based on generative AI for creating “living” NPCs in games.

Image source: Krafton

Let’s remember that last summer Nvidia showed a “smart” interlocutor based on ACE in the multiplayer action movie Mecha Break, and now the capabilities of Nvidia ACE are intended to demonstrate autonomous non-player characters.

These NPCs will use AI to perceive the environment, plan actions, and behave like real players: understanding and supporting the user in completing their tasks, adapting to the opponent’s tactics, and so on.

For example, throughout 2025, the free-to-play battle royale PUBG: Battlegrounds will feature (see trailer above) Nvidia ACE-based teammates with whom users will be able to cooperate by giving voice instructions.

The small language model Mistral-Nemo-Minitron-8B-128k-instruct will allow such AI allies to communicate in real time, give advice, find and share loot, control vehicles and fight with other players.

Nvidia ACE-based standalone NPCs will appear in other games:

• Life simulator Inzoi – “smart” zoi (zoi) will dynamically adjust behavior in accordance with personal characteristics and surrounding circumstances (see video above);
• Battle royale Naraka: Bladepoint Mobile (in March) and Naraka: Bladepoint (in 2025) – NPCs will be able to join the player’s squad, fight alongside users, find items, exchange equipment and give advice on leveling up (video link);
• Multiplayer role-playing game Mir5 – Nvidia ACE will provide an AI boss in the project. The monster will be able to analyze the equipment and skills of users in order to choose the most successful tactics, as well as adapt to the strategies of opponents (video link).

In addition, “smart” interlocutors and autonomous characters based on Nvidia ACE are being prepared by the developers of the detective Dead Meat, the sandbox AI People and the tech demo ZooPunk (it is made by the creators of the metroidvania F.I.S.T.: Forged in Shadow Torch).