A number of big NVIDIA ACE announcements were shared during the company's CES 2025 keynote. NVIDIA has expanded its ACE (Avatar Cloud Engine) technology, originally announced at Computex 2023, in various ways. The improved tech will provide AI-powered allies and foes in multiple big PC games.
KRAFTON, for example, has gone all-in on NVIDIA ACE. Its leading product, PUBG, will add 'co-playable characters' through the so-called PUBG Ally feature. Powered by the Mistral-Nemo-Minitron-8B-128k-instruct small language model (SMM), PUBG Ally lets AI teammates communicate using game-specific lingo, provide strategic recommendations, find and share loot, drive vehicles, and even fight other players.
KRAFTON CEO CH Kim said:
CES 2025 marks a significant milestone for KRAFTON and NVIDIA as we work together to unveil AI technology that will revolutionize the gaming industry. We plan to closely collaborate with NVIDIA to drive the transformation of the user experience with AI-powered innovation, such as CPC, that promises to redefine the future of gaming.
inZoi, KRAFTON's upcoming life simulation game, is also using NVIDIA ACE with a spin of its own on the co-playable characters concept. The so-called 'Smart Zoi' will dynamically adapt to what's happening around them and react based on their personalities. For example, a Smart Zoi with a considerate personality could notice a hungry man on the street, go to the food store and grab him something to eat. In another instance, they might help a lost woman by giving them directions.
Kangwook Lee, Head of Deep Learning Division at KRAFTON, said:
PUBG IP Franchise's PUBG Ally and inZOI's Smart Zoi, rising as the world's first CPC (Co-Playable Character) built with NVIDIA ACE, are unlocking new and unique experiences. At KRAFTON, we’re excited by the possibilities of ACE autonomous game characters and how AI will enhance the way we create games.
Other developers are also implementing similar NVIDIA ACE powered features in their games. For example, NetEase has announced that AI teammates will be added to its highly successful free-to-play Battle Royale game NARAKA: Bladepoint. These NPCs will join the player's party, battle alongside them, find specific items that they might need, swap gear, offer suggestions on which skills to unlock, and fight smartly to help the player win.
Zhipeng Hu, Head of Thunder Fire BU and SVP of NetEase, stated:
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 characters that allows us to create AI autonomous teammates running on the device locally that naturally assist the player in their epic battles.
The feature is coming in March to the mobile version of NARAKA: Bladepoint playable on PC, while the native PC version is getting it later this year.
On the other hand, Korean developer Wemade is going to use it in its MIR5 MMORPG to power what they're calling the world's first AI boss, Asterion, Lord of the Void. MMORPG players know all too well that even the most complicated bosses are static and, therefore, predictable for humans. The goal here with NVIDIA ACE is to change all that forever.
The AI model enables Asterion to analyze the party, identify each player's unique skills, and determine who to attack first, such as the healer, traditionally the weakest character. Asterion also recalls past battles similar to the current situation and then determines the most probable course of action to achieve victory. The boss will also constantly adapt, attacking with unpredictable patterns so that it cannot be defeated twice with the same strategy.
Jung Soo Park, CEO of Wemade Next, said:
Together with NVIDIA, we have begun a new era of gaming with NVIDIA ACE autonomous game characters. MIR5’s AI bosses are a milestone moment in gaming, enabling unique boss encounters with every play session. We’re excited to see how this technology transforms games.
NVIDIA ACE is being utilized in many different ways by developers. For example, the upcoming murder mystery game Dead Meat will use it to power its fully dynamic conversations locally. The game previously used LLMs via cloud, but at CES 2025, they showed locally generated dialogue running on a GeForce RTX 50 Series GPU.
Developer Meaning Machine integrated ACE and NVIDIA's Mistral-NeMo-Minitron-8B-128K small language model (SLM), Eleven Labs' Text To Speech (TTS), and Open AI's Whisper automatic speech recognition (ASR) into its own Game Conscious AI system.
GoodAI's sandbox game AI People features AI-driven NPCs that interact autonomously with each other, their environment, and the player, creating a dynamic AI-generated narrative. The developer says these NPCs learn, experience emotions, pursue their goals, dream, talk, and create a dynamic story for the player. Built using extensive language and speech recognition models, AI People can now run locally on a GeForce RTX GPU in addition to the previous cloud option.
TiGames, the developer behind the Metroidvania game F.I.S.T.: Forged In Shadow Torch, has showcased a tech demo called ZooPunk where the combination of several AI technologies lets NPCs communicate naturally with the player. A speech model listens to their voice and translates the words to text, while a language model parses the text to understand the intention behind the sentence and generate the NPC's response. The NPC's voice is also AI-powered, and NVIDIA ACE provides lip synchronization with Audio2Face. Perhaps more interestingly, the demo shows the first use of on-device in-game Stable Diffusion image generation, where the player can simply ask the NPC to repaint the airship with new art. The ZooPunk demo also ran on the new GeForce RTX GPUs, not on the cloud.
By the way, NVIDIA ACE's Audio2Face is also featured in the recently launched VR game Alien: Rogue Incursion. Moreover, Perfect World Games is using it for its Unreal Engine 5-powered MMORPG World of Jade Dynasty. Perfect World Games brought a showcase video at CES 2025 to demonstrate how Audio2Face allows them to animate their vast cast of characters in both Chinese and English.
The animations are dynamically adjusted based on various variables detected in the recorded voice acting. Of course, if any adjustments are needed, developers can intervene manually to make changes as they see fit, tailoring dialogue for specific scenes.
