Would you enjoy killing more human NPCs?

Nvidia’s AI NPCs can become your teammates now. This is coming in PUBG at some point. But, this or similar technology should proliferate so that it becomes par for the course for all games, or rather most AAA games.

Imagine how much better career mode could be on FIFA. Just kidding, EA does not care about career mode.

This can be used for making the enemies better as well. Reading this gave me a pause though.

I loved The Last of US 1 and 2 both. But I never could get myself to play through again. It felt heavy, always. The story, the mechanics. Even without AI, just the fact that these random NPCs were calling each other out by name, they would scream when they found out one of their friends had died, meant that I felt guilty, not wanting to kill these NPCs. I would try to sneak around as much as possible.

The game was heavy, a great experience but not something I would want to replay. After you complete it, additional game modes are opened up, which make it more game like. But I could never forget how harrowing the base game was.

There are a lot of these fodder NPCs in action games. We all complain about stupid AI, not able to figure out that I am hiding behind that box. But, if they became more human like, I don’t think most people would enjoy killing them. Killing them will feel more like killing a person.

Games should be enjoyable. There should be a disconnect. There should be some stupidity. We want a better villain but if that’s all that you have in the game, I am not sure how enjoyable that would be.

In other news, Nvidia also announced a $3,000 personal AI supercomputer called Digits

Which is cheap I guess for 3000? You have Macs that are costlier than that and are not AI supercomputers.

This would also proliferate more as time goes on. More computers with the AI component in them, in a general purpose computer way. These things will become OS components.