Ubisoft is debuting new game experience “Teammates” from the developers behind its 2024 project “Neo NPC,” which the French gaming giant says will show how “generative AI-driven gameplay can shape a new generation of more interactive and engaging games.”
The prototype for “Teammates” is currently playable for a limited number of participants in a closed playtest.
Per Ubisoft, “In the initial prototype from 2024, Neo NPCs displayed novel cognitive and natural language abilities but remained in a static environment. ‘Teammates’ now puts our Non-Playable Characters (NPCs) in a more traditional gameplay setting – a first-person shooter – with new advanced AI features that allow them to respond dynamically to real-time voice commands and adapt their behavior to each situation, revealing distinct personalities along the way.”
Ubisoft says these “Teammates” characters will “react naturally, adapting to players’ strategies, moods and even personal slang, for an experience that feels unprecedentedly responsive,” and can “interpret player intent and tone, as well as environmental cues to generate fluid, context-aware reactions, deepening immersion and player agency.”
“It’s really about experimenting with entirely new ways of creating interactive stories,” the Ubisoft project’s narrative director Virginie Mosser said. “Our role is to give AI meaning, to narrativize it, ensuring logic doesn’t replace soul. We designed ‘Teammates” to leave space for player creativity, finding that balance between emotion and unpredictability.”
The experience features in-game companion “Jaspar,” described as “a personal assistant designed to support players throughout their missions.”
The developer says Jaspar “recognizes the player by name, helps with onboarding, understands the game’s lore, and can highlight threats or key objects in the environment.” He can also “remind players of mission objectives, suggest next steps, and generally act as a tactical guide when they are unsure what to do next.”
Ubisoft announced the new project Friday, following its release of its latest quarterly earnings results, which were initially delayed by nearly a week due to what Ubisoft now attributes to a shift in accounting. Ubisoft also announced it had now received a large investment payment from stakeholder Tencent which would go towards covering recent expenses accounted for in its earnings.
“Games of tomorrow will listen, understand and react to players far more than today, and our research gives a glimpse of what adaptive, generative play could add on top of proven game systems,” Ubisoft director of GenAI gameplay Xavier Manzanares said. “It’s the first time we’ve shared an experiment this early with players, but our goal is to pave the way with a strong technology layer so our creators can start imagining the value it could bring to their project and players.”
Additionally, the “Teammates” division has also built an Application Programming Interface (API) that “abstracts the complexity of generative systems, embeds necessary guardrails including hallucinations, bias, toxicity among others, and helps control its power to put it at the service of human creativity and play.”
“Teammates” is meant to serve as an experiment that “serves both as a playable prototype and a testbed for the underlying technology.”
“Think of it as an agnostic middleware for GenAI that we can easily plug to our in-house game engines, Anvil and Snowdrop,“ Manzanares said. “It opens a whole lot of new opportunities for our teams.”
“We are making exciting progress in building the tools of tomorrow for our teams. This work reflects the direction we want to take in the years ahead,” Ubisoft co-founder and CEO Yves Guillemot said. “Creativity remains deeply human. AI provides tools that help bring creative visions to life in new ways, it can be a powerful enabler to create even more meaningful and immersive experiences for players.”