The days of pre-written dialogs are over – at least if Nvidia’s tech demo Covert Protocol is anything to go by. In the short detective game, you can simply ask NPCs what you want
It’s a problem that even the role-playing hit Baldur’s Gate 3 has: No matter how big the sandbox, how far-reaching the freedoms – at some point in every computer game we come up against the point where the title tells us what we can and can’t do.
This is most obvious with dialog options in role-playing or detective games. There, we usually only have a handful of sentences with which we run through a prefabricated dialog tree.
Nvidia has set out to change this. The company has only been a part-time graphics card manufacturer for a while now – the real field of activity these days is AI. Nvidia’s latest tech demo called Covert Protocol, in which we can simply ask NPCs anything, shows what is already possible with AI today
Covert Protocol: Microphone instead of dialog options
Nvidia presented the short game to a small group of journalists at the GTC in-house exhibition that started yesterday. In Covert Protocol, you control a detective who has to solve a criminal case in a hotel lobby
The special feature: There are no dialog options with which we address NPCs according to a prefabricated scheme. Instead, we use a microphone to ask questions or make comments as we wish.
Nvidia’s Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) runs in the background. ACE is a series of AI applications designed to make it easier for developers to create characters via the cloud.
In addition to games, ACE will also be used for customer support and video conferencing.
Covert Protocol continues what Nvidia already showed in another tech demo last May. What was still in its infancy back then seems to be much more mature today.
Covert Protocol: Freedom with borders
According to Jacob Roach from Techradar the journalists present also used this opportunity for more exotic topics of conversation: Are PCs or consoles the better gaming platform? What is the NPC’s favorite graphics card?
The characters didn’t let this put them off, however, and kept returning to the content of the game – the criminal case to be solved in Covert Protocol.
As players, there are still limits to how far we can deviate from the game’s predefined story. Free to formulate questions? Gladly. Engage NPCs in a discussion about hardware during a detective case? Probably not
But only a small step forward?
The tech demo shown by Nvidia is impressive at first glance. After all, according to Roach, the NPCs respond in a matter of seconds – something that AI NPCs, such as those available for The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, are still lacking.
However, the perceived revolution must be qualified on closer inspection. Roach does not see any major changes to the gameplay itself as a result of the new feature. Because even if the number of dialog options is increased from a handful to infinity: In the end, the dialogs themselves are still a question-and-answer game, as we already know it today.
In addition, Roach says he’s not sure whether dialog via microphone is really better than selecting fixed options.
He sees AI NPCs like those in Covert Protocol more as a new tool for game developers to use properly. After all, there is no guarantee with Nvidia ACE that you will ask the right question. It’s hard to imagine a developer being happy with an important detail being hidden behind an AI that simply doesn’t give out the right information.
In addition to the title, a number of other AI applications and graphics cards have been shown.
