A former EverQuest producer, WoW vets and Elden Ring devs are making an MMO filled with AI-generated NPCs
A bunch of MMO veterans led by one of the original producers of genre granddaddy EverQuest are working on a new online game that will use AI tools to create characters and have them interact with players. There's also mention of blockchain-like asset ownership and ambitions of being the next metaverse.
Avalon’s team is headed up by Jeffrey Butler, who was a producer on the original EverQuest before serving as lead on its cancelled reboot EverQuest Next. Joining Butler at Avalon studio Avalon - yes, the company and game are called the same thing - is apparently a team of industry vets made up of more EverQuest alumni and devs with credits on World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, Elden Ring and Diablo.
Avalon: The Game’s headline feature is that it’ll span a variety of settings and genres, from fantasy to cyberpunk, and let players hop between them while contributing to the game’s own setting and lore as they add to the world.
Helping to create those many worlds is a load of AI-powered tech behind the scenes, including procedural generation character creation tool Popul8 - which churns out a bunch of variations on NPC character models, and was recently used to make all those overly-teethy civilians in Cities: Skylines 2.
Even deeper down the AI hole is Avalon’s use of Inworld AI, which acts as a sort of built-in ChatGPT for NPCs’ interaction with players, generating dialogue and personalities for characters based on prompts and details given to them by devs.
The result of all this tech, at least going by the game’s brief teaser trailer, appears to be a generic-looking MMO with unremarkable snippets of combat that switch between bad-looking hack-and-slash fantasy to bad-looking third-person shooting against sci-fi
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