Ubisoft is testing an AI tool that writes NPC dialogue
Video game worlds are filled with “barks.” You may not know the name for the short, quick phrases that come from a game’s characters when they aren’t being chatty, but they’re always there. It’s your Call of Duty: Modern Warfare teammate yelling “Grenade!” or Overwatch hero Junkrat’s giddy “Fire in the hole!” It’s Ellie in The Last of Us shouting at Joel, “Watch out!” These lines are often triggered by certain situations — if you get hit by a bullet, land a headshot, or pass by a shopkeeper selling goods, for instance. These sorts of lines are easy to overlook when they’re good, but hard to ignore when they’re bad.
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While barks are short and sometimes repetitive, writing them is an important job for video game developers; it’s some of the most frequent dialogue a player will hear. (And sometimes they become iconic!) A video game can have hundreds or thousands of these NPC lines. On Tuesday, Ubisoft unveiled a tool it says could make the process of writing barks less tedious for its writers. Ubisoft describes the program, Ghostwriter, as an “in-house AI tool” to generate “first drafts of barks.” Ghostwriter creator Ben Swanson, an R&D scientist at Ubisoft La Forge, hosted a GDC 2023 talk Tuesday to talk about how the company is using it.
“Ghostwriter isn’t replacing the video game writer, but instead, alleviating one of the video game writer’s most laborious tasks: writing barks,” Ubisoft wrote in a blog post outlining the tool. “Ghostwriter effectively generates first drafts of barks — phrases or sounds made by NPCs during a triggered event — which gives scriptwriters more time to polish the narrative elsewhere.”
Swanson said he worked with Ubisoft’s writers to create a tool that would genuinely aid their work
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