Nvidia’s AI NPCs will debut in a multiplayer mech battle game next year

Nvidia ACE, the company’s AI-powered system for giving voices and conversation skills to in-game characters, is set to debut in Mecha Break, a new multiplayer mech battle game coming to PC, Xbox X / S, and PlayStation 5 in 2025.

In Mecha Break, players can choose from a variety of mechs across categories like assault, melee, and sniper for online matches where they’ll fight both on the ground and in the air. It looks similar to something like the Armored Core series, just without a single-player mode.

Nvidia writes that players will be able to “interact via natural language with game characters” and that the characters can “see” and identify you or objects around you through your webcam, using GPT-4o. It’ll also use a combination of on-device Nvidia models and cloud-based AI to generate NPCs’ voices.

In the demonstration above, the player asked an in-game character for details about their mission and mechs, then changed their mech’s paint job by talking to it. The AI NPC’s responses were flatly delivered and bland. Maybe that’s fine when NPCs are just glorified in-game wikis.

But it might not be ideal for much beyond that. When The Verge’s Sean Hollister demoed Nvidia ACE in January, he pointed out that the characters “didn’t feel like real people,” the dialog wasn’t particularly inspiring, and that there were frequent delays before NPCs replied. Mecha Break doesn’t look like it’s any better so far, but we’ll see where things stand when it releases next year.