The small features in a successful open world game add to the player’s sense of immersion. The sound of background conversation is one of the crucial components. The game’s authors must write each “bark,” or line of dialogue, by hand, which takes a lot of time and attention to detail. With Ghostwriter, a machine learning programme that generates initial versions of barks, Ubisoft, the developer of well-known open world video game franchises like Assassin’s Creed and Watch Dogs, intends to speed up this procedure.
Narrative writers enter the persona and the kind of interaction they want to create in Ghostwriter. For writers to review, the technology then generates versions, each with two slightly different options. Ghostwriter updates when the writers make changes to the drafts, ideally creating more specialised choices going future.
The purpose of this is to give game writers more time to work on important things. According to a video release from Ubisoft, “Ghostwriter was created hand-in-hand with narrative teams to help them complete a repetitive task more quickly and effectively, giving them more time and freedom to work on games’ narratives, characters, and cutscenes.”
Ghostwriter is promoted by Ubisoft as a “AI” tool, which is currently the big thing with it appearing that every corporation, from Google to Microsoft, has jumped on board. The challenge with this technology, as with others, is getting people to utilise it, particularly staff. The integration of the tool into production, according to Ben Swanson, an R&D scientist at Ubisoft who built Ghostwriter, is now the toughest obstacle. The production team developed Ernestine, a back-end tool that enables anyone to generate new machine learning models in Ghostwriter, to better ease this.
If Ghostwriter is successful, authors will have more time and energy to devote to creating richer, more interesting gaming worlds for players to explore.
