Ubisoft fans who find the dialog to be a little dry and/or unnatural in the next Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, or Watch Dogs game may have something more to blame than just their writers. In a new article, Ubisoft revealed that it is adopting Ghostwriter, a new, in-house AI tool developed by Ben Swanson (R&D Scientist at La Forge Montreal) that makes it easier for developers to generate dialogue for games. Ubisoft clarified that the tool will only be used for certain types of dialogue, and that writers will continue to wield “a degree of creative control.”
“Rather than writing first draft versions themselves, Ghostwriter lets scriptwriters select and polish the samples generated,” Ben explains. This way, the tech is a tool used by the teams to support them in their creative journey, with every interaction and feedback originating from the members who use it.
From an Ubisoft article:
Ghostwriter isn’t replacing the video game writer, but instead, alleviating one of the video game writer’s most laborious tasks: writing barks. 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. Ben Swanson, R&D Scientist at La Forge Montreal, is the creator of Ghostwriter, and remembers the early seeds of it ahead of his presentation of the tech at GDC this year.
Ghostwriter is the result of conversations with narrative designers who revealed a challenge, one that Ben identified could be solved with an AI tool. Crowd chatter and barks are central features of player immersion in games – NPCs speaking to each other, enemy dialogue during combat, or an exchange triggered when entering an area all provide a more realistic world experience and make the player feel like the game around them exists outside of their actions. However, both require time and creative effort from scriptwriters that could be spent on other core plot items. Ghostwriter frees up that time, but still allows the scriptwriters a degree of creative control.