How does AI make games fun? Mihayou made a move

Mihayou tested the water AI through the new work "Honkai: Interstellar Railway", knocking on the door of the new world of the game.

Written by: Kyle

Two and a half years after the release of "Yuanshin", the game upstart Mihayou finally released a new game, "Honkai: Star Railway". One of the highlights of the new game is that it has a built-in AIGC tool called "Graphic Generating Graphics". Users can upload any image to generate a corresponding style of game character "March 7".

The vast number of players have opened their minds, and nearly 10 million pictures have been generated in just one week. This is not enough, and some users hope that the generated pictures can truly become characters and share the game journey with themselves.

Although this step has not yet been realized, Mihayou has plans for AI. Its president Liu Wei said that in the future, AI tools will be used to increase the level of NPC lines and plots, and create NPCs whose dialogues will never be repeated.

AI and games are inextricably linked. Whether it is the legion fighting against the player in "Red Alert" or the police involved in the hunt in the GTA series, they are all AI, but they do not have machine learning capabilities, and they only act step by step according to the programmed settings. The emergence of AlphaGo has opened up new ideas for game AI. The AI player "Jue Wu", who is comparable to the top human king, has killed the Quartet in "Glory of the King".

When generative AI showed the world the powerful capabilities of multimodality, the game industry also began to leverage on it, with the purpose of upgrading the player experience by leaps and bounds.

Mihayou Xinyou implants the raw map AI

"Yuan Shen" is popular all over the world, and the developer Mihayou has become a mudslide that broke the pattern of game manufacturers, and has rapidly grown into a game manufacturer that rivals Tencent and NetEase. Recently, the company released a new work "Honkai: Star Railway" (referred to as "Star Railway").

Produced by MiHoYo, attention is naturally indispensable. In the first week of the launch of "Star Iron", the download volume and revenue in the global mobile market were 1.6 times and 1.3 times that of "Yuanshin" in the same period. According to the data released by the Sensor Tower store intelligence platform on May 16, within a week of its release, the overseas downloads of "Star Iron" exceeded 11 million, topping the list of overseas mobile game downloads for the month.

The new game is launched, attracting two-dimensional players to try it out. Soon, players discovered that Mihayou had buried an "easter egg" in "Star Iron": it provided an AI generation tool "meme resonance machine". Through this "machine", players can change all pictures into "March Seven", one of the protagonists of "Star Iron".

As a result, the two-dimensional players who are good at exploring and being funny have their brains wide open, uploading various social network memes to play "pictures", including Liu Wei, the president of Mihayou who is affectionately called "Big Viagra" by players, and The following is the popular "trainee" on the Internet.

Game players generate March 7th through the "Meme Resonance Machine"

A simple "picture generation map" tool spread through social networks, adding to the enthusiasm for the early launch of "Star Iron". According to statistics, in a week, the majority of players have used the "meme resonance machine" to generate nearly 10 million pictures. During this process, some people also put forward new ideas, "It would be great if the 'March Seven' generated by myself can be brought to life in the game, so that everyone's game characters will have different shapes and characteristics."

In the same story mobile games, players expressed a strong demand for differentiation. From character modeling and clothing, to story plots and trends, as well as adventures and knowledge, most players do not want to repeat the old path explored by others, but want to open up a unique game experience. " and other open world games are sought after an important reason.

But even "Yuan Shen", which invested hundreds of people and took more than 3 years to develop, can only achieve the ultimate in map richness, and the plot and character design in it cannot achieve "thousands of people and thousands of faces". Now, with the advent of generative AI, there is an opportunity to change the gaming experience.

The launch of the "Meme Resonance Machine" can be regarded as a test for MiHoYo. For MiHoYo, who is obsessed with open world gameplay, AI is destined to become its must-have option.

In April of this year, Liu Wei revealed in an interview with the Japanese game media that the "Star Iron" team has tried to use AI tools to assist art and copywriting development, hoping to increase the level of NPC lines and plots through AI tools in the future, creating a dialogue that will never be repeated. NPCs. However, judging from the current game content, this point has not been officially applied. "Big Viagra" said frankly that there are still many problems with AI tools, and the characteristics of characters such as OOC (not in line with personality) are still difficult to realize.

Game AI becomes stronger in the post-AlphaGo era

Generative AI allows game companies to see the hope of track upgrades, and players are also looking forward to it. But there is actually a cold knowledge here: the combination of games and AI is not a new story.

Game lovers have experienced AI in many well-known games, such as the legion attacking your army in the Red Alert game; the World of Warcraft, the Warcraft that is eyeing you; the robot playing against you in the chess and card game; GTA In the series of games, when you rampage on passers-by, drive a police car all over the street to chase your cops.

GTA game police chase screen

To be precise, the AI in these games is very rudimentary, and it is far from the powerful AI functions that people have experienced now, because neural networks, deep learning and other technologies are rarely used, and the main responsibilities of low-level AI characters in games are It is to simulate intelligent behavior, they do not have the ability of machine learning.

The AI decisions in the above games are basically potential behaviors preset by developers. The difficulty at the time was how these AIs reacted to the different behaviors of different players. For example, in the GTA game, the AI does not know when you will steal the car or hit someone. As long as you obey the law, you will not attract the attention of the police. Once you start a criminal journey, the police will act.

This requires AI to have perception capabilities. During game development, the programmers introduced the concept of "perception". Through the program, the NPC can detect the visual field perception, then analyze the perception information, output the result of the next desired behavior, and implement the decision step by step.

It can be seen that although AI is commonly used in these strategy games, their IQ is not very high, and they just switch between multiple states according to the player's actions. As long as the player is proficient in playing, he can basically predict the next move of AI.

But as AI technology evolves, the story changes. In March 2016, AlphaGo defeated Go world champion and professional nine-dan Go player Lee Sedol with a total score of 4-1. In May of the following year, it defeated Ke Jie, the top chess player in the world at the time. This time, AlphaGo's next move is unpredictable. There is no other reason. AlphaGo has applied advanced technologies such as neural networks, deep learning, and Monte Carlo tree search methods. It can play against itself non-stop throughout the day to improve.

AlphaGo allowed people to see the reborn changes in AI's computing and reasoning capabilities, which aroused the attention of the game industry. Many game companies began to introduce AI to improve the game experience.

In 2017, Tencent put the game AI called "Fine Art" into "Glory of the King", happily "push towers" with real players. At the 2021 World Artificial Intelligence Conference, Tencent AI Lab and Glory of Kings jointly launched "King's Juewu" to appear on the scene. "Juewu" is a top AI team trained through deep learning, and it continuously competes with passer-by players and professional players. , without failure. Such a record does not come from "opening up". According to Tencent, the training intensity of "Jue Wu" in one day is comparable to 440 years of human training. Secondly, it is not affected by emotions and personality, so it is not easy to make mistakes.

In 2019, NetEase equipped its mobile game "A Chinese Ghost Story" with a "smart child" system, which was the first attempt to apply natural language processing technology to massively multiplayer online role-playing games, allowing the game's NPCs to freely communicate with players. Interestingly, the character of the "child" in the game will change according to the different behaviors of the players, whether it is humorous or warm and caring, initially realizing the different experience of "your child and my child".

AI with a certain learning ability brings players a sense of freshness and challenge. Compared with the early AI that only acts according to the preset program and allows you to tease it at will, the upgraded game AI character can often make unexpected decisions , allowing real players to gain a higher sense of accomplishment after defeating AI characters.

AIGC brings new opportunities to upgrade game experience

Today, the emergence of ChatGPT has once again greatly improved the capabilities of AI, and the game industry will naturally not let go of the opportunity.

Before Mihayou tried AI, NetEase had already taken action. On February 15th, NetEase's "Naishuihan" mobile game announced that it had installed the first "game GPT" in China, allowing NPCs to freely talk to players and give logical behavioral feedback based on the content of the dialogue, that is, "completely controlled by Highly intelligent NPC driven by AI".

"Game GPT" took a look at the hot spots of ChatGPT. It is actually based on Netease Fuxi AI technology. "Naishuihan" officially announced that "Naishuihan GPT" is different from ChatGPT. The latter focuses on summarizing and giving conclusions, while the former focuses on guiding NPCs' next actions by understanding semantics; the latter has a wider range of learning. It is more like a search engine, while the former mainly studies martial arts novels, history books, poetry and songs, and is deliberately restricted in its cognitive scope.

Many players have already experienced Nishuihan intelligent NPC, and some players commented: "Nishuihan mobile game AI, there are some things but not many". In the game, players can talk to NPCs by typing, and they can also fight against NPCs. A video posted by a video blogger showed an NPC named "Gao Dasheng" lying on the ground after losing the battle with the player, yelling, "My life is so miserable! I was injured so badly, and no one came to help me." After the passing player is healed, it will take the initiative to thank, "Girl, thank you for your rescue just now!" However, when conducting casual conversations, NPCs often answer irrelevant questions, which shows that the AI technology behind it still has room for optimization.

Naishuihan game players can talk freely with NPC

Nevertheless, "Naishuihan", which integrates GPT capabilities, has also successfully attracted the attention of a large number of players. On April 28th, before the second test of the mobile game "Naishuihan" started, the official announcement was made that the total number of pre-orders on the entire network exceeded 30 million. It can be seen that NPCs capable of intelligent dialogue have aroused the appetite of many players.

Using generative AI to increase the amount of NPC lines and interactions is a mainstream adoption trend of current game manufacturers.

In March of this year, game giant Ubisoft announced Ghostwriter, an AI game writer tool, to assist script writers in creating game lines. Later, Ubisoft also integrated Ghostwriter into its Omen narrative engine. Developers can automatically generate several versions of available lines by inputting a basic line or speech motivation of NPC. According to Ubisoft, Ghostwriter has added reinforcement learning technology with human feedback, and it will become more and more effective and accurate after humans make thousands of choices of suitable lines.

In addition to making NPCs more intelligent, allowing users to participate in game scene design to a certain extent is also regarded as a major development direction in the future.

Earlier this year, Keijiro Takahashi, an engineer of the well-known game engine Unity, shared a video in which users enter text prompts in the engine's editor to generate objects, move objects, create point lights, etc., and run the generated scenes. This makes it possible for users to create copies of games autonomously. However, the engineer also pointed out that there are still many instructions that cannot be correctly understood and executed by this AI plug-in, so it cannot be expected to be really useful for the time being.

According to Xue Shaohua, associate professor of Beijing Institute of Technology, like "Mario Maker", the productivity is handed over to the players, so that the players are both creators and consumers. This kind of open interactive development may be one of the trends in the future game industry.

Ideally, with the further development of generative AI, the AI that will play against real players in future games will be smarter and able to bring higher challenges to real players; NPCs in real-playing games will no longer be the same, Instead, it has a personality like a human; further, users can use the AI tools provided by the game to customize characters, spaces and plots, allowing a single game to infinitely expand into various virtual continents.

Of course, with the help of AI, the efficiency of game production is also rapidly improving.

At the Game Developers Conference GDC 2023, Unity announced that it will launch generative AI tools to help developers make games faster and better; and the Polish team has developed a PERSONA 3.0 plug-in for Unreal Engine 5 to create hyper-realistic virtual character. The creation process from concept sketches to character models can be shortened to minutes through machine learning algorithms and photogrammetry. In terms of game art design, AI is also promising. A producer of VR games told "Metaverse Explosion" that using Midjourney and Dall-E can fully meet their original painting creation needs.

With the addition of AI with extraordinary capabilities, the game world will become more and more real. At that time, humans and machines will coexist and compete in the same space, and more interesting plots will happen soon.