Ubisoft CEO says AI will make open-world games "your world" with fewer "pre-scripted things," and screw it, maybe for Assassin's Creed an AI Socrates that will definitely give you a historically accurate philosophy lesson maybe

Socrates as he appears in Assassin's Creed Odyssey
(Image credit: Ubisoft)

Nobody loves AI quite like tech CEOs love AI, and that includes Ubisoft boss Yves Guillemot, who thinks the tech is going to power a new generation of reactive NPCs and far more dynamic versions of the publisher's traditional open-world games.

"What we see is that, in video games, we will be able to experiment with a lot of things that we will be able to re-use in the real world," Guillemot said on stage at Saudi Arabia's New Global Sport Conference, as reported by Game File (paid article link). "For example, we can make sure that, when you meet with Socrates [in a game], you have all the data that's about what he said, what he did, so you will be in front and speaking with a person that is actually very close to what that person was."

Of course, the idea of Socrates appearing in a Ubisoft game isn't far-fetched, since he was a supporting character in Assassin's Creed Odyssey. There – as characterized by human writers and animators and a human voice actor – he was one of the game's most memorable details, equally delighting and annoying players with his roundabout philosophical questioning.

The idea of the best open-world games being more reactive to my actions is certainly a compelling one – but AI content generation still hasn't managed to move past an inherent feeling of empty meaninglessness. And man, if a technology somehow feels more profoundly meaningless than video games, I'm not sure there's a whole lot of hope for it to improve the medium.

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Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.

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