A demonstration of Nvidia ACE (Avatar Cloud Engine) for Games, an AI-powered system for giving voices and conversation skills to in-game characters, was shown running in a mech battle game called Mecha Break during Gamescom 2024. The demo shows a player asking questions about an upcoming mission and getting AI-generated advice from one of the characters on which mech will be the best choice for it.
Mecha Break developers say Nvidia’s AI NPC tech isn’t shipping in the full game
A Gamescom demo for the 2025 mech combat game showed off Nvidia’s AI-generated conversations, but that isn’t its final form.
A Gamescom demo for the 2025 mech combat game showed off Nvidia’s AI-generated conversations, but that isn’t its final form.
After the demo video went out, Mecha Break’s developers replied to social media posts criticizing the use of AI by saying, “We were honored to work with NVIDIA to create a tech demo showcasing their ACE technology in a beta build of Mecha Break. However, we need to clarify that at launch Mecha Break will have a cast of human voice-acted characters.”
The use of ACE was a tech demo, and Nvidia’s AI “isn’t in the final game,” writes Brett Buren, a PR spokesperson, in an email to The Verge.
After trying Nvidia’s AI NPC tech in January, The Verge’s Sean Hollister wrote that the characters it powered “didn’t feel like real people.” He said there was “often a short delay” before they replied and that sometimes they misinterpreted him.
Nvidia’s blog post says that this showcase demo uses a combination of on-device and cloud-based AI models to create the experience.
Mecha BREAK, developed by Amazing Seasun Games, a Kingsoft Corporation game subsidiary, has implemented the NVIDIA Nemotron-4 4B Instruct NIM running on-device in the first showcase of ACE-powered game interactions. Additionally, NVIDIA Audio2Face-3D NIM and Whisper, OpenAI’s automatic speech recognition model, provide facial animation and speech recognition running on device, while Elevenlabs powers the character’s voice through the cloud.
Another “digital human technology demo” called Legends showed a character that could “see” the player and objects in the real world using the computer’s camera for augmented reality-like immersion.
Correction August 24th, 2024: This story previously said Mecha Break will use Nvidia AI NPCs when it’s released. The game will use voice actors, not AI, according to PR spokesperson Brett Buren.
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