‘The Sims 4’ Rival ‘inZOI’ Brings ChatGPT-Style AI Characters

inZOI–a soon-to-be-released rival to The Sims–will offer “smart” AI characters that can be prompted just like ChatGPT.

Nvidia has long promised to bring smarter non-player characters (NPCs) to video games with its Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE). The life simulation inZOI, which is due to be released at the end of this month, will be one of a handful of shipping games to adopt the technology.

Nvidia’s previous ACE demonstrations have shown how players can have natural-language conversations with AI characters, instead of using pre-determined text. However, a series of forthcoming games will use the AI in different ways.

inZOI’s AI Features

With inZOI, “players can transform the city’s NPCs,” said Jason Paul, vice president of Nvidia’s GeForce platform technology.

The game’s NPCs are called ZOIs, but there’s a setting players can choose to turn them into “smart ZOIs” that have additional AI features.

“You can give these smart ZOIs life goals through a text prompt, much like you prompt ChatGPT,” said Paul. “This text prompt then gets passed into an ACE language model that is agentic and generates character actions in line with the prompt.

“So, for instance, a smart ZOI could be prompted to do acts of kindness, and then the AI model will generate dynamic actions, such as maybe having them offer food to a hungry stranger on the street.”

At the end of an in-game day, the language model will adjust the AI character’s scheduled activities based on the human player’s instructions and the character’s in-game experiences, Paul added.

Nvidia says that gamers won’t need bleeding-edge graphics cards to take advantage of the AI features. “It’s a small, compact language model that takes advantage of some of Nvidia’s unique distillation methods to provide a really small footprint and run across a wide range of GPUs, while still delivering the quality of output,” said Paul.

The smart ZOIs will be part of the game when it launches on March 28.

More AI-enhanced Games

Other soon-to-be-released titles will find other ways to deploy the AI. Naraka:Bladepoint is a battle royale game also arriving at the end of March, and it will include an “ACE-powered teammate” which includes a speech model that allows players to hold a conversation with their AI buddy.

The AI assistant can also help the player with combat, search for items and offer gameplay tips. The AI features will initially be available in the Chinese language version of the game before arriving in the global version later this year.

Then there’s Black Vultures: Prey of Greed, a first-person shooter in which the player can use an “AI combat system” that’s connected to their in-game helmet, helping to analyze the battlefield and provide combat guidance. The AI might, for example, suggest a route to cut across the battlefield that contains the fewest enemies, based on what it can see unfolding in the game.

Finally there’s Fate Trigger, an anime-style tactical shooter, which is using Nvidia’s audio-to-face technology to “generate real-time facial animations and natural lip sync” when talking to the in-game characters.

Release dates are yet to be confirmed for Black Vultures and Fate Trigger.