A tour of duty with the “Teammates” concept, built on in-house middleware that connects external models to internal engines
Ubisoft’s first AI showcase was all about conversation. Its second, Teammates, is all about combat, and a group of three personalities trained up by an in-house narrative team for you to go into combat with.
It’s the product of an expanded internal team (now up to 80 people) developing in-house middleware that connects a wide range of external AI models with the company’s Snowdrop and Anvil game engines, and supports internal teams in building that into their games. Concurrently, it’s developing its own “playable experiences” – the team is careful not to call them “demos” – that highlight potential applications. The company let me squad up with the Teammates at an event in Paris this week, and revealed that it’s being put through its paces by both internal studios and external testers, touting feedback from “hundreds” of users on its Ubisoft Connect program.
Teammates is a notable change from the team’s Neo NPC debut at GDC 2024, which was based on conversations with AI NPCs which unlocked RPG-style relationship impacts. This had a supportive but subdued reception from internal teams, said Manzanares, who couldn’t see it fitting the types of games they were making. In response to this, Teammates feels like something that could easily wear a “Tom Clancy’s” prefix.
It’s based on a couple of AI-powered cyborg soldiers you can command through a few simple encounters with small squads of bullet-sponge robots, guided by a third AI companion which has a more GM-like control over the experience. The soldiers, Pablo and Sophia, have their own personalities (stoic and bubbly, respectively, which the demo offers a few different flavours of for both) and background lore which can be surfaced through conversation as you play. The companion, Jaspar, delivers GM-like insights with a Ryan Reynolds-esque smarm. The whole thing is powered by Google’s Gemini platform.
At the start of the mission you have team-mates but no weapon, and need to direct them from cover for the first encounters. Using voice commands brings back unwelcome memories of Xbox’s late and unloved Kinect, but this works in a way Kinect rarely managed – I was able to give snappy instructions like “stand on those pads to open the door” or “flank those soldiers and stay in cover” and Pablo and Sophia would do it, with varying degrees of sass depending on which personality had been assigned.
Both would periodically volunteer suggestions for plans of attack or abilities like being able to concentrate fire, using what’s termed the Initiative system. This became increasingly useful as the level progressed, because even when granted a weapon it was notably useless and each enemy squad took time to grind down. Botched tactics lead to Pablo or Sophia being downed and requiring resuscitation, and it’s possible to demand them do the same to you.
Beyond just bossing them around, picking at conversational asides unearthed differing backstories for each; I was able to tease out Pablo had seen a previous squad wiped out, and Sophia cheerily glossed over the practicalities of cyborg dining habits. I didn’t want to spend my demo time laboriously mining them for lore, but I did serendipitously discover it, which is the result of what the R&D narrative team said was extensive preparation, briefing and training.
Jaspar, meanwhile, was authentically annoying: self-satisfied and occasionally belittling, although seemingly responsive to requests to be less so. It had wider control over the game – I could ask it to highlight soldiers on the HUD, change the colour of the HUD, or tell me what I’d just picked up so I didn’t have to go into the D-pad menu and find out.
It’s also in charge of giving out achievements, the ten or so in that the demo contained being unlocked when the AI deemed the requirement to have been met, rather than when the player satisfies a fixed crite