If you’ve been dreaming about having a more in-depth conversation with one of your favorite gaming characters, it seems that Sony is working on making that happen. A leaked video shows Aloy, the main character from Horizon Forbidden West, having a conversation with the player and explaining her background. I’ve seen the video, and while I’m impressed with the advancement of AI, I’m not sure how I feel about the result so far.
A leaker sent a video to The Verge, showcasing a PlayStation prototype where Sharwin Raghoebardajal, Sony’s director of software engineering, speaks to Aloy. It’s an odd thing, given that you play as Aloy in Horizon Forbidden West, but the overall impression from the video is even weirder.
Raghoebardajal asks Aloy to tell him more about the fact that she’s been looking for her mother. The dialogue flows naturally even though the responses are powered by AI, but Aloy’s voice and facial expressions are a give away for the fact that this is all generated and not made by developers. It dips into uncanny valley territory.
A bit of the video follows below, but be careful — it does spoil some Horizon Forbidden West storylines.
Upon the initial leak, it was unclear whether the video was legitimate or not, although it certainly seemed to be that way. The Verge said that the video was nothing more than a prototype that the company developed with Guerrilla Games; the idea was to show off the technology at Sony, so this wasn’t meant to be seen by outsiders. The demo features OpenAI’s whisper model to power speech-to-text; meanwhile, GPT-4 and Llama 3 are said to have been used for the conversations.
There’s now been an update that gives it all more weight, though. The original leaked video has since been taken down by Muso, which, as The Verge explains, is a copyrights enforcement company for Sony Interactive Entertainment. That covers PlayStation.
It’s unclear when, or if, Sony will start using AI-driven characters in actual games. The company isn’t the first to experiment with using AI to power character interactions. Nvidia has shared multiple demos of Ace, its suite of AI-generated NPC tools, and Ubisoft and Tencent are starting to use it.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.