Hey all, I’m back with a look at some unique tech for one of last year’s hits for this week’s Video Game Tuesday. It’s all about the artificial intelligence in Where Winds Meet, an excellent title that we reviewed back in December. It earned 4.5 out of 5 GiN Gems.
AI in Where Winds Meet?: AI is rather prevalent in Where Winds Meet, and it’s surprisingly useful. It ranges from using AI to take a photo of yourself (or someone else obviously) to creating a player character on the PC version and translating in game chat in real time so that people who speak different languages can talk and adventure together.
In Game Chat?: Given that the global servers are very much multilingual, this is a very handy feature anyone can use by selecting the “T” icon above each message. This is also very helpful with the various signposts you’ll find throughout the world that can help you figure out puzzles and quests like the signs in Dark Souls but much more numerous. Or they can troll you, and you’ll fall to your death or look for a breakable wall that doesn’t exist.
What else?: Well, Where Winds Meet’s developer Everstone Studio recently launched a tool that allows players to upload a clip of a video to replicate dance moves directly in game, which is pretty neat.
But the most significant feature is the use of making many, but not all of the NPCs in Where Winds Meet able to be spoken with via in game chat to befriend them. Doing so is highly recommended as early as possible, and you’ll need to work for each one because they’re all chat bots utilizing AI.
It’s not perfect, and sometimes you’ll get into very awkward conversations with these NPCs and even long goodbyes in a chat. For example, I described a location the person was looking for by emoting that I handed them a map to the exact place (as an aside this map isn’t something you can make or exists in the game, you’re just saying you have it in the chat.) And then I spent 10 or more minutes trying to extricate myself from the conversation without resetting it and undoing all my work because they just wouldn’t let me simply wave goodbye.
So, it can be a tedious task making chat bots your best friend, but by doing so it gives you a chance to have NPCs potentially sending you gifts with useful items every day. It does not happen all the time, and from what I can tell the more NPCs you’ve befriended the more likely it is to happen every day at the daily reset. But it happens at least once a week from what I’ve experienced. Sometimes you can trick your way into an instant befriending with some well-chosen emotes, but it’s not easy.
So overall, that is a pretty smart way to use AI inside a game, and more titles should experiment with this type of advanced interactions.
That’s it for this week’s Video Game Tuesday.
