A good open world game is filled with little details that add to a player’s sense of immersion. One of the key elements is the presence of background chatter. Each piece of dialog you hear is known as a “bark” and must be individually written by the game’s creators — a time consuming, detailed task. Ubisoft, maker of popular open world gaming series like Assassin’s Creed and Watch Dogs, hopes to shorten this process with Ghostwriter, a machine learning tool that generates first drafts of barks.
To use Ghostwriter, narrative writers input the character and type of interaction they are looking to create. The tool then produces variations, each with two slightly different options, for writers to review. As the writers make edits to the drafts, Ghostwriter updates, ideally producing more tailored options moving forward.
The idea here is to save game writers time to focus on the big stuff. “Ghostwriter was created hand-in-hand with narrative teams to help them complete a repetitive task more quickly and effectively, giving them more time and freedom to work on games’ narrative, characters, and cutscenes,” Ubisoft states in a video release.
