The company behind Genshin Impact, HoYoverse, has announced an investment of over $14.6 billion in artificial intelligence over the next three years. Its goal is to develop its own tools to stop relying on external models. This will result in NPCs with more dynamic responses, automation of repetitive processes, and faster content generation, starting with its upcoming life simulation title.
The Technology Behind Creative Autonomy 🤖
HoYoverse's bet focuses on creating its own AI infrastructure, thus avoiding the limitations and costs of external licenses. This involves developing language models and procedural generation systems adapted to their graphics engines. For developers, automating tasks such as dialogue design or dungeon creation will reduce production times. For players, the result will be more reactive worlds, where NPCs do not repeat pre-made phrases and the environment evolves more organically.
Goodbye to NPCs That Only Talk About the Weather 🌤️
But not everything is joy. With this investment, HoYoverse's non-playable characters will stop repeating the classic nice weather today. Now, hopefully, they will tell you how climate change affects them in Teyvat or ask you about your day while selling you a fish. What we don't know is if the AI will also learn to complain about final bosses or ask you to level up before accepting a quest. That said, at least they will be able to do the shopping on their own.