Last year’s Unreal Fest was about new tools to build bigger, more detailed worlds, as I saw firsthand with The Witcher 4’s reveal, but this year things look to be less about going big and more about tangible realism in how we interact with a game world through ‘living’ NPCS. This year, the focus seems to be on what’s in those worlds, on how characters behave, act, and react.
That shift shows up pretty clearly in Epic’s latest PUBG experiment with PUBG Ally in PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS, a companion system built around AI that can listen, respond, interpret what’s happening in a match and act like it understands the flow of the moment rather than just firing off pre-written lines, so you can speak to it or type at it and it comes back with actions that work in the chaos of an actual live game, helping with navigation, combat support, even basic decision-making.
