Californian developer platform Inworld AI has today released its findings from the Gamer Attitudes to NPCs report.

A survey of 1,002 gamers in the US aged between 16 and 50 was conducted late last year with participants selected randomly from a panel of gamers.

Excitement for AI in video games was high, with 99 percent convinced that advanced AI being used with NPCs would have a positive impact on gameplay.

People want intelligent NPCs

The consensus from the report was that AI advancements have the capacity to bring in a new era of interactability with NPCs and, by extension, immersion within games. Giving NPCs unscripted conversational abilities and individual personalities using multimodal behaviour systems are among the factors that would help achieve this. And of course, NPCs are widely prevalent in mobile gaming, too.

In total, 84 percent of those surveyed agree that NPCs in their current form have a positive impact on gameplay, but 76 percent want better situational awareness from these in-game characters and 52 percent dislike their repetitive dialogue. Notably, 81 percent would be open to a price increase for a game using advanced AI technology with its NPCs.

As for players who avoid NPCs when playing, they represent only a nine percent minority. Meanwhile, as many as 40 percent talk to as many NPCs as they encounter if it means the chance to unlock more content.

If NPCs were more intelligent, 78 percent would talk to them more.

"Humans are storytellers. We’re drawn to narratives that help us to make sense of the world around us. The same thing is true in the gaming world - the more immersive and believable a story is, the more we want to stay inside it," said Inworld AI CPO and co-founder Kylan Gibbs.

"So it’s really no surprise that so many gamers want to unlock deeper stories through these NPC interactions."

In December 2022, AI startup Kinetix launched its first AI-powered emotes for use within video games.