Square Enix and Google have partnered to inject the tech giant’s AI, Gemini, to help advise and guide players in the popular Japan-only MMO, Dragon Quest X.
Announced at a press event over the weekend, the partnership with see Square Enix turn one of the loveably blue slimes of the Dragon Quest universe into an AI-powered chat bot called Chatty Slimey. Players can converse with the bot through both voice and text, with the bot responding with generated voice lines that can help guide a player through different stages of the game and remark on their actions. Gemini is trained off data publicly available on the internet, although Google didn’t specifically mention where this bot might get the required content for these responses.
Speaking to Japanese publication Sankei (via VGC) Square Enix’s head of development, Takashi Anzai, said that the chat bot will make the game more inviting to new players. “New players won’t feel lonely wondering where to start playing; it will become their own personal companion,” he concluded.
This isn’t the first time Square Enix has shown a strong interest in AI. In November last year, the publisher announced that it plans to have at least 70% of all of its QA and debugging work handled by AI by the year 2027. This approach was pitched as a means for Square Enix to “establish a competitive advantage in game development.”
It also isn’t the first time an AI chat bot has been integrated into a multiplayer game. Fortnite infamously added an AI-powered Darth Vader into Fortnite during its Star Wars season last year, and had to work quickly to prevent the Disney-owned character from replying with slurs and racist remarks players quickly figured out how to prompt from it.
The use of generative AI, including what was later explained as placeholders that were mistakenly included in the final game, has proven to be a contentious aspect of games like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and, more recently, Crimson Desert.
