PUBG Ally Duo Mode Two-Week Beta Available Now, Adding A Collaborative AI Teammate To Your Squad

NVIDIA ACE is a suite of RTX-accelerated digital human technologies that bring game characters to life with AI.

Since its debut in 2023, NVIDIA has expanded ACE from conversational NPCs to autonomous game characters that use AI to perceive, plan, and take action within their environment. Enabling these autonomous characters are ACE small language models (SLMs), capable of planning at sub-second frequencies required for realistic decision making, and speech models that allow AI characters to communicate with players.

Multiplayer games build social connections and excitement through competition and cooperation. But players may not always have someone to play with, or might prefer learning at their own pace in a low-pressure environment. While many games use non-player characters (NPCs) as allies or opponents to supplement human players, these traditional NPCs are often too simple to offer meaningful engagement.

PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS’ new Ally Duo Mode introduces PUBG Ally, a highly adaptive, context-aware AI teammate that dynamically adjusts its playstyle based on your commands and emergent battlefield situations. It makes independent decisions such as looting, fighting and navigating to support you, all without requiring continuous prompting. Capable of understanding both voice and text inputs, from casual comments to tactical instructions, PUBG Ally possesses a deep knowledge of PUBG-specific terminology, player lingo, map locations, and item attributes.

It works seamlessly alongside you to secure that coveted chicken dinner. Born from a collaborative AI research and development effort between KRAFTON and NVIDIA, PUBG Ally represents a new generation of AI game characters designed for deeper immersion.

To balance split-second combat reflexes with intelligent decision-making, PUBG Ally divides its workload into two interconnected systems. The first is a traditional, fast-paced behavior tree that handles immediate tactical actions such as movement, precise aiming, and instant combat responses. The second is NVIDIA ACE, which drives the teammate's cognitive abilities using AI models and tools. Defining the boundary between these two systems required extensive iteration, as perfecting the division was essential to keeping PUBG Ally responsive enough for high-stakes combat while preserving the flexible, natural feel of a true teammate.

This cognitive system leverages three distinct models running locally on RTX GPUs with at least 8GB of VRAM. First, a lightweight NVIDIA Parakeet speech-to-text model precisely interprets English voice commands in real-time. Next, NVIDIA Mistral-Nemo-Minitron, a 2 billion parameter small language model, analyzes the situation and generates context-aware responses in English. Finally, a custom KRAFTON in-house text-to-speech model synthesizes natural-sounding voice responses instantly. To maximize performance and keep latency to a minimum, an in-game inferencing toolset streamlines AI execution directly alongside the game's graphics engine. To learn more about the latest tools and plugins for building intelligent in-game characters, check out the Unreal Engine Fest Developer blog.

You can team up with PUBG Ally in Ally Duo Mode through PUBG Arcade, for the next two weeks, until June 30th, via Steam:

The PUBG Ally Duo Mode beta will enable KRAFTON to collect invaluable real-world player feedback, to guide the future of AI agents in games.

For further information about the underlying technology powering the PUBG Ally, we recommend checking out this in-depth NVIDIA ACE article.