AI companions in games have long been constrained by fixed dialogue. PUBG Ally is a different kind of system. Built by KRAFTON for PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS, this AI teammate is powered by NVIDIA ACE and its suite of efficient models and tooling.
PUBG Ally uses automatic speech recognition, a 2B-parameter small language model, and text-to-speech to understand player voice, reason through game context and dynamic events, and respond in real time. KRAFTON is calling the result a co-playable character (CPC): a new category distinct from non-playable characters (NPCs), designed to cooperate, adapt, and remember across sessions.
PUBG Ally entered public beta on June 17 and will be available in PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS Arcade Mode for gamers until June 30th.
We sat down with with Hyunseung Kim, research lead, and Yujeong Son, project manager, at KRAFTON to go deep on the architecture, the latency challenges, the multilingual support, and what they learned building and tuning an AI system whose outputs aren’t deterministic.
Video 1: PUBG Ally in action, as shown at the Seoul GeForce Gamer Festival
