Q&A: How KRAFTON Built PUBG Ally, a Co-Playable Character Powered by NVIDIA ACE

Summary

KRAFTON developed PUBG Ally, an on-device AI co-playable character for PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS, using NVIDIA ACE tooling and models. Conventional non-playable characters rely on fixed dialogue, but PUBG Ally processes live game states and player voice input in real time. The interactive pipeline combines automatic speech recognition, a quantized Mistral-NeMo-Minitron-2B small language model, and a custom text-to-speech model running locally on client GPUs with at least 8GB of VRAM. To minimize latency, the architecture separates reactive gameplay into a behavior-tree System 1 layer while routing strategic decisions and speech generation to the language model. KRAFTON tuned the non-deterministic system across multi-layer evaluations and large-scale playtests with over a thousand players.

Takeaways

1. 1

   PUBG Ally runs entirely on-device by utilizing a quantized Mistral-NeMo-Minitron-2B model that fits into graphics memory alongside the game on GPUs with 8GB of VRAM.

2. 2

   The dual-layer architecture delegates tick-rate movement and combat reflexes to a behavior tree so gameplay reactions never stall on language model inference.

3. 3

   Optimizing prompt structure to keep instructions stable across turns maximizes KV cache reuse and keeps on-device SLM inference latency predictable.