At GDC 2026 in Los Angeles, Xue Bing, deputy planning director of Peace Elite at Tencent's Photon Studio Group, presented the game's AI teammate work. He reported that all AI NPC gameplay combined has reached 110 million cumulative users, a peak of 17.7 million daily active users, 70 messages of interaction per match, and a microphone open rate of nearly 75%.
Peace Elite saw that shooter games had become increasingly social, while the competitive nature of online PVP shooters is a high barrier for players with weaker game or social skills. The team decided to design an AI tactical partner from scratch on top of existing gameplay, called "Jue Di Zhi Hui" (command), with the persona of a teammate who follows orders, chats well and offers companionship. It went through three stages and three versions released to users in the tens of millions for validation. The first aimed at a professional, human-like tactical partner, with professionalism shown in game behavior and human-likeness in dialogue. The second gave the AI partner memory to build an emotional bond with the player. The third aimed to let players cultivate their own personalized AI partner.
The project built a reusable "large model + AI Bot" architecture and applied it to further features. A smart war dog uses a large model so it can understand the player's voice, obey commands, search on its own, attack alongside the player and rescue wounded teammates. A themed-gameplay AI star teammate, the character "Xiao Mashen," is connected to a large language model and loaded with knowledge bases for all themed gameplay, answering players' questions in real time. AI hosting lets a player hand their character to a teammate, and the character then acts on that teammate's voice commands instead of following a fixed system-controlled behavior pattern.
On the AI star teammate, Tian Xiwei joined Peace Elite's "Jue Di Zhi Hui" all-star lineup as "Xiao Tian" at the conference. The product will upgrade the AI star teammate experience, and characters such as Xiao Tian and Hua Aotian will gain a strategy large model, multi-emotion TTS, full-duplex natural dialogue and deep memory processing. Xue Bing said the team will continue researching directions such as full-duplex natural dialogue, deep emotional resonance, semantic-level situational awareness, explainable tactical decision logic and multi-scenario tactical collaboration, and will add more AI roles and NPC experiences.