Revamped NPCs are just the beginning

The following is a guest post from Kin Wai Lau, CEO at ZKcandy.

AI agents are making headlines, yet many still don’t realize just how powerful they really are. Most attention these days goes to AI influencers who post on X without human control, trying to pump tokens they’ve launched.

This media buzz makes sense, but agents’ true potential spans far beyond that. In gaming, where interactivity and unpredictability are most valued, AI agents spur nothing short of a revolution. They are creating games with user-dependent content, where players shape their own stories. This approach breaks the limits of traditional “linear” game development: AI agents help build interactive digital worlds unseen in human history.

What Can and Cannot AI Agents Do?

Many learned about AI agents in 2024, when a mysterious agent called Terminal of Truths started posting bizarre texts on X about “Goatse Gospel” and “Goatse singularity.” It then began shilling the GOAT token that gained a $1B market cap in weeks. This ushered in the era of AI influencers — agents that barely need humans to post content online.

Luckily, social media is not the only thing we can delegate to them. AI agents can be personal assistants much smarter than the previous generation of bots: they “perceive, reason, plan, and act,” as NVIDIA’s CEO Jensen Huang said in his visionary keynote.

AI agents let you launch an assistant with on-chain functionality in minutes. They can run your wallet, integrate with smart contracts, and execute transactions. It seems that AI agents still need human instructions to figure out what to do, so they can’t design completely new experiences from scratch. However, it seems we may get there quite soon.

AI Agents for Gaming: The New Storytelling Frontier

To succeed in gaming, one must create an immersive environment with multiple storylines and branch points. In traditional game development, it takes years to create such complex universes by hand. That’s why AI’s ability to instantly create countless improvized plotlines feels like a miracle.

So far, improving non-player characters has been the greatest application of AI agents in gaming. AI unlocks unprecedented levels of freedom for NPCs, letting them adapt their behavior based on the player’s choices. Agents analyze gamer sentiment and playstyle, so NPCs exhibit realistic emotions and make decisions based on players’ personalities.

Another boost for NPCs is their ability to build dialogues with the player. AI agents will likely rebuild this gameplay module completely, giving unseen degrees of freedom to NPCs’ behavior. Recent breakthroughs in AI’s voice interaction skills suggest:, it’s a matter of time before those are implemented in games.

However, AI agents offer game development much more. They can build more dynamic immersive worlds, create richer narratives, and adapt gameplay in real time. AI agents can generate new quests and missions, produce unique locations and landscapes, and design personalized characters. As a nice bonus, they will save gaming studios millions of dollars and years of work on crafting storylines by hand.

In this new generation of games, AI agents could act like Masters in the famous Dungeons & Dragons roleplay. Those design the setting, characters, and events, set up scenarios, and respond to players’ actions to shape the narrative. Like digital Masters, AI agents could simulate entire events and universes, adjusting plots, challenges, and difficulty based on player behavior.

Increasing the Agency

AI agents may see widespread use in game development as early as 2025. First games might introduce a new monetization method through premium content: agents will generate personalized art, write smart contracts, and mint NFTs. These mechanics may attract Web2 studios looking for Web3 opportunities. The Web3 UX is now ready: inefficiencies of early blockchain games like wallet management and gas fees are gone. Traditional gaming studios are now ready to explore the potential of asset ownership supercharged by AI agents.

In future games, creators will define only the basics, while AI agents will create a personal story for each player. Gaming ecosystems will be interoperable, so players can transfer assets using blockchain as AI builds immersive digital words.

Some early examples of AI-fueled games, launched before the agent frenzy, are AI Dungeon and Charisma.ai. The former is a storytelling platform where users create customized adventures: building worlds, roleplaying, and experimenting with genres; premium features unlock advanced AI models and deeper plots. Charisma.ai, an immersive conversational AI platform for online training, elevates learning experiences with AI-powered avatars that respond in personalized, context-aware dialogue.

This January, Galaxy Interactive VC and Solana’s layer-2 Sonic teamed up to invest $1M each in platforms building AI agents. And this seems to be just the beginning: NVIDIA proclaimed the transition to the next phase of AI development — Agentic AI. The corporation suggests “AI will be mainstream in every application,” “with potential reaching trillions of dollars.”

AI agents are game-changers that make experiences more personal and dynamic. It’s a new kind of immersive digital world, one that feels more unpredictable and real, competing for attention with Netflix, Spotify, and TikTok. Giants like Elon Musk’s xAI join the race, as the billionaire announces that he’ll start his AI-based game studio. AI agents are shaking things up, and the gaming industry is only beginning to realize the revolution ahead.