At the AI theme forum of the 2025 Yunqi Conference, Liu Chang, the head of NetEase's "Against the Cold" mobile game, took the stage to share. With the theme of "AI reshapes the emotional links of the virtual world", systematically interpreted the game's breakthrough practice in the field of artificial intelligence for the first time.
The person in charge pointed out at the opening: "Players consume content very quickly, but content updates can never keep up", directly pointing to the three major anxiety facing the industry's content supply, emotional value and social maintenance.
The person in charge revealed that the team positioned AI as a transformative force that “can bring assistance, experience and links.”In the iconic "castle mode", AI has achieved a breakthrough in "one sentence creation" - players can automatically generate character appearance, animation plot and even complete short videos by simply entering text descriptions.
"This made us realize that AI makes every player the director of their own life," the person in charge said.Up to now, this model has inspired millions of players to transform from "audiences" into "directors", producing tens of millions of UGC content on short video platforms, forming a tens of billions of communication effect.
In terms of intelligent NPC systems, the person in charge shared a warmer technical vision: "AI can make players 'never go offline' and always have intelligent digital clones in the game." These NPCs with large-scale model capabilities will not only accompany players to push swings, mining, and film films, but will also post to your friends to share life's details.
What is moving is that some players use AI technology to reproduce the image of their deceased relatives, allowing their father to "always follow her", making the game world a new carrier for emotional sustenance.
The person in charge particularly emphasized the "two-way" innovation brought by AI.By capturing player feedback and network hotspots in real time, the development team can realize "5G surfing on the Internet" and quickly convert player inspiration into game content.
"The virtual world is no longer a one-way output," the person in charge said, "but a real two-way rush."At the same time, AI intelligent clone technology ensures that "friends are not online, you can still interact with their AI clone", greatly enhancing the stability of social relationships.
These innovative practices rely on the large-model infrastructure and distributed computing power support jointly built with Alibaba Cloud to ensure the stability of the system at the scale of tens of millions of users.The AI practice of the mobile game "Against the Cold" has received attention from mainstream media at home and abroad such as CCTV and Wall Street Journal, becoming an industry benchmark for AI to empower digital culture.
The person in charge concluded that AI is making the virtual world a "more immersive, more emotional value and more connected place."By lowering the threshold for creation, providing credible companionship, and achieving two-way co-creation, technology truly allows every player to "write their own stories" in the virtual world.
