At CES 2026 Nvidia said that its live non-player characters built on Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) technology will be integrated into another game, expanding the company’s push to bring dynamic, conversational AI into mainstream titles.
The new deployment targets Total War: Pharaoh, the large-scale ancient Egyptian strategy released in 2023 by Sega and the British studio Creative Assembly.
As part of an experiment, Creative Assembly will introduce a dynamic AI advisor powered by Nvidia ACE into Total War: Pharaoh. The advisor is intended to help players learn and master the game’s systems and to provide timely, actionable recommendations during play.
Players will interact with the advisor using text commands; the system is designed to understand requests, explain mechanics and suggest strategies in context.
The advisor runs a compact language model locally on the player’s graphics processor, rather than relying solely on remote servers. It processes incoming player commands together with the current session state and draws on an extensive internal database to produce responses.
According to Nvidia, the model was trained specifically on the mechanics and design of Total War: Pharaoh. It is capable of interpreting the game state and responding in a tone and reasoning style that fits the historical setting.
Creative Assembly characterizes the prototype as part of a broader research program aimed at preserving the strategic depth of the Total War series while making its games more approachable, dynamic and accessible to more players.
This prototype advisor is an experimental feature: testing is scheduled to begin before the end of 2026, and Creative Assembly plans to invite selected players to participate in trials, provide feedback and challenge the system in real play scenarios.
The collaboration highlights a trend toward locally run, game-specific language models that augment traditional game design with contextual guidance, allowing studios to blend AI-driven assistance with established gameplay loops.
Developers and platform partners see this as an opportunity to explore new forms of in-game help that keep players engaged without reducing the tactical and historical fidelity that fans expect.
Creative Assembly and Nvidia are positioning the advisor not as a replacement for human-driven design or community guidance, but as a complementary tool that can shorten learning curves and offer dynamic support tailored to each play session.
If the tests prove successful, similar ACE-based features could appear in other titles, continuing the industry’s experiment with integrating on-device language models into complex strategy games.