Researchers have unveiled PUBG Ally, an embodied agent designed to serve as a voice-enabled teammate inside PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS. According to the paper, the system can reason, act autonomously, and interact with human players during live matches.
The core challenge, the authors explain, is combining two demanding capabilities: perceiving and responding to a constantly changing game world under strict latency constraints, while also conversing naturally with players and keeping speech synchronized with in-game actions. To address this, Ally pairs agentic tool use with real-time game control.
A language-model agent operates through a controlled interface to inspect game information, interpret player speech, maintain context, decide what to say, and issue high-level action choices. Those choices steer a faster control layer responsible for movement, combat, and recovery.
Because player and agent behavior continually shape one another during a match, the team argues that training requires data from actual gameplay. They collected records from nearly 39,000 sessions in which real players played alongside Ally, capturing gameplay, player speech, agent decisions, tool use, actions, and player feedback for iterative training.
For evaluation, the researchers relied on player feedback and preference comparisons, identifying gaps between offline metrics and actual player preferences and refining their evaluation criteria over time. Live deployment also required low-latency on-device execution and safeguards for player-facing communication, addressed through model compression, context compaction, targeted safety training, runtime guardrails, and memory redaction.
During the live service, players in 141 countries were surveyed. Among respondents whose play with Ally was confirmed in game records, positive responses exceeded negative ones by 25.1 percentage points when asked whether they would recommend Ally. The paper notes that players described Ally not merely as a tool but as a teammate or companion.