With millions of tokens at stake, ByteDance has fully conquered the entire AI game track!

By Ju Hao 

Edited by Guo Fu 

"There are no more humans!"  

Literally, ByteDance has developed a "full-AI" game with its Seedance model. On September 23, Jiangnan Studio under Nuverse released the Early Access version of *Ask No Mortal World* on the Steam platform, and its 88% positive rating put ByteDance on the front page of the gaming industry. 

If it were just a well-received RPG, this would hardly seem unusual, but as a "3A" game entirely made with AI art, AI voice acting and AI coding, such high praise makes it feel like a real "novelty". Only three days after the Early Access launch, even someone like me, who has never been interested in Xianxia-themed works, played it for a full 30 hours. 

Steam Store Page

Compared with AI games generated with "one-sentence prompts", the "completeness" of *Ask No Mortal World* is its biggest advantage, and AI elements play far more roles than just an art tool in the production process. The development team spent a year presenting players with a Xianxia world interpreted by AI. "The highest AI content on the market" is the evaluation that Xin Jie, the lead producer, gave to this game. 

Under the AI-generated worldview, interactive conversations with NPCs have become a major highlight of the game. During the dialogue, players can feel that "while humans are learning from AI, AI is also becoming more human-like". The process of getting familiar with AI from strangers in the same shared world is exactly what makes me addicted to this game. 

01 The AI Aesthetic Is Not As Unpleasant As You Might Think

When talking about the "AI aesthetic", different people have different feelings. Some think it is like eating food with too much wasabi, which is too pungent to bear; others see it as the trend of technological progress and enjoy it wholeheartedly. 

Xin Jie has his own understanding: he believes that the "AI style" is a new type of visual style, just like anime and 3D animation. He does not regard it as a disadvantage, because what players really reject is not AI, but shoddy content. 

The experience *Ask No Mortal World* brings to me is definitely far from shoddy; its unrestrained sense of freedom like AI's wild imagination is my first impression of it. The game does not provide players with an infinitely large map, but you can feel that every interactive action you take is like sipping a carbonated drink, and the sense of refreshment runs through the whole game. 

In-game Screenshot

The very first time I saw the birth system of *Ask No Mortal World*, I knew this game was made with full sincerity. 

For the protagonist's birth interface, most games only provide 3 to 4 pre-customized career paths for players to choose from, while the growth path of *Ask No Mortal World* is more like a fill-in-the-blank question. Before reshaping your physical body, you need to first conceive in your mind what kind of immortal cultivator you want to become. 

Character growth is divided into two systems: "Dao Path" and "Spirit Root", and players need to allocate limited points to create different strengths for the protagonist. 

"Dao Path" corresponds to various behaviors of players in the Xianxia world. Players who choose "Joy Cultivator" are more likely to gain the "Charm" attribute, and have unique advantages in advancing exclusive storylines with female NPCs; players who choose "Ghost Cultivator" and "Demon Cultivator" can gain attributes by "killing" NPCs, so as to make the protagonist stronger faster. 

In-game Screenshot

"Spirit Root" corresponds to five different sects in the story, as well as the five elements attributes of metal, wood, water, fire and earth that the protagonist uses when casting skills. These five elements attributes not only follow the mutual generation and restraint rules, but also correspond to different combat gameplay. Players who choose the Metal Spirit Root follow the violent playstyle: they can increase the critical strike rate by stacking "Metal Soul" to defeat enemies with one hit; players who choose the Water Spirit Root accumulate "Cang Liu" through cultivation techniques to cast multiple spells for stacked damage. 

In-game Screenshot

Each genre is like a uniquely crafted dish, and players can find the style that best suits them through selection and experience. After being defeated by a master from another sect, I was always willing to try to restart the game with the exact same skill set that beat me. This means that while the character grows, *Ask No Mortal World* also guides players to explore their own preferences, and the freedom it provides is far richer than simply setting a few fixed career paths. 

In-game Screenshot

Traditional interactive narrative games usually adopt linear storytelling, which brings a sense of tension. Different from that pattern, *Ask No Mortal World* takes a more laid-back, "Buddha-like" path. 

Without the task pressure of "clocking in at work", *Ask No Mortal World* directly allows players to "lie flat". When I got tired of all the fighting and killing in the mortal world, I controlled the protagonist to rest in the inn for 360 consecutive days: no system would pop up to force me to advance the plot and save the world, and no gameplay or character would be locked just because my cultivation level was not high enough. 

This game seems to throw the entire Xianxia world at you, and never interfere with how you experience it. Whether you want to join a sect to become a senior veteran, or play as a loose cultivator wandering alone like a "lone wolf in the wind", the system does not care at all. 

Without the rigid constraints of game tasks, the way to obtain game resources has also become very casual. The immortal cultivator who has been competing for his whole life no longer needs to grind wild mobs, because taking some unorthodox paths can improve the cultivation level much faster. 

In-game Screenshot

From "stealing vegetables" in QQ Farm to "taking by force" in *Sanguosha*, the pleasure of "the doctrine of using others' resources" never gets old, and "stealing" is another path that *Ask No Mortal World* opens up for players. Players only need to complete one QTE, and the magic weapon that the NPC has worked hard to accumulate will be taken away. Successfully obtaining the treasure is not the priority: provoking the usually honest NPC has instead become the real fun. 

If you want higher challenge, convincing NPCs to give you resources through dialogue is a more decent way. In *Ask No Mortal World*, all NPCs are independent intelligent agents. By giving different prompt words, players can freely simulate dialogue scenarios, and the way to interact with NPCs is no longer limited to fighting at every turn. You can have a "job interview" with the sect leader, ask your Xianxia partner for pocket money. Whether you are "expressing shared hardship" or "praising and flattering", any words that get you what you want are good words. 

In order to increase the probability of persuading AI, you can even "beat AI with AI": use the external assistant Doubao to learn the AI's "local language" to make the negotiation more successful. 

Bilibili Platform Screenshot

As an interactive narrative game, *Ask No Mortal World* can be regarded as a purely technical work, and the video performance in the game has a very high degree of completion. 

At the level of combat animation, traditional games first make character models, then add actions, lighting and lens effects on top; supported by Seedance, *Ask No Mortal World* can first generate animation scenes with AI, directly disassemble the AI output into usable game assets, and align the picture performance directly with players' viewing experience. 

When characters are in close contact, players can feel the NPC's body floating up and down with their breathing, and even the red blood streaks in the corners of their eyes are clearly visible. Compared with 2D static character art, the eye contact and micro-expressions of characters in *Ask No Mortal World* bring higher visual satisfaction, which further upgrades the interactive experience of the game. 

Game CG

But *Ask No Mortal World* does not follow the usual path: it weakens the role of the main plot and strengthens the gameplay of the work. 

The main storyline of the game is obviously not as outstanding as the visual performance, because AI has a strong sense of "déjà vu" when building the plot, which is simply old-fashioned. Players do not need to put much thought into predicting the next plot direction. If the plot extends only in this way, the game will lack the surprise brought by advancing the process. *Ask No Mortal World* smartly uses gameplay to make up for this shortcoming. 

For example, in the romance line, the CG of female characters is not only used as "fan service": the production team designed a novel way to obtain them. Players need to use the "Soul Recording Stone" item to take photos of female characters. Each scene performance is divided into three memory points, and players need to seize the best shooting opportunity to record the CG. 

Steam Store Page Promotional Image

The first-person shooting perspective enhances players' sense of immersion and sense of achievement. The character CG feels like a product obtained through repeated dates, rather than an accessory of combat power improvement. By using the form of mini-games, the right to choose when to present CG is handed over to players, which greatly saves narrative space without destroying the compactness of the main storyline. 

The game also opens a Creative Workshop, where you can see the "collision of sparks" between artificial intelligence and human ingenuity: there is a "Black Mamba" in ancient costume, a "Nai Long" proprietress who opens dual cultivation gameplay, and a "Dou Bao" who guest stars as a reclusive master. The "unserious" attribute of the game is fully reflected here. 

In-game Screenshot

In addition to building gameplay, the production team also deeply depicted the concept of "time" to enrich players' experience perception. 

The game adds limited-time gameplay in specific periods of the year, and you can only wait for a whole year to experience it again if you miss it. When the protagonist spends more than 90 years of lifespan to break through from the Qi Refining stage to the Foundation Establishment stage, players will find that the mortal NPCs on the map will also pass away. 

Players can feel from various details that the world they live in is not the same every day, and time has specific meaning for them. On the path of cultivating immortality, you inevitably have to make choices among a series of worldly things. The down-to-earth atmosphere of the game runs parallel to the Xianxia theme: from auctions to stone gambling, from martial arts competitions to catching thieves, you can feel that you are cultivating under the pulse of time, and at the same time experiencing a real life. 

02 A Million-Token Bill, Just To Find An Answer

The development team has only 20 people. They call themselves "an AI team that makes games" rather than "a game team that uses AI", and they have practiced this idea with actions. 

*Ask No Mortal World* did not become famous overnight. Before that, Jiangnan Studio had laid the groundwork for three games, and the previous works all had more or less problems of insufficient compatibility between games and AI. For example, the interaction and feedback efficiency of *Boss Simulator* do not match, the AI of *Book Traversing Game* suffers from memory collapse during long conversations, and *Director Simulator* is limited by the excessive cost of AI video generation.