Staking millions of tokens, ByteDance has fully cleared the entire AI game track!
By | Ju Hao
Edited by | Guo Fu
"There are no humans left!"
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 *No Mortal Concerns* on the Steam platform, and its 88% positive rating pushed ByteDance to the front page of the gaming industry.
If it were just a well-received RPG, this would hardly be unusual, but as a "AAA" game fully powered by AI art, AI voice acting and AI coding, such high praise makes it feel like a real breakthrough. Only three days after the Early Access launch, even someone like me who has never touched a xianxia-themed game before played it for a full 30 hours.
Steam Store Page
Compared with AI games generated with "one-sentence prompts", the completeness of *No Mortal Concerns* is its biggest advantage, and AI elements do not only act as 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 concentration on the market" is how the lead producer Xin Jie describes the game.
Under the AI-generated worldview, human-AI conversations with NPCs have become a major highlight of the game. Players can get a sense that "while humans are learning from AI, AI is becoming more and more human-like" during interactions. This process of going from strangers to acquaintances with AI in the same shared world is exactly what made me hooked on this game.
01 The AI vibe is far less annoying than people expect
When it comes to the "AI feel", different people have different perceptions. Some think it is like putting too much wasabi in food, 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 the "AI style" is a new type of visual style, just like 2D anime and 3D animation. He does not see it as a disadvantage, because what players really resent is not AI, but shoddily made content.
The experience *No Mortal Concerns* brings me is definitely far from shoddy; its unrestrained, AI-inspired sense of freedom is my first impression of it. The game does not provide players with an infinitely large map, but you can feel that every interaction you make is like taking a sip of fizzy soda, with the feeling of "pure exhilaration" running through the entire game.
In-game Screenshot
The moment I first saw the character birth system of *No Mortal Concerns*, I knew this game was made with great care.
For the protagonist's birth interface, most games offer 3 to 4 pre-set career paths for players to choose from; but the growth path in *No Mortal Concerns* is more like a fill-in-the-blank question. Before you reshape your physical body, you need to first conceive in your mind what kind of xianxia cultivator you want to be.
Character growth is divided into two systems: "Dao Path" and "Spirit Root". Players need to allocate limited points to create different specialties for the protagonist.
The "Dao Path" corresponds to various behaviors of players in the xianxia world. Players who choose the "Joyful Cultivator" path can more easily gain the "Charm" attribute, and have unique advantages in advancing exclusive storylines with female NPCs; players who choose "Ghost Cultivator" and "Demon Cultivator" paths can gain attributes by "killing" NPCs, making the protagonist grow stronger faster.
In-game Screenshot
The "Spirit Root" corresponds to five different sects in the storyline, as well as the five attributes of metal, wood, water, fire and earth that the protagonist uses when casting skills. These five elements not only follow the mutual generation and restriction rules, but also correspond to different combat gameplay. Players who choose the Metal Spirit Root follow the brute force path, and can increase critical hit rate by stacking "Metal Soul" to defeat enemies with one strike; players who choose the Water Spirit Root accumulate "Cascading Flow" 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 getting beaten up by a senior master from another sect, I always stay motivated to try the exact same cultivation technique that defeated me and start a new playthrough. This means that while the character grows, *No Mortal Concerns* also guides players to explore their own preferences, and the freedom it provides is far richer than simply setting several pre-defined career paths.
In-game Screenshot
Traditional interactive narrative games usually adopt linear storytelling, which brings a sense of tension. Different from that narrative mode, *No Mortal Concerns* takes another more laid-back, "Buddha-like" path.
There is no task pressure that feels like "clocking in to work". *No Mortal Concerns* 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 an inn for 360 consecutive days, no system would pop up to force me to advance the plot to save the world, and no gameplay or character was locked behind insufficient cultivation level.
This game seems to throw the entire xianxia world at you, and never cares how you experience it. Whether you want to join a sect to become a senior veteran, or play as a rogue cultivator to be a "lone wolf wandering in the wind", the system does not seem to mind at all.
Without the rigid constraints of game quests, the way to obtain game resources has also become more casual. Cultivators who have spent their whole life grinding no longer need to farm mobs, because unorthodox methods can improve their cultivation level much faster.
In-game Screenshot
From "stealing vegetables" in QQ Farm to "Snatch" in *Sanguosha*, the pleasure of "taking what you want" never goes out of style, and "theft" is another path that *No Mortal Concerns* opens up for players. Players only need to complete one QTE, and the magic treasure that the NPC has worked hard to accumulate will be taken away; successfully obtaining the treasure is not the priority, and provoking the usually honest and straightforward NPC has instead become the fun part.
If you want more challenge, persuading NPCs to give you resources through conversation is a more decent way. In *No Mortal Concerns*, every NPC is an independent intelligent agent. By giving different prompt words, players can freely simulate conversation scenarios, and the way to interact with NPCs is no longer limited to fighting at every disagreement. You can have a "job interview" with the sect leader, or ask your xianxia partner for pocket money. No matter you "complain to gain sympathy" or "praise to please them", any line that gets you what you want is a good line.
To increase the chance of successfully persuading AI, you can even "beat AI with AI" by using the external assistant Doubao, learning the AI's "local dialect" to boost the success rate of negotiations.
Bilibili Platform Screenshot
As a narrative game, *No Mortal Concerns* can be regarded as a pure tech-focused work, with highly polished in-game video performances.
At the level of combat animation, traditional games first make character models, then add animations, lighting effects and camera processing on top of them; supported by Seedance, *No Mortal Concerns* can first generate animation scenes with AI, directly disassemble the AI output into usable game assets, and align the visual performance directly with players' perception.
When characters are in close contact, players can feel the NPC's body rise and fall 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 *No Mortal Concerns* elevate the interactive experience of the game to a new level.
Game CG
But *No Mortal Concerns* does not follow the usual path either: 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 its video performances, because AI has a strong sense of "déjà vu" when building plots, to put it bluntly, it is cliché. Players can predict the next plot direction without much effort, and if the plot only extends in this way, the game will lack surprises brought by advancing the process. *No Mortal Concerns* smartly makes up for this with excellent gameplay.
For example, in the romance line, the CGs of female characters are not just used as "fan service". The development team came up with a rather novel way for players 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 you need to capture the best shooting moment to record the CG.
Steam Store Page Promotional Art
The first-person shooting perspective enhances players' sense of immersion and sense of achievement. Character CGs feel like products obtained from repeated dates, rather than accessories of combat power improvement. By using the form of mini-games, the right to choose the timing of CG presentation is handed over to players, which greatly saves narrative space without breaking the compactness of the main storyline.
The game also has a Creative Workshop, where you can see the "collision of fire and Mars" between artificial intelligence and human ingenuity: there is a "Kobe Bryant's Black Mamba" wearing ancient Chinese costume, a "Little Dragon" proprietress who opens dual cultivation gameplay, and a "Doubao" that makes a guest appearance as a reclusive master. The "unserious" attribute of the game is fully demonstrated here.
In-game Screenshot
In addition to building gameplay, the development team also deeply portrays the concept of "time" to enrich players' experience perception.
The game adds limited-time gameplay at specific times of the year, and if you miss it, you have to wait a whole year for it to come back; when the protagonist spends more than 90 years of his lifespan to break through from the Qi Refining stage to the Foundation Establishment stage, you will find that 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 xianxia cultivation, you inevitably have to make trade-offs among a series of worldly things. This down-to-earth vibe of the game runs parallel to the xianxia theme: from auctions to gambling on raw stones, from martial arts tournaments to catching thieves, you can feel that you are cultivating under the pulse of time, and at the same time, you are living a real life.
02 A million-token bill, just to find the answer
The development team has only 20 people, and they call themselves an "AI team making games" rather than a "game team using AI", and they have put this idea into practice with actions.
*No Mortal Concerns* did not achieve overnight success. Before it, Jiangnan Studio had already laid the groundwork with three games, and the previous works more or less had the problem of insufficient compatibility between games and AI. For example, the interaction and feedback efficiency of *Boss Simulator* did not match, the AI in *Book Traversal Game* suffered from memory collapse during long conversations, and *Director Simulator* was limited by the extremely high cost of AI video generation.