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The use of third-party assistant tools and overlays in multiplayer PC games is a contentious topic. Giving you personalized views of match data, providing pick rate stats for characters, or tracking your stats over time, they can be useful aids, but they can often give unfair advantages. Many multiplayer games have outlawed them and labeled them as forms of cheating – Marvel Rivals is the most recent example with Netease banning their use despite their popularity. The hero shooter’s main rival Overwatch 2, also doesn’t allow them. However, in a presentation at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Microsoft has talked more about its Copilot AI “exploration” that sees its own software coach players, provide tips, and give hero pick suggestions in real time while playing Overwatch 2.
Last week, Microsoft talked about how it wants to integrate its Copilot AI into the Xbox ecosystem, showcasing it at work in a number of first-party games, including Overwatch 2. In a session at this year’s GDC called ‘The Future of Gaming Supported by AI: How Xbox is Empowering Players and Creators,’ it re-aired some of the footage it showed during the Official Xbox Podcast, but gave some more details about whether this will actually ever be implemented into competitive FPS games like Overwatch 2 and whether it can be categorized as “unfair.”
During the talk, which was attended by PCGamesN, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for gaming AI, Fatima Kardar, says that her team has been touring Xbox Games Studios developers to “explore what it would look like if Copilot had a much deeper understanding of a particular game.”
“Here we looked at systems opportunities pre-match, making recommendations on hero selection based on player history, team composition, and maps,” Kardar says when specifically addressing Overwatch 2. “We also looked at opportunities for post-match coaching where we can advise you on what went wrong and what you could do differently next time. While these are mostly concepts, and not planned features for Overwatch, they help illustrate what is possible with experiences like Copilot as you bring them closer to your game.”
When asked by PCGamesN in a post-talk Q&A about how the player selection tips differ from the kind of information provided by third-party tools that have been banned in games like Marvel Rivals, Kardar says that studios will have to decide if specific AI tools are right for their individual games.
“The exploration [of Copilot] is based on what the game’s creator thinks. If they think that’s going to give [players] an unfair advantage, then absolutely not… At the end of the day, you know your game the best, and you’ll decide if in your game [helping players] to choose a team gives you an unfair advantage or not. The way I look at it is we’re giving this ability to do it, but to your point the game creator decides what their game is and [what] it looks like, so that’s how I think about it. If it makes sense that it shouldn’t be [in the game], then it won’t be. If it does, maybe they will.”
When asked whether Blizzard saw the Copilot gameplay footage before it aired, Kardar says that yes, “[Blizzard] has seen this, and they helped provide us with guidance… but at the end of the day, this is an exploration, this is not what we’re actually doing [in the game]. We’re trying to figure out different things.”
Even though this is an early investigation from Microsoft into how AI can assist players in real time, its implementation in multiplayer games does still feel a bit concerning. In a game like Minecraft, which also featured in the Copilot demo and in the GDC talk, it feels like a good fit. When games of a competitive nature are involved, though, things do seem a little murkier and potentially problematic. For now though, here are some great free PC games like Overwatch 2 that you can play right now.
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