NC Levels Up Game Quality and Development Speed with Barco AI

Full-scale Use of Barco Studio for Game Development Since Early This Year

NCSoft has begun actively utilizing its long-accumulated artificial intelligence (AI) research and development (R&D) capabilities in game development. Through the generative AI-based creative tool ‘VARCO Studio,’ the company aims to achieve the dual goals of accelerating game development speed and improving quality.

According to NCSoft on the 26th, VARCO Studio has been applied across various services since early this year. VARCO Studio is a creative support tool developed using NCSoft’s proprietary language model, ‘VARCO LLM.’

It offers features such as the image generation tool ‘VARCO Art’ and the text generation and management tool ‘VARCO Text.’ The existing ‘VARCO Human’ service, which creates and manages digital humans, has been expanded and reorganized into ‘VARCO Avatar’ for creating AI NPCs and chatbots within games.

Since VARCO Studio is a model specialized for game production, it focuses primarily on quickly producing high-quality game content. For example, VARCO Art is used for securing references such as ▲key art within games ▲concept art ▲illustrations, while VARCO Text assists in ▲automatic quest generation ▲character and scenario creation based on new IP universes.

NCSoft plans to expand the scope of generative AI creative tools to include audio and graphics in the future. ‘VARCO Audio,’ targeted for development completion within this year, can be used to create and edit sound resources such as sound effects and background music used in games. Additionally, ‘VARCO Graphics,’ which automates character animation production, is also under development.

AI technology is also being actively utilized in global game service operations for overseas market expansion. NCSoft uses ‘VARCO Chat’ to provide game guides, game content search and delivery, and customer inquiry responses.

Lee Yeon-su, head of NCSoft’s Research Division, said, "VARCO will help by delegating simple and repetitive tasks to AI, allowing humans to focus on unique creativity, diversity, and distinctiveness. Once fully applied to work, we expect both game development speed and quality control to ‘level up.’"