How New AI Models Are Being Used in Games (November 2026)

The short version

Four kinds of AI use are clearly documented in games right now:

1. Talking NPCs powered by large language models — NetEase put a DeepSeek-powered character into Justice Mobile in February 2025, and its open-world MMO Sword of Justice describes tens of thousands of AI NPCs.
2. Studios using AI models behind the scenes — reports on MiniMax's IPO prospectus say miHoYo uses MiniMax models in Honkai: Star Rail and other products for NPC dialogue, character behavior, 3D-model tuning and story generation.
3. AI teammates — NetEase and NVIDIA presented on-device AI teammates for Naraka: Bladepoint Mobile PC at GDC 2025.
4. AI-assisted development of small games — solo creators now ship browser games with AI coding help and say so, like The Last Ember on itch.io.

Below are the details, with sources, followed by what the newest models (DeepSeek V4 Pro and MiniMax H3-Image) add.

Case 1: DeepSeek NPCs in NetEase's Justice and Sword of Justice

In February 2025, the team behind NetEase's martial-arts MMORPG Justice Mobile (逆水寒手游) announced a DeepSeek-powered NPC named Shen Qiusuo (沈秋索), launching on 21 February 2025. TechNode reported that he chats with players, shares martial-arts stories and engages in emotional interactions, and that the team called it DeepSeek's first integration into a game. The same game had already partnered with five other Chinese models for NPC interactions: Alibaba's Tongyi Qianwen, Baidu's ERNIE, MiniMax's abab, Moonshot AI's Kimi and ByteDance's Doubao.

In an interview with the Daily Economic News (via ifeng), the game's AI design lead described what sits behind such characters: NPC emotion and memory, multimodal links from text to voice, animation and behavior, player-created custom NPCs driven by language models, and an in-game "model arena" where NPCs powered by different models answer the same player question and players vote for the more human-sounding one. She also described using AI behind the scenes: summarizing player feedback and bug reports, and assisting content writing within the game's world and character settings.

NetEase then made AI NPCs a headline feature of Sword of Justice, its open-world wuxia MMORPG for PC and mobile. NetEase's official announcement describes "an adaptive AI NPC ecosystem powered by DeepSeek and NetEase's proprietary AI system," with tens of thousands of NPCs that have their own identities and memories, remember players' words and actions, and respond based on their personalities. It also mentions AI Companions that let solo players take on raids alongside NPC allies.

Why it matters: this is the clearest public example of a major studio running a general-purpose LLM inside a live game at scale.

Case 2: MiniMax models at miHoYo

MiniMax, the Shanghai AI company behind the Hailuo video app and the MiniMax M and H model families, has an unusual link to games: miHoYo (the maker of Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail) was one of its angel investors. Coverage of MiniMax's Hong Kong listing, including 36Kr, reports that miHoYo has also been a customer since 2023, using MiniMax models in products such as Honkai: Star Rail for character behavior control, intelligent NPC dialogue, 3D-modeling optimization and plot generation. The same reports say a miHoYo co-founder joined MiniMax's board as a non-executive director in 2023.

MiniMax's older abab model was also one of the six models wired into Justice Mobile's NPCs (see Case 1).

What we do not know: neither company has published which specific features in Honkai: Star Rail use MiniMax, so treat this as "used in development and operations" rather than a visible in-game chatbot.

Case 3: AI teammates in Naraka: Bladepoint

At GDC 2025, NetEase's Fuxi Lab and NVIDIA presented "Achieving AI Teammates in NARAKA: BLADEPOINT Mobile PC Version." The session describes AI teammates built with NVIDIA ACE that run on-device: they can talk, follow orders and even take charge. NVIDIA also announced ACE autonomous characters for inZOI, Krafton's life simulator.

This is a different approach from DeepSeek NPCs: smaller models running locally on the player's PC rather than calls to a cloud model, which avoids per-message server costs and network delay.

Case 4: Browser games coded with AI assistants

The biggest change for small games is in how they are built. A good example from this week is The Last Ember, a free 3D survivors-like published on itch.io on 11 November 2026. Its page carries an honest AI disclosure: code and story text were written with the help of an AI assistant (Claude), while 3D models (KayKit), music (OpenGameArt) and sound effects (Kenney) are human-made CC0 assets. The result has eight weapons with evolutions, three heroes, four bosses and three endings — a lot of game for one creator.

Tools for this workflow are multiplying. One new example is OpenVibe, an open-source (MIT) Windows app by Mathieu Kerbel that runs several AI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Aider and others) in real terminals on one canvas, gives each agent its own git branch, and never pushes code on its own. We have not found a released game that credits OpenVibe, so we mention it only as an example of the tooling, not as a case study.

What to watch for as a player: itch.io game pages have an AI Disclosure field, and Steam asks developers to disclose AI-generated content too. Disclosure tells you what was AI-assisted (code, text, art or audio), which is more useful than a simple yes or no.

DeepSeek V4 Pro: what it means for game developers

DeepSeek V4 Pro is DeepSeek's flagship model, released in general availability on 13 August 2026 according to its official announcement. The Justice games above used earlier DeepSeek models; V4 Pro is the current top option for studios considering LLM-driven NPCs or tooling. The published facts that matter for games:

Prices are from the official pricing page; peak hours are 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC on weekdays, everything else is off-peak. For NPC dialogue, two details stand out: cache-hit input is about 30 times cheaper than cache-miss, which rewards keeping a character's long system prompt and world lore identical between calls, and the 500-request concurrency limit on Pro means a busy game would likely use the cheaper, higher-concurrency Flash model for routine chatter. In the app and on the web, V4 Pro is available through Expert Mode.

MiniMax H3-Image: concept art for games

MiniMax H3-Image is an open-weight image generation and editing model released by MiniMax in November 2026. Its model card lists native outputs of about 16 megapixels (for example 4096×4096) without an upscaler, generation in 6 sampling steps, up to 16 reference images per edit, and a 33.1-billion-parameter diffusion transformer. Weights are released under the MiniMax-H3-Image Community License, and it is also available through the MiniMax API and Hailuo apps.

MiniMax's own showcase leans into game use cases:

• Environment concepts and characters, creatures and props as showcase categories.
• An edit that turns a game map into a first-person 3D game view from a marked position, keeping the map as a minimap.
• An edit that turns an untextured 3D render into a finished-looking film still.

For a studio, that points to pre-production uses: exploring concepts, mood frames for a level, or a quick look at what a blockout might become. It does not replace production art, and anyone shipping commercially on the open weights should read the license, including the separate authorization described in its Section IV.

What this means for players

• AI NPCs are real, mostly in Chinese MMOs so far. If you want to try one, NetEase's Justice / Sword of Justice games are the documented examples.
• Most AI use is invisible. Studios use models for dialogue drafts, feedback analysis and tooling, so you may never see a chatbot.
• Small games are getting bigger. AI-assisted coding lets solo creators ship more ambitious browser games, often free.
• Read disclosures. Platforms like itch.io show AI disclosures on game pages.

Sources and how we checked

Every case above links to a primary or reputable source: NetEase's own announcement, TechNode's report of the Justice Mobile Weibo post, the ifeng/Daily Economic News interview, NVIDIA's GDC 2025 session page, the itch.io page for The Last Ember, MiniMax's Hugging Face model card, DeepSeek's official API documentation, and 36Kr's coverage of MiniMax's prospectus. We do not list rumored integrations. This page replaces our earlier standalone pages on DeepSeek V4 Pro, MiniMax H3-Image and OpenVibe.

FAQ

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