Video Games

Project Milo Was a Big Swing (and a Miss) at Leveling Up Game AI

as IGN AI Week Continuing, I thought it was fitting to take a look back at Xbox’s flagship game AI project, Project Milo, before it disappeared completely into the vaporware cloud. It was announced at E3 2009. I mean, it’s so old at this point that many people across the younger generation of gamers don’t even know what it is. At the time, I experienced this game as a senior editor for the official Xbox magazine and had no idea what it was. Few were outside the walls of Microsoft.

What it wanted to be was a grand experiment in AI.take a quick look All the stories IGN has done over the yearsYou ride pretty! “Emotional AI” allows you to interact with Milo and his (or her dog, if you choose the female version named Millie) Kate. “Interactive” means talking using the Kinect’s built-in microphone array.

Milo in a 2009 demo that was never actually released.

Yes, Kinect. Maybe I should have mentioned that part sooner! If you remember Kinect but not Milo, you’re probably nodding your head and thinking, “This is starting to make sense.” Adding more puzzle pieces turned out to be the brainchild of visionary game designer Peter Molyneux. Molyneux, by his own admission, often chewed on more than he could ambitiously chew. together.

It was essentially a grand experiment in which the correct formula could not be found. Wikipedia page, special sauce looks like this: conversation. Molyneux claims the game’s technology was developed during his work on Fable and Black & White. ”

It was the brainchild of Peter Molyneux, who, by his own admission, often chewed more than he could chew.


Honestly, the Kinect itself probably wasn’t working, even if the software was. Perhaps his Kinect 2.0, which unfortunately shipped with the Xbox One, took Milo and Kate wherever they wanted to go. But let’s just imagine. had everything worked. How awesome would an AI-driven experience be if you could talk to a realistic digital avatar and actually have rudimentary conversations?

Some of the technology developed for Mile & Kate was incorporated into Fable: The Journey, a Kinect game released by the team of Molyneux (who left midway through the project) and Lionhead. (Note: Apologies to the smaller Fable CCG called Fable Fortune, but Fable: The Journey is his last “big” Fable game released in 2012!) As mentioned in review For IGN, spellcasting adventure games have been a lot of fun…if the Kinect actually worked well, a lot of the time it didn’t. Perhaps one day, Molyneux’s original vision for Milo and Kate will also come to fruition.

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