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PayPalARC Raiders is still one of the most popular games around right now, and thankfully some of the generative AI voices are getting replaced.
The CEO of Embark Studios, Patrick Söderlund, spoke to GamesIndustry.biz in an interview covering a nice selection of topics. And of course, since generative AI is a hot topic and ARC Raiders has been using it - that was touched on as well.
Explaining how generative AI is actually used, which has been clarified before elsewhere: "We pay our actors for all time spent with us in the booth and continue to bring many of them back as we carry on updating the game," the CEO explains. "For select usage, we also pay them for the approval to license their voices through text-to-speech for lines that aren't as essential to the immersion of the experience, mostly ping system audio."
What Söderlund is talking about above is where you middle-click ping an item, or an enemy, and your raider will say something basic like "I have some Oil". Clearly, those are here to stay but other parts are being replaced with proper voice lines. They use a similar system for THE FINALS, their other shooter for voice-over lines from the announcers. Both games have attracted a fair amount of criticism for it.
"We re-recorded some of the lines post-launch and made them with real voices," he says. "There is a quality difference. A real professional actor is better than AI; that's just how it is. We look at [AI] first and foremost as a production tool. We can test things internally. We can test 15 different lines without recording them, and then we know what to record. It's also a way for us to work, not replace actors. We don't necessarily believe in replacing humans with AI all the time."
Nice to see. And it is a bit of a "well - duh" type of thing. Of course a person is going to be better than AI. The whole point of having voice actors is they know how to actually act, to bring some kind of clear intention and emotion into their roles with all their own little personal voice quirks. You don't get that with generating fake AI voices.
ARC Raiders continues to run great on Linux / SteamOS thanks to Embark enabling the anti-cheat.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Lets hope it will stay that way !
"We don't necessarily believe in replacing humans with AI all the time."That "necessarily" negates the meaning of the sentence; it turns the statement into "we do believe in replacing humans with AI all the time, but there are some circumstances where we might not."
We don't necessarily believe in replacing humans with AI all the time.My heroes.
Last edited by such on 16 Mar 2026 at 5:08 pm UTC
Caldathras 16 hours ago
Of course a person is going to be better than AI. The whole point of having voice actors is they know how to actually act, to bring some kind of clear intention and emotion into their roles with all their own little personal voice quirks. You don't get that with generating fake AI voices.
Well said.
CharlieTheMadHatter 12 hours ago
Just please stop pushing lazy art with AI tools.
ARC Raiders imo has done most of the things right with it in my book. If AI thing isn't in my face with the sloppy art or hallucinated stuff then thats ok.
hopefully smaller (double A and whatnot) will understand that they can use this technology to speed up some tedious things, but dont overstay their welcome with that.
triple A ofc will probably fire most of the staff and use AI for everything if they can get away with it.
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