Arc Raiders Devs Finally Admit Human Voice Actors Are Actually Better Than AI
After months of player complaints, Embark Studios is finally swapping out the controversial text-to-speech for real human performances.
Arc Raiders has been eating everyone’s lunch since it dropped not long ago, just last October. It’s an objectively massive hit on Steam, proving that players are still hungry for a good extraction shooter. But since day one, there’s been one glaring, elephant in the room: the weird, lifeless AI generated voice lines.
Well, it seems the developers have finally read the room.
In a surprising pivot from the standard tech-bro playbook, Embark Studios is quietly ripping out the text-to-speech AI lines and replacing them with actual, breathing human performances.
Speaking in a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz (brought to our attention by Kotaku), Embark CEO Patrick Söderlund admitted what the rest of us already knew: algorithms can’t act.
“We re-recorded some of the lines post-launch and made them with real voices,” Söderlund explained. “There is a quality difference. A real professional actor is better than AI; that’s just how it is.”
Gee, ya think?
When Arc Raiders first launched, the use of AI text-to-speech (even though actors were paid a licensing fee for their vocal data) rubbed a lot of players the wrong way. The publisher’s original defense basically boiled down to, “Everyone is doing it, deal with it.” But after months of players complaining about the immersion-breaking “AI slop,” Embark is walking things back.
To be fair, they aren’t dumping the tech entirely. Söderlund noted that the studio still uses AI as a “production tool” to test out a dozen different lines internally before they pay an actor to step into the booth and record the final version. They also still use licensed text-to-speech for minor things like location pings and such, because apparently, paying a human to say “ammo over here” four hundred times is where the budget cleary draws the line.
Still, it’s a refreshing change of pace to see a studio actually listen to community blowback and hire real creatives to fix the problem. It’s a stark contrast to how other studios have handled player feedback recently, just look at the devastating reasons Highguard is shutting down after completely ignoring its core audience.
Honestly, it makes that weird, hilarious bug where Marathon was actively censoring “Arc Raiders” in text chat even funnier in retrospect. Maybe Bungie wasn’t trying to stifle the competition; maybe they were just trying to protect our ears from the robot voices.
Either way, Arc Raiders is a demonstrably better game today than it was at launch. If paying real actors for their time spent in the booth is the new standard Embark is setting, we’re entirely here for it. Now if only the rest of the industry would take the hint.
