I’ve just finished point-and-click adventure Heir of the Dog. It’s really good! The main character, voiced by Tom Hardwidge, has perhaps 76 billion lines of dialog, and nails every single one. Meanwhile, Arc Raiders developer Embark says it absolutely had to use AI to voice characters in its relatively taciturn extraction shooter because “the actors would just go crazy if they had to read all of that!”
As noticed by RPS, a new video uploaded by developer Embark features CCO Stefan Strandberg and others at the studio explaining why Arc Raiders controversially included AI voice acting, and the reasons are…odd.
When the game launched in October of 2025, it had a bizarre mishmash of voice acting and genAI voices, which caused a fair amount of fuss. By March 2026, Embark announced it was beginning the process of replacing the AI voices with human ones, and now, another eight months later, it’s approaching the subject head-on in a video hosted by Danny O’Dwyer.
The core issue here is the repeated declaration that aspects that can make voice acting and recording arduous work—like the many variants that are needed for delivering the public “pings” when you want to communicate in-context information in the field—are somehow now “too impractical to record every version of something.” Audio director Bence Pajor says, “The actors would go crazy if they had to read all of that.” This follows the last 30 years of voice actors recording astonishing numbers of lines for video games.
Midway through the video comes an awkward moment in which two of the game’s voice actors themselves appear to justify the use of AI, although it does seem like the words might not be entirely in context. Later the pair adds that on reflection, they wondered if they could “truly own” their performances when so much wasn’t actually them, and concluded no.
There are also some very weaselly explanations like, “After release there was an outcry from a number of players and games journalists about the use of AI to record these voices. At the time the studio kept silent about it, opting instead to put in the work to re-record lines with the voice actors as quickly as they could.”
Re-recording dialog is not something that’s only done when responding to a controversy, and the idea that staying silent allowed Embark to put in more work or do things more quickly is just silly.
Then comes another of the ol’ tricks, in which Pajor, laughing, points out people still complained about AI even when the lines were recorded by humans, which he says suggests, “Hey, you can’t even tell, so why does it matter?!” The reason it matters is that this is an industry move that will evaporate voice actors’ work and income at a net loss for quality and performance.
“We are not in the industry of replacing actors,” adds Strandberg. “Actually, I think it’s quite the opposite. We should celebrate the performance and we should give them more space.” Which is hard to take entirely to heart given the same video states that the removal of AI lines happened in response to the backlash.
Either way, it’s great that Embark is now taking the role of voice actors more seriously. Humans deserve better treatment than machines.