Arc Raiders was one of the biggest games of 2025, and it continues to be incredibly popular on Steam. But its use of AI-generated voice lines rubbed many the wrong way. Now, Embark Studios CEO Patrick Söderlund says the team has replaced many of the text-to-speech lines with real human-recorded dialogue that is “better” than the AI slop featured at launch.
When Embark’s extraction shooter Arc Raiders launched in October on consoles and PC, it became one of the most-played games around and received rave reviews from critics and fans. Yet there was some tension around the game’s release when it was revealed that many of the in-game voice lines heard when pinging a location were created using AI text-to-speech built using audio provided by actors who were paid a licensing fee. For some, this was not acceptable and marred the launch of Arc Raiders. The CEO of Nexon, the game’s publisher, said all studios were using AI tools, and that’s just the way it is. But Söderlund and his team seem to be reversing course a bit.
In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Söderlund explained “a lot” of the in-game voice lines in Arc Raiders are recorded by human actors and there are now fewer AI-generated lines in the game than there were when it launched last year.
“We re-recorded some of the lines post-launch and made them with real voices,” Söderlund told the outlet, clarifying that they don’t want to “replace” real performers.
“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.”
Söderlund also explained that the studio pays its actors for “all time spent” in the booth recording lines and that it continues to “bring many of them back as we carry on updating the game.” And in some “select” situations, Embark pays actors for “approval to license their voices through text-to-speech” for audio lines that aren’t as “essential to the immersion of the experience.” This is mostly for location pings.
The big takeaway here is that Söderlund seems to understand that AI-generated content is still not popular among players and is trying to reassure people that Arc Raiders has less of it than before. But it still contains and will likely continue to use text-to-speech voice lines, and for some players, that will remain a dealbreaker.
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