A crazy surprise
During a long and interesting interview at Games Industry, Patrick Söderlund, director of Embark, spoke about Arc Raiders. A lot of it was about how the development happened. For example, he was pleased that the studio manages to exist in the AAA environment without necessarily being able to count on the same budget, as long as it can optimize the tools, the organization of the studio, or even the technology available.
And who says technology, says the subject of AI. It is common knowledge that Embark uses tools, some of which are based on AI technology, to help create content for the game. Among the elements of the game affected, we find voice acting. Patrick Söderlund also recalls how it works for Arc Raiders :
We pay our actors for all the time they spend with us in the studio and we continue to call many of them as part of game updates. For some uses, we also pay them for their permission to use their text-to-speech voice for lines of dialogue that are less important to the immersive side of the experience, mainly the ping system.
However, compared to the launch of the game, the use of voice synthesis has been reduced, in favor of direct recording of actors and actresses. A trend that Söderlund details in the wake of this declaration, coming to a most hair-raising conclusion:
There is a clear difference in quality. A real professional actor is better than an AI: that’s a fact. We see AI above all as a production tool. We can test things internally. We can test 15 different lines of dialogue before going to recording. It’s also a way to work, not to replace the actors. We do not necessarily believe that we should systematically replace humans with AI.
Let’s put aside the fact that it would have been even better to see the dubbing professionals involved called back each time, without resorting to voice synthesis, this kind of output makes you smile yellow. Actors have for months been pushing the door open to the lower quality of voices by AI, because of the loss of emotion and personality.
Seeing a reduction in their use in this specific case therefore seems obvious. But look, let’s point out the relative and apparent backtracking on the issue… before quickly being disappointed again, whether it comes from Embark or another studio.