Arc Raiders has been cutting back its AI voices: "A real professional actor is better than AI, that's just how it is."

The mighty success of Arc Raiders has always had one caveat on it, the asterisk on the praise pointing to a black mark that is its use of AI-generated text-to-speech voice lines. In a new interview, Embark Studios CEO Patrick Söderlund acknowledges that there is a "quality difference" between real performances and AI-generated speech. He says the developer considers the tech "a production tool" to help test lines, but reveals that it has been gradually stripping back the number of AI voice lines in Arc Raiders since launch.

Arc Raiders design director Virgil Watkins recently told us that the text-to-speech tools acted as "an unlock for us to be able to do voiced characters when we, at the time, did not have capacity to do so." He added that the team was considering whether the results were up to standard, and that the multiplayer game's success hadn't inspired Embark to "open the floodgates for all types of AI or even AI-adjacent tools."

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Söderlund says Embark has "re-recorded some of the lines post-launch and made them with real voices," and that there are now fewer AI voice lines in the game than there were at launch. "There is a quality difference," he admits, "A real professional actor is better than AI; that's just how it is." He notes that the team will use its text-to-speech to "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," Söderlund continues. "We don't necessarily believe in replacing humans with AI all the time." He restates that there are select cases where the team pays voice actors "for the approval to license their voices for text-to-speech for lines that aren't as essential to the immersion of the experience." He notes that Embark pays its actors for all their recording time, however, and continues to bring many of them back into the booth as it delivers new updates.

Looking to the future, Söderlund hopes that "in the next five years we can continue to have both The Finals and Arc Raiders in one shape or form in the market with a solid, highly engaged player base, and that we have two more games in the market so that we have four in total." He teases that the team is "excited about" its other in-development projects, but that it's too early to talk about them yet.

Söderlund is also cautious about the studio's size, pointing to the recent round of Battlefield 6 layoffs and noting that the steady increase in triple-A scope and budgets is "a problem across our industry." While he wants to double Embark's game count in the coming years, and that will require some additional hires over time, he emphasizes, "You won't see us grow to thousands of people. That's not going to happen."