Extraction shooter ARC Raiders is already a hit, but its AI voice acting has ruffled some feathers

If you like your shooters with a healthy side order of social awkwardness, ARC Raiders is your ambrosia. It isn’t a run-and-gun experience from the COD mould. Instead, the multiplayer smash hit of 2025 is closer to DayZ: a big open space full of materials and items you need, and which other players are also searching for. While there are computer-controlled enemies that can’t be negotiated with, whether you engage in combat with other human players is completely up to you. And them, of course.

That formula’s proving to be one of the most successful of the year. ARC Raiders has already sold more than four million copies in its first month on sale, and currently sits fourth on Steam’s most played games with a 24-hour peak of nearly 400,000 players. There’s something about entering a hostile zone full of tasty loot while being able to talk your way out of a fight with other players via live voice chat that’s clearly hit the mark.

But it’s not all sunshine, rainbows and game of the year awards for developer Embark Studios, who is simultaneously enjoying massive commercial success and taking significant criticism for its decision to generate voice-acted lines for its NPCs with AI, rather than employing human voice actors.

Eurogamer’s review sums things up nicely: “This design is overshadowed by the spectre of AI. Arc Raiders uses machine-learning algorithms for its Arc animations, and text-to-speech-based performances generated from the voices of real actors.

“Embark claims it uses AI voices so the studio can implement ideas quicker, creating new voice lines in hours rather than having to go through the longer process of manual rerecording (and therefore re-hiring actors). But NPC voices are not central to the experience, so I don't think this argument holds water. Even if it did, Arc Raiders' launch has been so successful Embark could probably hire a team of live-in voice actors and still make gargantuan amounts of profit, while benefitting from more memorable characters as a result.”

The subsequent debate escalated as far as Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney, who responded to Eurogamer’s review post on X with his own statement.

“Since the author states the pessimistic case, I’ll put the optimistic one here. Game developers compete to build the best games in order to attract gamers. When tech increases productivity, competition leads to building better games rather than employing fewer people.”

But what about employing voice actors, Tim? This debate has surfaced an important point: it’s not just a matter of whether you use humans or AI to make a game – it’s who you use, and to make which parts of a game. It’s in those specifics that we either lose the creative soul of a project in the name of optimised workflow, or retain it at a financial cost.

Remember when deciding which game to play was about whether you’d have fun with it, rather than weighing up the ethical and political impact? Best load up Need For Speed Underground again, then.