Embark Studios Replaces AI Dialogue in ARC Raiders With Professional Voice Actors

When ARC Raiders launched, a handful of NPC lines inside Speranza and topside weren't recorded by human actors at all. They were generated by AI text-to-speech, a cost-control measure CEO Patrick Söderlund openly acknowledged in a GamesIndustry.biz interview. On March 15, Embark Studios confirmed those lines are being replaced with recordings from professional voice actors.

The reasoning Söderlund laid out is pretty straightforward: AI let the team move fast and experiment before locking in final performances, which is genuinely useful during development. But certain deliveries simply land better with a human behind the mic, and now that ARC Raiders has become a breakout success, Embark has the runway to go back and fix what they couldn't afford to prioritize at launch.

The "couldn't afford" part is key context here. ARC Raiders is a PvPvE extraction shooter, not a dialogue-heavy narrative RPG. It doesn't have the wall-to-wall voice work of something like a BioWare title. Still, those recurring NPC lines players hear over and over in Speranza and topside matter for immersion, and the AI-generated versions weren't fooling anyone. VICE's Denny Connolly, who played through portions of the game specifically to evaluate the voice work, was blunt about it: "the voices are not great. I've since sat and played through the game some, and almost every single line of delivery sounds off."

There's a compensation note worth flagging. VICE reported that the AI voice work "was trained with authorisation from the voice actors, and they were compensated." That's a meaningfully different situation from studios that have used AI to clone or approximate performances without consent, which is what made the Larian Studios AI controversy at the end of 2025 such a flashpoint. Embark's approach doesn't eliminate the ethical friction entirely, but it sits in a different category than unauthorized scraping.

What makes this story interesting beyond the studio-specific decision is the broader pattern it illustrates. VICE framed it well with the observation that "incidental generative AI in AAA is the new norm." The practice Embark used at launch, leaning on AI/TTS for non-critical lines while concentrating the real VO budget on higher-visibility moments, is exactly the calculus a lot of studios are running right now. The Bethesda comparison is apt: Oblivion famously spent a huge chunk of its voice budget on Patrick Stewart for the game's opening sequence, leaving the rest of the cast stretched thin. AI changes the math, but not necessarily the underlying strategy.

ARC Raiders has recently surpassed Helldivers 2 in all-time concurrent players on Steam, which gives Embark a budget position at this point that they didn't have on day one. Circling back to replace placeholder assets when a live-service title finds its audience is a reasonable post-launch cadence. The question the studio hasn't fully answered publicly is how many lines are actually being replaced, which specific NPCs are getting the upgrade, and exactly when players will hear the difference in-game.