I’ve just finished point-and-click adventure Heir of the Dog. It’s really good! The main character, voiced by Tom Hardwidge, has perhaps 76 billion lines of dialog, and nails every single one. Meanwhile, Arc Raiders developer Embark says it absolutely had to use AI to voice characters in its relatively taciturn extraction shooter because “the actors would just go crazy if they had to read all of that!”

As noticed by RPS, a new video uploaded by developer Embark features CCO Stefan Strandberg and others at the studio explaining why Arc Raiders controversially included AI voice acting, and the reasons are…odd.

When the game launched in October of 2025, it had a bizarre mishmash of voice acting and genAI voices, which caused a fair amount of fuss. By March 2026, Embark announced it was beginning the process of replacing the AI voices with human ones, and now, another eight months later, it’s approaching the subject head-on in a video hosted by Danny O’Dwyer.

The core issue here is the repeated declaration that aspects that can make voice acting and recording arduous work—like the many variants that are needed for delivering the public “pings” when you want to communicate in-context information in the field—are somehow now “too impractical to record every version of something.” Audio director Bence Pajor says, “The actors would go crazy if they had to read all of that.” This follows the last 30 years of voice actors recording astonishing numbers of lines for video games.

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