The discourse around Arc Raiders has been pretty messy lately. I’ve seen a lot of people on BlueSky claiming the game has no human voice acting, which is just factually wrong (they’re using a mix of both)

I get why studios look at this from a business angle; when you need to iterate on lines quickly the efficiency of Al is hard to ignore. I also see why people are so defensive about it: it’s not just a ‘non-issue’ for everyone, there are legitimate concerns about how this shift affects job security for actors and whether the industry is losing that human touch in the process.

It has very little human voice acting. The vendors you interact with, which you’ll probably interact with the most, use sound-generated voice lines. And they have the flattest, blandest line deliveries.

It’s not like there are a lot of lines they say in the first place. For a studio that wants to shove AI into everything they’re not using it in any way that would justify AI. Like, there are no characters that call you by name, or generate responses based on your actions. They just have 5 or 6 voice lines each… Something you’d expect in a regular game!

On the other hand Arc Raiders is the only UE5 game that actually runs well, due to the studio completely reengineering it’s rendering pipeline. Basically they built their own version of UE5. Though I wonder how much vibe coding was used in the process. Perhaps the cracks will start showing eventually.

You’re talking to someone who grew up gaming in the 90s.

“Voice-acting” to me was nothing more than a few chirps or tones to convey talking. For such a minor and insignificant part of the game (vendor dialogue) it’s a non-issue for me. In fact, I’ve heard flatter voice acting in higher budget games from the 2000s and it didn’t bother me then and that was real people.

I’ve been enjoying the actual game a lot and I think anyone avoiding it based purely on “AI = bad” is doing a disservice to themselves.

I frankly don’t really care if in the past there was no voice acting in games.

The point is, there is voice acting now, and if they’re going to add voice acting to their games they could have the decency of actually hiring actual voice actors. And if using AI is a must they better make sure it’s used in a, way that justifies it.

I was born in the early 90s, so I grew up with plenty of late 90s and early 2000s videogame jank. But I don’t see how that can be used as an excuse for corner-cutting practices today.