If you’ve spent any time flicking through Arc Raiders‘ traders, you’ll probably recognize Celeste. She’s the unofficial leader of the underground settlement, helping give the Rust Belt’s battered human survivors a little morale boost beneath all the scrap metal and gunfire. However, it’s not unfair to say the character’s personality is a little stilted, and that’s down to Embark’s use of text-to-speech software.
While Diana Gardner has voiced Celeste from the beginning, Embark believes the character hasn’t always captured her performance well. That’s about to change, with the developer now using full motion capture to bring more of Gardner’s facial expressions and emotions into the game. The first proper showcase comes with Arc Raiders’ Frozen Trail trailer, which releases on Tuesday, October 6, 2026.
It marks the first time Embark has used full motion capture alongside more detailed facial capture for its NPCs, allowing the studio to map Gardner’s expressions onto the character with considerably more accuracy.
“Celeste’s limited expressive capabilities have been immersion-breaking for players, resulting in facial animations that fall short in communicating the stakes and stories we want to tell. Sometimes high-fidelity, dynamic facial expressions are important to anchor the gravity of the story, and this is something that has constrained us up to this point.”
Embark expresses that the character and Diana’s performance are “no longer hiding behind an imaginary face.” And The Finals developer isn’t stopping there. It says future updates will bring characters closer to the real-world actors who portray them, aiming to integrate more authentic performances into interactions throughout the Rust Belt.
“We’re not stopping with our cinematic videos […] It’s a start, and we will continue to improve our technology over time, to keep you all more immersed,” Embark notes. I’d like to see this applied to The Finals, as Season 12 of the FPS is set to expand on its roster of in-universe sponsors, and what makes the game show itself tick. Arc Raiders, though, needs to be more than what Embark is discussing above.
Speranza needs to be a hub; there’s no getting around it. Not just a selection of interactive menus. Adding outposts in the upcoming update is a neat idea, but it still scratches that itch. Interacting with NPCs, while hanging out with my mates at the dingy Speranza bar, would hit different before heading up to the surface.
For now, Celeste is the first step. The Frozen Trail update drops on Thursday, October, 2026. We’ll see you out there, Raider.
