Embark Studios had made no secret of the fact that many of the voice lines in ARC Raiders were created using generative AI. In a new episode of its behind-the-scenes series about the evolution of ARC Raiders, the studio has acknowledged that the criticisms about its use of generative AI have been fair, but said that it was “too impractical” for the team to record every voice line in the game.
“Every time you’re testing out a new technology, you don’t really know how people will react to it,” said executive producer Aleksander Grøndal. “We’d seen some similar reactions with THE FINALS; we had used a similar technology, so I knew that we were heading into a bit of potential rocky territory. I think there was some really fair criticism in there. There’s no point in trying to be defensive; it’s just what’s best for the game at the end of the day.”
Further in the video, the studio justified its use of generative AI, noting that it was only used so that it could release updates for ARC Raiders at a rapid cadence. The developers also noted that they used actors, whose recordings would then be run through generative AI to change up their voices.
According to the studio’s audio director Bence Pajor, “[The actors] have been here all along. But we haven’t always used them to record the actual thing you’re going [to hear] because that’s only been solidified super late. We made a lot of training data from their voices so we could prototype as well with their voice.”
“Every new item that appears in the game, every new feature, everything needs to have a lot of dialogue because you can ping it. There’s so much going into everything. To record the training data for the ping system becomes too impractical to record every possible version of something. I mean, the actors would just go crazy if they had to read all of that. That’s not feasible because the game has been changing so fast and we can’t call them in every time we just change a feature.”
In October 2025, studio CCO and co-founder Stefan Strandberg had said that the amount of generative AI-based voices used in ARC Raiders was on the same level as in the studio’s other shooter – THE FINALS. “We use a combination of recordings of real actors and TTS,” he said. “So that’s true for this game as well.” He noted that this was due to the relatively small size of the team at the time.
“We are trying to maximize what we can, being a small team trying to get make rich worlds right, but still staying small… but we don’t use generative AI in other domains across the game.”
Earlier this year, ARC Raiders design director Virgil Watkins also spoke about the subject, and said that the team has no plans to “open the floodgates” when it comes to the use of generative AI. Further in his statement, he clarified that Embark Studios has always been keen to explore emerging technologies and how they can be used for game development.
In the meantime, take a look at how the studio is celebrating the first anniversary of ARC Raiders.
