2025, particularly the tail end of it, seemed to be dominated by one topic when it came to videogame development discourse: the use of generative AI. Big names such as Activision, Krafton, and Larian were all pulled into the debate for their varying positions on using AI tech, and so too was Embark Studios, the creator of the biggest new multiplayer game of the year. Arc Raiders is a hit, but it ruffled many feathers with its use of a text-to-speech system to generate character voice lines and in-game callouts. Despite those concerns, it’s not just persevered, but blossomed into one of the most-played games in the world right now. However, judging from my recent conversation with Arc Raiders’ design director, Virgil Watkins, it doesn’t seem as if this will embolden Embark to increase its use of generative AI tech.
With Arc Raiders having enjoyed such popularity, despite the AI outcry, there are three possible states of mind Embark could find itself in. Maybe it’ll have more resources than it imagined and will no longer need to rely on things like its text-to-speech model, which involves Embark paying actors to provide them with voices that they can then feed into a TTS system to generate new lines more quickly. Or, it’ll see that for the majority of players, using the divisive tech isn’t enough of a reason not to play, and could accelerate its investment in and usage of AI tools. Finally, it may not have been swayed to either end of the spectrum, and its outlook on AI will remain the same. Speaking to Watkins, I ask which profile Embark fits into right now.
“Honestly, I don’t think it’s fallen any way or the other,” he tells me. “As with all the tools we build or make use of, [it comes down to]: ‘Does it ultimately let us do something we couldn’t before, or is it an added [bonus] to the game?’ With the TTS stuff, I think it was an unlock for us to be able to do voiced characters when we, at the time, did not have capacity to do so.
“And now, do we have different affordances, now that the game is what it is? Probably. And then we can ask ourselves, ‘Did the quality hit the mark?’ And maybe not. So should we revise how or why we do that? But I don’t think it’s been like, ‘Oh, well, let’s open the floodgates for all types of AI or even AI-adjacent tools.’ So no, I don’t think it’s changed our outlook on that.”
“It is still very much in the vein of building what we can, the best we can,” Watkins adds. “And a lot of it is just that avenue of exploring emerging tech and building our own tools for things, because that’s what enabled us to build a lot of this with the team the size we have. So I think it’ll be more of that in the future, and just trying to see what we can do for ourselves to, like, keep building content at the scale we have. But obviously we’re not deaf to the concerns that are out there for it.”
So, while I don’t think you need to worry about a flood of AI-generated elements coming to Arc Raiders any time soon, it’s clear that Embark isn’t going to totally step away from using it when it feels the need to. That’s despite the resources it now has after an incredibly strong couple of months since launching – although it does appear from Watkins’ comments that Embark has noticed concerns over the quality of the TTS-powered voice lines, so we could potentially see less reliance on that in the future.
When Lauren spoke to iconic Baldur’s Gate 3 voice actor Neil Newbon last month, he argued: “When a game’s successful, I don’t really get why [developers] don’t go ‘well, at the time we couldn’t afford to do it – it was too much or too difficult – but now we’ve been super successful, why don’t we go back and actually redo the lines with actors?'” I’d personally love to see exactly this happen in Arc Raiders, with trader quips and voice lines in cinematics 100% performed by real human actors to make them more emotive and believable, but we’ll have to wait and see if that comes to be.
I’ve already talked to Watkins about the remarkable number of players who chose to wipe their accounts in Arc Raiders’ first Expedition, but keep your eyes peeled for more from our conversation in the coming days.
