Arc Raiders AI Voice Acting: The Controversy, Explained

Arc Raiders shipped with text-to-speech voice lines licensed from paid actors. What Embark said, why players objected, and what changed after launch.

Category: Arc Raiders AI & ARC Machines · Updated 2026-08-03

Where this stands, as of August 3, 2026

ARC Raiders shipped on October 30, 2025 with some voice lines produced by text-to-speech, built from recordings by voice actors that Embark Studios says it hired, contracted and paid for that use. Players criticised how those lines sounded. In March 2026, Embark CEO Patrick Söderlund said Embark had re-recorded some lines with human actors after launch, and that "a real professional actor is better than AI". By Embark's own most recent public account, licensed text-to-speech remains in the game for ping system audio.

This page records what was said, by whom, and when. It is dated because the situation changed after launch, and it can change again with any patch.

What shipped at launch

ARC Raiders released on October 30, 2025 for PS5, Windows and Xbox Series X/S, developed and published by Embark Studios, a Stockholm studio owned by Nexon.

Design director Virgil Watkins described the voice system to PCGamesN in an interview published around launch:

Players heard it in the ping and callout system and in trader dialogue. Eurogamer's reviewer noted that speaking characters were "mostly limited to traders", with player characters also vocalising emotes and pings during matches. GameRant pointed to the basic materials trader, Celeste, as an example.

Human actors were recorded too. Chief creative officer Stefan Strandberg told Eurogamer on launch day: "I came out of recording just two days ago with two wonderful actors that you'll have heard in the pre-order trailer. Those are real actors."

On the commercial arrangement, Söderlund told GamesIndustry.biz on March 13, 2026:

This was not a first. Embark's previous game, The Finals (2023), used the same text-to-speech approach and drew the same criticism.

The Steam store page carries a disclosure, unchanged as of August 3, 2026: "During the development process, we may use procedural- and AI-based tools to assist with content creation. In all such cases, the final product reflects the creativity and expression of our own development team."

Why players noticed

Eurogamer's review by Rick Lane, published November 10, 2025, scored the game 2 out of 5 and singled out the voices. It called the generated lines "aggressively mediocre and a stain on the experience", with voices that are "flat and emotionally blunted, aside from the occasional bizarre inflection that reveals their robotic roots".

On the official Steam discussion board, in a thread opened on launch day, players called the voices "really bland with zero life in them" and said "the AI voices suck". Players also noted that some characters sounded "clearly AI" while others "sound much better", making the inconsistency easy to hear. GameRant described the lines as landing "with a thud".

Voice actor Neil Newbon (Astarion in Baldur's Gate 3) told PCGamesN on December 15, 2025 why synthesized delivery is noticeable: "I've heard generative AI; it's dull as hell. It takes me out of the immersion ... that's uncanny valley territory."

Embark raised the same question. Watkins told PCGamesN on January 11, 2026: "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?"

The argument, as each side put it

Stated in defence of Embark's approach:

• Consent and payment were contractual. Watkins said the use is "part of their contract", and Söderlund said actors are paid for booth time and paid again for the licence.
• It enabled content the team could not otherwise ship. Watkins, January 2026: "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."
• The affected content is peripheral, limited by Söderlund to lines "that aren't as essential to the immersion of the experience, mostly ping system audio".
• Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, posting on X on November 11, 2025 in response to the Eurogamer review: "When tech increases productivity, competition leads to building better games rather than employing fewer people."

Stated against it:

• Precedent. TheGamer's Jade King framed AI voice acting as "opening Pandora's Box" toward "a world where corporations happily take full advantage", with the concern being adoption by larger studios.
• Whether consent is meaningful under commercial pressure. Summarising the critical position, GameRant wrote that critics "question whether consent is genuine when refusing means losing employment opportunities".
• The lost day rate. Newbon, December 2025, on using AI in place of a recording session: "You're robbing that performer of that day's fee."
• Affordability. Newbon said the cost of voice lines "compared to the rest of the game's development is peanuts". Lane made the same point in the Eurogamer review.
• Theme. Lane: "You made a game about the tragedy of humans being replaced by robots while replacing humans with robots, Embark!"

Wider labour context: SAG-AFTRA video game performers struck from July 2024 to July 2025, partly to secure AI protections. No union statement specific to ARC Raiders has been found.

Embark's stated position, from its chief creative officer

Stefan Strandberg spoke to Eurogamer in an interview published October 30, 2025, headlined "There's no shortcut to making great games".

One point here is contested rather than settled. Embark's position is that text-to-speech is not generative AI. Eurogamer's reviewer disputed that directly, writing that Embark "has further argued (less convincingly) that TTS is different from generative AI tools like ChatGPT". PC Gamer covered the same definitional gap.

The post-launch change

Söderlund told GamesIndustry.biz on March 13, 2026 that there are fewer AI voice lines in ARC Raiders now than there were at release:

He also said: "We look at [AI] first and foremost as a production tool," and "It's also a way for us to work, not replace actors."

What was not said matters too. Söderlund did not say how many lines were re-recorded, which characters, or in which patch. He did not say text-to-speech was being removed, and in the same interview he described the licensed text-to-speech for "mostly ping system audio" in the present tense.

Newbon, who had publicly called for exactly this in December, credited the studio. Speaking to FRVR and reported by GamesRadar+ on March 30, 2026: "Props to them for actually doing it, I actually think that's great to hear ... I think hats off to them for doing that, that's a good thing."

Why this may move again

• Söderlund has been appointed executive chairman of Nexon, Embark's parent company.
• In a Nexon financial presentation held March 31, 2026, Nexon president and CEO Junghun Lee called ARC Raiders "a Trojan Horse ... a gift that contains a shift in the mindset about how technology frees developers and live service teams to spend more time thinking and less time typing", while promoting Nexon's Mono Lake AI initiative. Söderlund, in the same presentation: "And now we're bringing that thinking to the rest of Nexon."
• ARC Raiders is a live service game with regular patches, and its official news feed does not address AI, voice acting, or text-to-speech in any post. Everything Embark has said publicly on this has come through press interviews.

So the position on the date of this page is a moving one, and it has already moved once. Any of it can change with a patch.

About this site

ArcRaidersAI.com is a fan-made companion tool named for the game, built and run independently, and it is not affiliated with or endorsed by Embark Studios. It is not part of the story above, which is about the game's shipped audio and Embark's production process.

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FAQ (corrected, replaces the `faq` array; only answers 1 and 2 changed)

Q: Does Arc Raiders use AI voice acting?

A: Yes, in part. ARC Raiders launched on October 30, 2025 with some voice lines produced by text-to-speech, built from recordings by voice actors that developer Embark Studios says it hired, contracted and paid for that specific use, mostly in the ping and callout system plus some trader dialogue. In March 2026, Embark CEO Patrick Söderlund said the studio had re-recorded some lines with human actors after launch, so there are fewer AI lines now than at release. In the same interview he described the licensed text-to-speech for ping audio in the present tense, so there is no public indication it has been removed.

Q: Were the Arc Raiders voice actors paid?

A: Embark Studios says yes. Design director Virgil Watkins told PCGamesN around the game's October 2025 launch that the studio hires and contracts voice actors, and that use of their recordings for text-to-speech is written into that contract. CEO Patrick Söderlund told GamesIndustry.biz in March 2026 that actors are paid for all time spent in the booth and paid again for approval to license their voices through text-to-speech. No public comment from an ARC Raiders performer about their own contract has been found.

Q: Why do the Arc Raiders NPC voices sound weird?

A: Because some of the dialogue at launch was generated with text-to-speech rather than performed line by line. Eurogamer's Rick Lane, in a November 10, 2025 review scored 2 out of 5, described the lines as "flat and emotionally blunted, aside from the occasional bizarre inflection that reveals their robotic roots". Players on the official Steam board reported the same inconsistency, with some characters clearly synthesized and others noticeably better. Embark has since re-recorded some lines with human actors, so what you hear now depends on when you play.

Q: Did Arc Raiders replace its AI voices with real actors?

A: Some of them. Embark CEO Patrick Söderlund told GamesIndustry.biz on March 13, 2026: "We re-recorded some of the lines post-launch and made them with real voices. There is a quality difference. A real professional actor is better than AI; that's just how it is." He did not say how many lines, which characters, or in which patch, and he did not say text-to-speech had been removed from the game.

Q: Does Arc Raiders use generative AI?

A: Embark says no. Design director Virgil Watkins told PCGamesN that the game "in no way uses generative AI whatsoever", treating text-to-speech and the machine learning used for robot movement as separate from generative AI. That framing is disputed: Eurogamer's reviewer wrote that Embark "has further argued (less convincingly) that TTS is different from generative AI tools like ChatGPT". The Steam store page says Embark "may use procedural- and AI-based tools to assist with content creation".

Q: Is the Arc Raiders enemy AI machine learning?

A: Partly, and it is a different system from the voices. Embark machine learning research lead Martin Singh-Blom told 80.lv in March 2026 that "the machine learning part is actually more limited than people think. It's strictly for locomotion, such as how the robot places its feet and moves." He said higher level enemy decision making runs on "more traditional systems like behavior trees". None of it is related to the voice line controversy.

Q: Is arcraidersai.com made by Embark Studios?

A: No. ArcRaidersAI.com is a fan-made companion tool named for the game, and it is not affiliated with or endorsed by Embark Studios, the developer and publisher of ARC Raiders. Embark's official site is arcraiders.com.