ARC Raiders Success Sparks AI Fears, Could Open AAA Floodgate

The success of ARC Raiders has prompted fears that this could embolden more developers to use generative AI in their work.

In case you missed it, the recent competitive smash hit ARC Raiders has been a rather big success for its studio, Embark Studios.

However, the game has drawn criticism from some players for its use of generative AI to create new voice lines for its characters.

Embark battled these claims by clarifying that ARC Raiders’ voice actors were hired to read lines for the game, and that a “text-to-speech” system was implemented trained on these actors’ performances to create new lines.

However, players still aren’t really sold on these lines, with some insisting that Embark now go back and change the lines to be recorded by humans now that the studio has a bigger budget.

ARC Raiders, Embark Studios

ARC Raiders Developer Embark Studios Will Continue To Experiment With AI

In a recent interview with PCGamesN, Embark’s design director Virgil Watkins spoke about the studio’s use of generative AI tools, as well as how this bodes for the future.

“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,” Watkins explains.

“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.”

Based on these comments, it seems that Embark isn’t necessarily interested in increasing its use of AI generation tools for ARC Raiders’ various in-game assets, though it hasn’t completely written off using those tools in the future either.

“It is still very much in the vein of building what we can, the best we can," he 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.”

Of course, this does potentially mean that some developers could feel emboldened to experiment with AI tools in the future, given the large success of ARC Raiders.

Despite the poor quality of AI generated results across asset generation, audio, and writing, it seems that more and more companies are admitting to the use of such tools each week, and that this may become a bigger issue for gamers as time goes on.