Arc Raiders is the game of the moment, and not entirely for the reasons its developer probably wants. On the one hand, it’s enjoying a lot of success as the multiplayer shooter at the top of everyone’s mind right now. On the other hand, at least part of that notoriety comes not from how many people are evidently enjoying its take on the extraction shooter genre, but from how it’s the highest-profile game currently out that uses AI-generated voices. And when there’s controversy, you can usually count on ludicrous comments from a C-suite executive to follow, in this case kicking off a conversation about just how prevalent AI currently is in game design.
Like developer Embark’s The Finals, its newest shooter uses text-to-speech voices alongside actual recorded voice lines for much of the spoken dialogue in the game. That hasn’t stopped Arc Raiders from quickly becoming one of the most popular multiplayer shooters around, either because players don’t care about the use of AI, didn’t know it was there, or were perhaps confused by the game’s AI disclosure on Steam, which like many such disclosures, seems calibrated to convey the least amount of meaning possible.
