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Embark CEO Explains Which AI Assets Have Been Replaced in ARC Raiders After Launch (And Why It’s An Improvement)

Embark Studios CEO Patrick Söderlund reveals why ARC Raiders is replacing AI voices with real human actors.

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ARC Raiders has become a massive hit and the extraction shooter’s team is making constant adjustments and tweaks to the game to ensure that it is providing the most immersive gameplay experience possible for players.

ARC Raiders Team is Replacing AI Voices with Real Human Actors

Although ARC Raiders isn’t a very narrative-heavy, linear game with lots of voice lines, there are a handful of recurring NPCs and dialogue that plays out both in Speranza and topside. In order to keep the budget of ARC Raiders within scope, some of those voice lines were recorded by AI in the launch version of the extraction shooter. Now that the game has become such a success story, the team is circling back and updating those assets.

Embark Studios CEO Patrick Söderlund recently revealed this update in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz. Söderlund talked about the update during a discussion about the various uses of generative AI tools in the game’s production…

“We re-recorded some of the lines post-launch and made them with real voices.”

Söderlund went on to explain that there is a real quality difference in the voice lines once they are updated to feature real actor performances:

“There is a quality difference. A real professional actor is better than AI; that’s just how it is. We look at [AI] first and foremost as a production tool. We can test things internally. We can test 15 different lines without recording them, and then we know what to record. It’s also a way for us to work, not replace actors. We don’t necessarily believe in replacing humans with AI all the time.”

He went on to explain that in some cases, the team needs to use text-to-speech version of the professional actors’ voices to support some of the game’s systems, like the ping system audio.

“”We pay our actors for all time spent with us in the booth and continue to bring many of them back as we carry on updating the game… For select usage, we also pay them for the approval to license their voices through text-to-speech for lines that aren’t as essential to the immersion of the experience, mostly ping system audio.”

After the Larian Studios AI drama at the end of 2025, it’s interesting to see how other game developers are deciding to speak about the use of AI in the development process and when it does and doesn’t make sense. Söderlund seems to be aligning with the sentiment that some work will always be better with a human touch, while still admitting that the use of AI helps speed things up in the development process and allows the team to experiment a bit more before locking in the final lines and performance.

ARC Raiders is available now on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series consoles.

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