Embark Studios is a team made up largely of former Battlefield developers from DICE, something most easily noticed by how destructible the environments in the studios debut game, The Finals, are.
It’s currently running an open beta with hundreds of thousands of players able to try this new free-to-play shooter for themselves, though players have quite easily noticed something new about The Finals.
The game is chock full of AI voices in place of actual voice actors, and the lack of quality to these voices is abundantly clear to players, though Embark Studios believes it “gets us far enough in terms of quality and allows us to be extremely reactive to new ideas.”
That last part may be true, it’s conceivably faster for the studio to use a text-to-speech software to write and implement new voice lines into the game than it would be to record a session with an actual person then edit and implement that recording.
But as professional voice actor Gianni Matragrano points out, actors are “constantly banging out rush order sessions for like, within a day or two.” Especially after the pandemic, plenty of voice actors today have in-home studios where they’re able to record at a high quality.
At this point, The Finals is likely pretty close to an actual release now that it’s running such a huge beta, so it doesn’t feel likely that the AI voices will be gone by launch. But it will be interesting to see if those voices are eventually swapped out, due to player feedback and criticism.
Source – [Rock Paper Shotgun]