Arc Raiders is a great game with a complicated legacy thanks to its use of generative AI to voice NPCs. It’s the same strategy Embark Studios used with The Finals, and the CEO of publisher Nexon now says fans should get used to it.
“First of all, I think it’s important to assume that every game company is now using AI,” Junghun Lee told Japanese outlet Game*Spark, according to a translation by Automaton. “But if everyone is working with the same or similar technologies, the real question becomes: how do you survive? I believe it’s important to choose a strategy that increases your competitiveness.”
He believes generative AI will increase the capabilities of game studios across the board, thus increasing the “average” quality of games. “AI has definitely improved efficiency in both game production and live service operations,” Lee said.
His comments come after fellow South Korea game publisher Krafton revealed an “AI first” plan to invest roughly $70 million in GPU clusters and related resources to build out an infrastructure for deploying agentic AI across the company. Krafton happens to own the makers of PUBG, Hi-Fi Rush, and Subnautica 2.
But the deployment of AI in games remains controversial and confusing, as proven by Nexon’s own Arc Raiders.
No one agrees on what counts as generative AI
“Arc Raiders in no way uses generative AI whatsoever,” design director Virgil Watkins claimed during a new interview with PCGamesN. But in addition to using machine learning during the development process, the hit Steam extraction shooter also uses text-to-speech models to voice all of the NPC barks for every random item and situation.
“[Text-to-speech] allows us to increase the scope of the game in some areas where we think it’s needed, or where there’s tedious repetition, in situations where the voice actors may not see it as valuable work,” Embark Studios CCO Stefan Strandberg told Eurogamer last month. “So it’s a wide umbrella, but the experience of the game doesn’t use any generative AI.”
Others disagree, including Eurogamer, whose review became a flash point on social media this week after it critiqued Arc Raiders‘ use of AI voices. “[Machine learning] is an interesting technology, and the effects it produces during matches are undeniably convincing,” wrote Rick Lane. “The same cannot be said about Embark’s generated voice lines, which are aggressively mediocre and a stain on the experience.”
There are also those who take issue with the assumption of Nexon’s CEO that everyone must be racing to embrace generative AI more generally. “Hello, not only do we not use AI, we would rather cut off our own arms than do so,” wrote indie team Necrosoft Games. “Demonschool is 100% human made.”
