Even After Its Success, Embark Design Lead Is Still Lukewarm On Ai... (2026)

Arc Raiders was one of 2025's hits—and while it's always hard to predict which live service will be the next actually successful one, that by itself isn't the most notable thing about it. It's an extraction shooter, and if you get one of those off the ground, it'll continue to be popular. Its largest impact on the industry has been the conversation around AI.

The game's developed by Embark Studios, creators of The Finals, and has routinely dipped its toes into hot water over the usage of generative AI to produce voice lines. Statements have sometimes even contradicted each other.

For example, in the story I just linked, Embark Studios CEO Patrick Söderlund was quick to emphasise that the studio wasn't using it to "replace people", even though replacing work you'd otherwise need a voice actor to come in and record is, uh, doing that. He then goes on to talk effusively about how Embark couldn't have made its two games without it, which strikes me as strange—either you replaced work that would've cost money you didn't have, or you didn't do that.

I digress: You might think that after gathering some success, Embark would keep banging that drum. But in a recent interview with PCGN, design director Virgil Watkins seems pretty lukewarm. Neutral. Straight down the middle.

"Honestly, I don't think it's fallen any way or the other," Watkins says, after being asked whether Embark was all-in on AI now that Arc Raiders is the new hotness. He explains that it's a case of: "'Does it ultimately let us do something we couldn't before, or is it an added [bonus] to the game?' With the [text-to-speech] stuff, I think it was an unlock for us to be able to do voiced characters when we, at the time, did not have the capacity to do so.

"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."

That's a pretty big admission that the game's text-to-speech AI generation is a stopgap, especially since its design director is iffy on the result being high-quality. Which it isn't; I'll confess, I bounced off Arc Raiders—partially because I don't like extraction shooters, but also because I'm a curmudgeon when it comes to AI, and hearing the listless, bland text-to-speech rattle off voice-lines made me feel like I'd been tricked into watching YouTube shorts slop, not playing a videogame that costs money.

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Source: PC Gamer