Frankly, I’m newer to the industry than you and won’t claim to really understand the minutia of game dev as well as you likely do. This is just how I personally think/feel.

I’ll fully, 100% leave it there… I hope I didn’t impose after your bad experience w/ the earlier thread dude! Good vibes only.

I’ve read the reporting on that, and I can empathize with it being a pain to get VAs back to do only a couple new lines for X map or Y item, but I just personally don’t agree with the practice — especially for a studio with the resources Embark has.

Doing my due diligence to tack this on to the end of my yapping, in case anyone comes across it — since again, there’s lots of misinfo and I don’t want to add on to that:

www.rockpapershotgun.com/arc-raiders-...

But like, statements like this from Embark’s CEO certainly don’t help — and make me raise my hackles:

www.rockpapershotgun.com/arc-raiders-...

There’s been a LOT of misinfo floating around which I think has made people more aggressive. I think people are under the impression that there are generative AI assets like weapon models and cosmetics, which poisons the well.

Do they ruin the game? No, it’s excellent. Do they ruin the good work of dozens and dozens of devs? Some would make that claim, I would not. But I don’t understand why this corner needs to be cut — it IS a small part of the game, so pay the folks to do all the lines you need and call it a day, imo.

I don’t disagree with you, but I don’t think the Eurogamer reviewer necessarily does either. They point out the ARC enemy machine learning as an interesting technological use case that shines in-game, which I totally agree with. On the other hand, the TTS voices leave me feeling a tad sour.

anyways I realize this thread is getting insanely long and I don’t want to blow up your notifs (even though I have way more I’d love to talk about) so I’ll cut it at that point for the time being lol

and that’s scary for multiple reasons! From my POV — and to be clear, this is conjecture, but I think it’s *part* of the reason why people feel so strongly about this — folks in roles like voice acting may feel coerced into making these concessions in order to keep finding work.

I wrote in my own ARC Raiders review that I think this snapshot of the games industry contextualizes this decision. Jobs are bleeding right now, and alongside that we see companies like Square Enix planning to replace 70% of its QA staff with AI tools by 2027. Companies DO want to replace workers,

Obviously that doesn’t justify folks lashing out like that ofc. Can’t DM you for some reason but what I wanted to bring up about the VAs was this:

I did see that the actors consented to have their voices used alongside gen AI fill-in. I think that’s a complex issue in and of itself, though.

Yeah, I totally get that — saw some of the replies before it was taken down and there was some nasty stuff for sure. I think it’s a mixture of social media being a bit of a powder keg in general + the state of the industry (games and games media alike) being so volatile.

I’m curious if you’d be willing to discuss your ARC Raiders take — I *mostly* disagree with your deleted thread, but I’m curious if you’d be willing to chat about it in DMs or something. Don’t mean to impose after you’ve already been dogpiled on, but if we chat I promise it’ll be level-headed!

You certainly wouldn’t be stupid enough to do the “email me a list of things you did this week” Musk-type bullshit that she pulled.

These are the kinds of articles I love to read, cheers Zack.

And while I think we all hate the idea of working for potential “exposure,” these folks got to work on parts of Shrek??? Literally cannot be a better ending imo.

Oh my god it’s black and blue AND white and gold

here before the 15-minute video “HE WANTS MORE PEOPLE DEAD” and it’s literally just this post

what an extremely photogenic fella!