Arc Raiders developer Embark Studios confirms using real actors to re-record AI lines; CEO Patrick Soderlund says: ‘We pay our actors for…’

Embark Studios has confirmed that it has re-recorded some AI-generated voice lines in its game Arc Raiders. The studio noted using human actors to revisit those lines after acknowledging differences in quality between synthetic and recorded dialogue.

The studio confirmed that several lines were replaced after the game’s launch. Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Embark CEO Patrick Soderlund said the company continues to work with actors while also licensing their voices for limited AI-generated dialogue in certain situations.In a statement to GamesIndustry.biz, Soderlund said, “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.”"We re-recorded some of the lines post-launch and made them with real voices. 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 explained.

What Arc Raiders maker Embark Studios said earlier about using AI in the game

Earlier, in October 2025, Stefan Strandberg, CCO of Embark Studios, told Eurogamer that the studio uses AI tools to assist with parts of the content creation process.“We use AI as tools to assist in some content creation, but it's always in the context of creativity, as an expression of the team,” Strandberg said.

"[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. So it's a wide umbrella, but the experience of the game doesn't use any generative AI," he added at that time.Meanwhile, Discord has addressed a recent data security issue linked to the Arc Raiders integration with the video-calling platform, which was storing users’ private Discord messages locally on their computers. The issue has since been fixed by developers at Embark Studios.A Discord spokesperson told Eurogamer that the company was “providing guidance to developers and updating the Discord Social SDK with additional protections”.