Arc Raiders is out now and putting up big sales and player numbers, and it’s achieved strong results thus far amid debates and discussions about how the PvPvE game implements AI technologies. Now, industry executive Shams Jorjani, the CEO of Helldivers studio Arrowhead, has weighed in with his thoughts on the matter, imploring people to consider the nuance and perspective of the matter.
He told The Game Business that what he’s observed is that people commenting on AI tend to fall into two camps: people and studios who are leaning into AI enthusiastically and other developers who say “the very fabric of their being is being threatened and therefore all AI is bad AI.”
“Maybe, could it be, that reality is somewhere in the middle? Could it be?” he said, as reported by GamesRadar.
Jorjani said he’s observed that people tend to “jump to extreme takes,” but in the case of how Arc Raiders implements AI, he said, “It’s a very interesting use case that actually makes gaming better.”
Like many other industry executives before him, Jorjani also stressed that there are pitfalls with AI as well as it relates to plagiarism and IP rights. “We need to make sure that we’re not stealing people’s intellectual property and rights,” he said.
For Arc Raiders, developer Embark Studios used AI for certain player communication voice lines. Jorjani said this is personally appealing to him because he does not like to speak with his own voice in multiplayer games, so having AI voice lines is beneficial for him.
“I think this allows more people to connect with each other, which is ultimately a good gaming thing. Let’s just make sure that people are paid for their work. Like, surely there’s a middle ground here, come on,” he said.
Also in the interview, Jorjani said game-development teams are always trying to find ways to become more efficient and cut down on “the stuff you don’t want to do” to free up space to work on “the stuff you want to do.”
“We don’t put any AI in the games, but if it can allow me to do my receipts faster, then that’s more Helldivers for everyone. Not Helldivers specifically, but you get the point,” he said.
For Arc Raiders, Embark hired real human voice actors and supplemented that work with automated, AI-driven text-to-speech for certain lines. The developer said this system—which creates voice lines for all of the game’s item and location names, as well as compass directions–made it so the voice actors didn’t have to come back to record new lines every time they added a new piece of content to the game.
Arc Raiders publisher Nexon is a big believer in using AI technologies to help make development more efficient. Not every developer uses AI or wants to use AI in game development, and many have spoken out against the use of generative AI. But for Embark, implementing AI for Arc Raiders was a continuation of what the studio did with its last game, 2023’s The Finals. This game also featured text-to-speech (TTS) that was generated using AI because the team could produce voice lines in hours rather than months. Embark defended its choice back then, stating that “making games without actors isn’t an end goal” and a combination of recorded voice audio and audio generated via TTS tools merely expedited the process.
AI is not just impacting video games, but also the wider labor market in the US and abroad. Various industries have faced major cutbacks and layoffs in recent times, but it’s unclear how much of this is related to AI, if it is at all.
Arc Raiders has sold more than 4 million copies and remains Steam’s No. 1 best-selling game and one of the platform’s most-played games overall. It recently peaked at over 480,000 players on Steam alone.