When it comes to video games, I love a good movement shooter. I love Titanfall 2, I love how movement-oriented Call of Duty has been in recent years, and I loved Overwatch before it became almost entirely devoted to selling character skins. The newest kid on the movement shooter block is The Finals, an extremely fun game that feels like a natural, team versus team evolution from shooters with heavy verticality, such as Fortnite or Apex Legends. However, there’s an extremely cynical element to its design that I can no longer shake – its AI voice acting.
When in open beta, The Finals made headlines for its AI voice acting. The game was well-received for its gameplay when it launched at The Game Awards, and rightly so — it’s one of the most fun shooters I’ve ever played. Its gameshow aesthetic gives it a lot of creative freedom (even if it hasn’t been fully realised yet, with extremely bland arenas still currently making up most maps).
The problem is that, over the the gameplay, your ears are besieged by soulless voices, presenting the game as if it were being streamed live, keeping the player updated on the wider match in progress (such as when a team is eliminated, or when a team is about to score). Voiceovers, or ‘announcers’, are commonplace in games – but in The Finals, they’re AI-generated.
For many people, I fully appreciate that this awful, machine-made voice acting could go unnoticed. I actually didn’t begin to notice it until after my first few games.
But once I started to notice it, I couldn’t stop. It’s like somebody pointed out a blinking ceiling light in the office, or a persistent smoke alarm constantly letting off a testing beep.
So I guess The Finals is going with AI voices…? pic.twitter.com/PIAbR43ZrT
— Gianni Matragrano (@GetGianni) October 28, 2023
The poster above, beloved voice actor Gianni Matragrano, was understandably mad at the developer’s choice of a voice actor-less voice actor. He later followed up this tweet with a response to the developers, who had claimed that AI voice acting was quicker.
“We [voice actors] are constantly banging out rush order sessions for like, within a day or two. You can literally get pro-grade VO for less than a grand total, bang out a couple recording sessions and bam you have all the audio you need,” Matragrano said.
I’d add that there’s a follow-on effect, too. By not using real voice actors, the rest of the product looks worse by association. The dialogue is often poorly written and lacking energy, and announcers frequently grunt in that weird, AI-voicey way that voice generators tend to do. At least a real voice actor could make things better with good delivery.
There’s really no excuse for what Embark Studios, the developers of The Finals, have done here. The most lukewarm critique of this ‘voice acting’ is that it would need refining and that it’s not perfect, even post-launch where it remains very much the same. I fully believe it’s conceptually impotent. Weightless, unencouraging, and somehow repetitive-sounding even when you hear a new line, the energy that charismatic voice actors could have brought to the announcer roles is completely unconsidered.
Now, in fairness, the developers have responded to these criticisms; we’re not just beating a dead horse here. Embark Studios said to IGN:
“In the instances we use TTS in The Finals, it’s always based on real voices,” the spokesperson said. “In the open beta, it is based on a mix of professional voice actors and temporary voices from Embark employees. Making games without actors isn’t an end goal for Embark and TTS technology has introduced new ways for us to work together.”
Why I’ve waited so long to write about this is… I genuinely thought they’d get a real voice actor in by now. In reality, the developers doubled down post-launch, claiming that the use of AI lets developers do more with less.
“I think with these new tools, they’re not going to go away. The important thing for us is to be transparent about the way we use them. That’s the context we want to provide, going forward,” Embark Studios’ brand director Sven Grundberg said.
That line really just hit me like a tidal wave because I want to play The Finals at the moment, but I really don’t want to put up with its garbage voiceovers. If the ‘new tools’ aren’t going to go away, meaning that we’ll likely see them in other games… Fuck that. And fuck taking a job away from someone, something Embark Studios has objectively done here (and something all too familiar in the journalism space).
“When you need more, you can book another session. We actually make it very easy. And then it’ll just sound good and not be something even players who don’t really care about AI ethics keep complaining about,” Matragrano also wrote in his tweet, made prior to Grundberg’s above statement. It peels back the curtain enough to expose how rotten this mindset is.
Reaching the end of this article that I put off for so long, expecting to see a change in direction from a studio I hadn’t heard of until now, I don’t think The Finals is really going to be the inflection point I want it to be on AI in media. When High on Life went through controversy for its AI-voiced background characters and art in late 2022, I thought we’d be done with this topic in games, at least for a little while.
But the mood has cooled on The Finals. As I write this, it boasts a player count of 87,313 on Steam and position 10 on the most played games list. Conversations about its use of AI have dried up.
As we head into CES 2024 season, I unfortunately expect to see a lot more of this stuff.
Unfortunately for everyone, even if you’re not clued into the AI conversation too much, the overall takeaway here is it’s bad. Not the use of AI, which should be considered critically, but the end product itself.
If you don’t care and play The Finals, turn all your audio settings off except dialogue. Listen to what Embark Studios considers good enough to not employ someone. And maybe think about what excuses could be made for AI taking your job.
Image: The Finals/Embark Studios