First-person multiplayer shooter The Finals launched across PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5 during The Game Awards 2023, introducing an enormous playerbase to the winter’s hottest new F2P game. (Well, maybe not as hot as Fortnite with LEGOs, but still.)
This competitive squad-based game takes on a game show format, where small teams work together to complete objectives across an enormous level. Think Apex Legends meets Battlefield, with an emphasis on destructible environments and team objectives over battle royale gameplay.
Anyway, The Finals has already proven incredibly popular. As of this article’s writing on December 11 at 2:49PM CT, The Finals is the game with the third highest current players on Steam, with over 159,000 people playing on PC alone. This means the game beats out PUBG, Baldur’s Gate 3, Lethal Company, Team Fortress 2, Skyrim, and VRChat in terms of active users.
Only two other games are more popular than The Finals this afternoon: Counter-Strike 2 (with over 730 thousand players) and Dota 2 (at a comfortable 455,000 users, approximately).
How does The Finals use AI?
To The Finals’ credit, the game sounds good. Polygon’s Ari Notis called it “an energetic and competent multiplayer shooter I could see myself dipping into for a few rounds when Halo Infinite gets too frustrating.” However, there’s a tricky, controversial issue behind the game’s development. The game’s developer Embark Studios relied on AI for voice acting over hiring human professionals, leading many to avoid The Finals outright.
Criticism went viral during The Finals’ open beta, with popular voice actor Gianni Matragrano highlighting how the game uses text-to-speech voice acting with its announcers to try to capture that game show format. Instead, the game’s announcers sound strange and stilted, like a computer obviously generated the lines. While the final voice acting appears a bit better, there are still moments where the quality proves subpar, with the inflection and tone of the female announcer in particular slightly strange at times.
For the record, complaints have surfaced on the game’s Steam forums surrounding AI voice acting. But it seems like Embark is set on using AI for future development projects. Earlier this year, two audio designers at Embark explained the company uses “AI with a few exceptions, so all the contestant voices like the barks and voiceover commentators are AI text-to-speech.” Apparently, Embark’s audio team members believe AI text-to-speech production “allows us to be extremely reactive to new ideas” in a way far superior to hiring human voice actors.
“If a game designer comes up with a new idea for a game mode, we can have a voiceover representing that in just a matter of hours, instead of months,” audio designer Andreas Almström said, per PC Gamer.
‘Making games without actors isn’t an end goal’
According to IGN, an Embark representative later claimed the studio uses “a combination of recorded voice audio and audio generated via TTS tools in our games, depending on the context,” arguing that “making games without actors isn’t an end goal.”
Still, that spokesperson defended TTS because it “allows us to have tailored voice over where we otherwise wouldn’t, for example due to speed of implementation.” That representative argued TTS in The Finals was “always based on real voices,” although it still furthers the point that Embark’s developers chose a machine over real, breathing human beings conveying emotional moments for the player.
Is AI the future for voice acting? Could voice actors face an existential threat as games follow in Embark Studios’ and The Finals’ footsteps? For over 100,000 gamers, the labor issues behind The Finals simply don’t matter. As long as the game is fun, who cares? Fire it up, and forget about all the conundrums that AI introduced. It’s an unfortunate circumstance, but what can you expect in a field where people once complained about censoring “vagina bones?”
(featured image: Embark Studios)
