It feels like just yesterday we were all buzzing about The Finals: the frantic extraction gameplay, those wonderfully clumsy enemy robots, the sheer fun of it all. Then, practically overnight, the entire conversation imploded. Embark Studios, the team behind the game, didn’t just stumble; they accidentally cannon-balled into the biggest, ugliest debate in the industry: Where does generative AI belong in our games, and who, exactly, does it replace? Honestly? It’s a scrappy, existential situation.
The Auditory Flashpoint
The real flashpoint, the thing that genuinely enraged people, wasn’t the visuals. Embark has been clear—their artists still crafted all the beautiful, destructible environments. The controversy was entirely auditory. The studio leveraged AI-driven text-to-speech for much of the in-game chatter—specifically, those necessary, repetitive voice lines players hear when they’re pinging a loot item or calling out a landmark.
Embark’s defense was simple: It’s just a tool. A way to create a massive scope of unique announcements without hauling a voice actor back to the studio every single time they tweak a weapon or add a map area. They even stressed that the AI was trained using the voices of contracted, paid actors who agreed to the terms. Given the AI lines were for the commentators, not the player characters, that sounds… efficient, right?
The Existential Clock
But for many, especially professional artists, writers, and voice actors, this wasn’t about efficiency. This was the sound of an existential clock ticking down. They looked at the game’s undeniable success and asked: If a successful studio can use AI to handle all the “tedious repetition”—which is often the “bread-and-butter” work that actually pays bills—where do humans fit in five years from now?
Look, machine learning has been part of games forever. The incredible, dynamic way the giant ARC enemies stumble and rebalance when you blow off a leg? That’s AI, too, and nobody complains—it makes the gameplay better. But generative AI, the kind that creates content that could have been made by a human artist? That is the line in the sand.
The Two Sides of the War
We’re seeing this brutal fight everywhere now, not just with The Finals. You have one side, executives like Epic’s Tim Sweeney and the folks at Embark’s parent company, Nexon, insisting that AI is the inevitable future, a non-negotiable way to churn out more content faster. They claim everyone’s already using it, and soon, we won’t even be able to tell the difference. They dangle the lure of “infinite, context-sensitive dialogue,” promising a truly dystopian level of endless content.
Then you have the developers proudly stating they’d “rather cut off their own arms” than touch the tech, and the large number of gamers who now actively search for the mandatory “AI generated content disclosure” labels on platforms like Steam just so they can avoid what they brutally call “AI slop.”
The Player’s Choice
We, the players, are being forced to make a purchase decision about the future. Are we actually okay with a product that brazenly prioritizes speed and volume over genuine human performance and creative integrity?
The Finals didn’t start the AI war, but it certainly cranked the heat all the way up, forcing us all to confront a difficult truth: There is a human cost to efficiency. We’re standing at a truly confusing crossroads, and frankly, I have no idea which direction this industry is about to swerve.
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Sources
- www.theguardian.com/games/2025/nov/19/pushing-buttons-arc-raiders-generative-ai-call-of-duty
- www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/arc-raiders-use-of-ai-highlights-the-tension-and-confusion-over-where-machine-learning-ends-and-generative-ai-begins/
- www.eurogamer.net/theres-no-shortcut-to-making-great-games-embark-studios-cco-responds-to-and-defends-ai-use-in-arc-raiders
- www.windowscentral.com/gaming/should-game-developers-be-forced-to-declare-any-usage-of-ai-epics-billionaire-ceo-tim-sweeney-is-against-it-ai-will-be-involved-in-nearly-all-future-production/
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