Open-world vampire RPG The Blood of Dawnwalker uses AI-generated voice acting, Rebel Wolves CEO Konrad Tomaszkiewicz has revealed, but the game doesn’t actually feature it. The developers introduced soul regurgitation technology early in development to create placeholder voice performances in order to tinker with things like quests without having to re-record related dialogue.
Tomaszkiewicz said this kept costs down, citing his experience working on The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Cyberpunk 2077 at CD Projekt. It has since claimed that all the evil chatbot pranks have been erased, and that all of the voice lines in Blood of the Dawnwalkers are now the product of real human lips and lungs.
“We used AI to generate the in-game audio early in the development process because, in our experience, one of the biggest problems when you’re making a complex game like ours is that once you start hearing the voices of the actors in the game, you know what problem you’re having in the game,” Tomaszkiewicz explained yesterday in a new edition of The Game Business. “Because when you’re reading a book, sometimes you don’t realize the problems you have in the game.
“And we used AI to generate the first audio for the game and figured out any issues we were having pretty early on in the process, before we even recorded it with the actors,” he continued. “And I think this was a very good decision, because we were able to iterate the game several times before going into recording. And this is very important, because when you make a story-driven RPG, recording is one of the biggest costs. Because we recorded in many languages, not just English, but Polish, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, etc. Overall, we recorded 8. And the amount of stories is the same, if not more.” [what we had] And you can imagine how hard it is to record all this and test and fix it later.
“And if you record something, start playing the game, and think, ‘Hey, there’s a problem with the sound, so I need to change the quest,’ how much would it cost to fix the problem? Because we’re using AI voice, you can fix those problems up front and save time later. And we knew that because we’ve had this problem before with games we’ve made at CD Projekt.”
Let me wear the official AI Detractor hot pants, which are getting increasingly worn and sweaty. Tomaszkiewicz did not reveal which specific generative AI technology the Rebel Wolves used on the Dawnwalker. It would be good to know whether it is a proprietary tool built specifically for this purpose, or one of the culture-devouring omnibots developed by a multitrillion-dollar software empire affiliated with the military and surveillance industries. It would be good to know in whose voice the Dawnwalker tools were “trained” and if they were paid for it. Veterans unions have spent years campaigning for protection from the invasion of their lives by unauthorized “digital replicas.”
I’d also like to hear from Tomaszkiewicz about the slippery slope argument that using genAI for relatively harmless efficiency gains like this will standardize shittier applications of that technology. Other developers are looking to replace voice actors with genAI at scale.
Finally, I’d like to hear from other RPG developers about other ways to use audio placeholders, or even without audio placeholders. Like a lot of the genAI hype, I’m not unsympathetic to the time-saving argument itself. Of course, developers could also record their own scratch vocals, but if you’re working on something the scale of The Witcher, this might not be practical. I’ve heard some horror stories about companies that overreached and had to commission follow-up recordings after the writers and designers decided the dungeons needed a little more work.
