Open world vampire RPG The Blood of Dawnwalker makes use of AI-generated voice acting, Rebel Wolves CEO Konrad Tomaszkiewicz has revealed, but doesn’t actually feature it in-game. The devs deployed the soul-regurgitating tech to create placeholder voice performances early in development, in order to tinker with quests and the like without re-recording the associated dialogue.
Tomaszkiewicz says this has kept costs down, citing his experience at CD Projekt working on The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Cyberpunk 2077. He claims that all of the sinister chatbot tomfoolery has since been erased, and that every voice line in The Blood of Dawnwalker is now the product of genuine human lips and lungs.
“We used AI in the early development process to generate the voices in the game, because from our experience, one of the biggest problems, when you’re doing complicated games like ours, is that when you start to hear the actors in the game, you figure out the problems you have in the game,” Tomaszkiewicz explained yesterday in a new edition of The Game Business. “Because when you’re reading stuff, you sometimes don’t recognise the problems you have in the game.
“And we used AI to generate the first voices for the game, to quite early in the process find out all the problems we have, before we recorded it with the actors,” he went on. “And I think it was quite a good move, because we were able to iterate the game a few times, before we went to recordings. And it is quite important, because the recordings are one of the biggest costs, when you’re doing a story-driven RPG, because we recorded in many languages, not only English, but Polish, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, overall like eight languages. And the amount of storyline – it’s similar or even more than [what we had] in The Witcher 3. And you can imagine what a big effort it is to record all of this, then later test it and fix it.
“And if, when you record something, and start to play the game and think ‘OK I need to change some quest because I hear it and there are problems’ – how costly this is, to fix those problems. When you fix those problems before, because you’re using AI voices, you’re saving time later. And we knew that because we had this problem before in the games we created with CD Projekt.”
Let me squeeze into my increasingly frayed and sweaty Official AI Detractor Hot Pants. Tomaszkiewicz hasn’t revealed which particular generative AI tech Rebel Wolves have used for Dawnwalker – it’d be good to know if it was a proprietary tool, custom-built for this purpose, or one of those culture-gobbling omni-bots developed by trillion dollar software empires who also have military and surveillance industry partnerships. It’d be good to know whose voices the Dawnwalker tools were ‘trained on’, and if they were paid for it. VA unions have spent years campaigning for protections against the undermining of their livelihoods by unauthorised “digital replicas”.
I’d also like to ask Tomaszkiewicz about the slippery slope argument that using genAI for such relatively harmless efficiencies will normalise shittier applications for the tech – other developers have sought to wholesale replace voice actors with genAI.
Lastly, I’d like to hear from other RPG developers about alternative methods of doing voice placeholders, or doing without them. As with much genAI hullabaloo, I’m not unsympathetic to the argument for saving time, in itself. Devs can just record their own scratch vocals, of course, but when you’re working on something Witcher-scale, this may not be practical. I’ve heard a few horror stories about overstretched companies having to commission follow-up recordings, after the writers and designers decide that some dungeon needs a few more twists and turns.
