Reviews for Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown paint a positive picture overall, but it was recently discovered that one of the game’s characters is voiced by a text-to-speech program.
Reported by IGN, tree spirit Kalux’s voice doesn’t sound like it was recorded by a human, and sounds far more like a text-to-speech or AI program. The voice itself is rather stiff and has unnatural inflections. AI voice acting sadly risks becoming more prevalent, much to the dismay of professional voice actors, but the good news is this character’s voice isn’t permanent.
Ubisoft admitted Kalux’s dialogue was recorded with a text-to-speech program, but it’s meant to be a placeholder until actual actor records the lines. This is a fairly common practice in game development, and it seems Ubisoft simply forgot to swap out the placeholder voice from the build sent out for review.
“During the development process of a game, some teams use multiple placeholder assets, including text to speech voiceover, until final dubbing is delivered. The English version of these eight lines of text for this character were not properly implemented but will be swapped out and updated with an upcoming patch,” explains Ubisoft.
But this patch won’t be implemented on day one with The Lost Crown‘s launch. Instead, Ubisoft only offers a vague window of late January or early February, meaning Kalux’s placeholder performance will be present for a while in the full release.
Another strange detail IGN spotted is how Kalux’s actual voice actor is completely missing from the credits. Every other character’s actor is credited, making Kalux a bizarre exception. Ubisoft didn’t provide an explanation for this when asked and, at the time of writing, Side UK (the production company behind The Lost Crown‘s voicework) has yet to answer whether it recorded dialogue for Kalux in the first place.
Although this seems to be a mistake on Ubisoft’s part, there’s nothing to say it won’t dabble with AI voice acting for future games. We’re already seeing examples of it in games like THE FINALS, which unsurprisingly drew backlash from players and actors, and Ubisoft has already begun using AI to assist with writing dialogue.
