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A glowing map from ARC Raiders with fairy lights strung across the towns of Toledo and Speranza. Image: Embark Studios
Opinion

Opinion: ARC Raiders Says Actors Would “Go Crazy” Reading Every Line. Have They Met a Voice Actor?

Nate Holloway · November 3, 2026 · 6 min read

ARC Raiders' audio director says recording every ping line with real actors would drive them "crazy." Voice actors read thousands of tiny lines for phone menus, courses and audiobook pickups every week, and stay sane. The hard part was never the reading. It's the booking, the budget and the contract.

Somewhere right now a voice actor is reading "Press two for billing" for the fourth time, in a slightly warmer way, because the client felt the third one sounded "a bit billing-ish." Nobody has gone crazy yet. Give it till lunch.

So it was hard not to smile at the week's most quotable line about our trade. In Embark Studios' own behind-the-scenes series, The Evolution of ARC Raiders, audio director Bence Pajor explained why the game's ping system, the bit where your character calls out an item or a place when you mark it, leans on voices generated from the cast's recordings. "To record the training data for the ping system becomes too impractical to record every possible version of something," he said. "I mean the actors would just go crazy if they had to read all of that."

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