Gears of War: E-Day Has No Russian Voices. A Fan-Made AI Dub Got There Before Launch Day

Gears of War: E-Day launches today with full voice acting in 11 languages. Russian isn’t one of them: the game has Russian menus and subtitles, but no Russian voices. A fan project called MD Revoice filled the gap with an AI dub four days before launch, and Russian players are arguing about whether it sounds human.

The Coalition’s prequel, published by Xbox Game Studios, opens to everyone on PC and Xbox Series X|S on October 6. Premium edition owners have been playing since the end of last week, and the reviews are warm: VGTimes counts an OpenCritic score of 88 and says critics are calling it a triumphant return to the series’ roots.

Players who wanted to hear Marcus Fenix and Dom Santiago speak Russian didn’t have to wait for any of that. MD Revoice put out version 1.1 of its dub on October 2, while the game was still in early access, and rebuilt it as version 1.2 on October 5 to match the latest patch.

Eleven voiced languages, and Russian isn’t one

E-Day’s Steam page splits its 22 languages exactly in half. Eleven get full voice acting, including both Spanish for Spain and Spanish for Latin America. The other eleven get menus and subtitles only, and Russian is in that group.

Microsoft hasn’t explained its choice of languages. It’s worth knowing, though, that the company suspended new sales of its products and services in Russia in March 2022. Remedy’s Control Resonant, which came out in September, also shipped with official Russian subtitles and no Russian voices.

That gap is exactly where MD Revoice works. “MD Revoice is a project by MD to create Russian voiceovers for games that didn’t officially get Russian audio localization,” its website says.

A dub that arrived before the game did

The dub is a 675 MB installer that copies audio files into the game folder. The site says it has only been tested on the Steam version and may not work through the Xbox app or Game Pass. It’s free, and the site says MD Revoice grows alongside the team’s other projects, a VPN and a Steam top-up service.

Image: MD Revoice demonstration video, via Zone of Games on YouTube

The project is open about what it’s really for. “The main goal of the project is the technology,” the site says. “Every voiceover is made on our own MDRevoice model, and every release is a step toward the next version of the model sounding better: more natural, more precise, closer to the original. The games here are a consequence: we use them to test what the model has learned.”

Gaming site PlayGround.ru reported that the model’s author says he has already spent more than 1 million rubles training it, and that E-Day uses a new test model called MDR14b. Goha.ru wrote that the team localized the dialogue and key audio tracks using technology that keeps “the original intonations and emotional delivery of the characters.” The English edition of iXBT.games went further in its headline: “AI localization quality resembles the work of real voice actors.”

What players heard

Comments under PlayGround.ru’s two stories split down the middle. “These guys really do have an excellent neural model, you’d never guess it was made in a few hours,” one reader wrote. “I hope that in a year it’ll be possible to make neural dubs of decent quality for every game. A voiceover really does take your immersion in a game to another level.”

A scene from the AI dub demonstration. Image: Zone of Games on YouTube

Another reader only noticed where the machine gave itself away. “I only realized it was a neural dub in the bar, when all sorts of emotional sounds like ‘ummm’ started. Otherwise it’s pretty decent.”

Some went straight to the business question. “To the point: these guys are great. I played Control with their dub: 95% of the dialogue is translated perfectly,” a commenter wrote. “At this rate, in six months to a year GamesVoice will be out of work.”

The studio that still hires actors

GamesVoice is the name that keeps coming up. It’s a Russian studio that has made unofficial and official game localizations since 2012, recording real actors, and it is one of the best known groups in fan dubbing there.

The two approaches collided last month over Control Resonant. MD Revoice released an AI dub for it, and iXBT.games quoted a player who loved it: “It sounds really, really good. In some lines you can still tell from the intonation and pronunciation that it’s AI, but if they polish it, it’ll be just [great]. At this rate voice actors won’t be needed.” At the same time, GamesVoice opened a crowdfunding campaign for a fully voiced, human Russian version of the same game. So Russian players are being offered a free AI dub right now, or the chance to pay for one with actors.

Whose voices are these?

MD Revoice doesn’t say what recordings its model learned from, and nothing on its site names any actors. We found no claim that it has copied a particular performer.

Russian dubbing actors have been worried about exactly this kind of tool for years. In 2023, dubbing actress Alena Andronova started a petition with the Union of Announcers of Russia after finding her voice for sale for AI synthesis without her consent, a voice she says she had recorded for a bank’s internal voice assistant. Forbes Russia reported that it had more than 2,300 signatures at the time.

“Synthesis technologies are developing at cosmic speed,” Andronova wrote in the petition. “This leads not only to mass job losses among people in these professions, but to the creation of compromising content that can completely destroy the reputation of the voice’s owner.”

Why it matters beyond Russia

For working voice actors, E-Day shows where AI dubbing is likely to show up first. It isn’t in the languages a publisher pays to record. It’s in the ones it leaves at subtitles, and it’s made by fans, for free, and sometimes before the game’s full launch.

Image: Xbox Game Studios

Eleven languages on E-Day’s Steam page fall in that gap. For now, the Russian dub is the only one anyone has filled.

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Read the replies, and the market answer looks less certain than the headlines. Some players say they can’t tell. Others say they can, from the first “ummm”. And GamesVoice is still asking players to pay for the human version.

Sources: Steam store page for Gears of War: E-Day (language table, checked October 6, 2026); MD Revoice (product page and project description); PlayGround.ru (two stories and reader comments, October 2026); Goha.ru; iXBT.games (E-Day and Control Resonant stories, reader comments quoted there); VGTimes; Game World Observer (Microsoft’s March 2022 suspension of sales in Russia); Cyclowiki (GamesVoice); Forbes Russia (Alena Andronova petition, 2023). Quotations from Russian sources are translated by Voice Over Herald. Images: Xbox Game Studios, MD Revoice demonstration video via Zone of Games.

Lee este artículo en español: Gears of War: E-Day no tiene voces en ruso. Un doblaje con IA hecho por fans llegó antes del lanzamiento

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