ARC Raiders Gives Celeste Her Voice Actor’s Face. Embark Says More Characters Are Next
Embark Studios is giving ARC Raiders’ Celeste a new face, and it belongs to the woman who has voiced her all along. Diana Gardner’s full performance, face and voice together, reaches the game in Thursday’s Frozen Trail update, and the studio says other characters will follow their actors too.
Celeste runs Speranza, the underground town where ARC Raiders players trade, take quests and catch their breath between raids. Since launch she has been voiced by Diana Gardner. Her face, though, was a separate invention, and it never moved the way Gardner’s voice did.
That changes this week. In a post on the game’s official site on October 4, Embark’s chief creative officer Stefan Strandberg said the studio had used full motion capture, including a more detailed face, for the first time. The new Celeste appeared in the Frozen Trail trailer on October 6, and the update that puts her in the game lands on October 8.
“No longer hiding behind an imaginary face”
Strandberg didn’t soften the problem. “Celeste has never fully represented the depth of Diana’s performance,” he wrote. “Celeste’s limited expressive capabilities have been immersion-breaking for players, resulting in facial animations that fall short in communicating the stakes and stories we want to tell.”
The fix, he said, means more of the actor shows up on screen. “This means that more of Diana’s performance and identity comes through the screen,” he wrote, and Celeste “has come to more closely resemble Diana, and that means she’ll look a little different to what you’ve seen before.”
Then came the line most players picked up on: “Celeste and Diana are no longer hiding behind an imaginary face, they are now one and the same.”
Image: Embark Studios, Frozen Trail launch trailer
For a voice actor, that’s a big shift. Gardner’s job until now was to give a character her voice and let someone else decide what the character looked like. From Thursday the face on screen is hers too, captured in the same session as the lines.
The voice was always hers
Embark’s post is clear that Gardner isn’t new to the role. “Diana Gardner has been with us since the very beginning of ARC Raiders, voicing Celeste’s lines and breathing life into one of Speranza’s central characters,” Strandberg wrote, adding that inside the studio Celeste “is better known to us simply as Diana.”
Image: Embark Studios
Not everyone has read the old Celeste as a face problem, though. PCGamesN’s Sam Comrie wrote that “it’s not unfair to say the character’s personality is a little stilted, and that’s down to Embark’s use of text-to-speech software,” before noting that Gardner “has voiced Celeste from the beginning.”
Embark’s own post never mentions artificial intelligence or text-to-speech. It talks about faces, capture and “authentic performance.” But the history of the game makes it hard to read the announcement any other way.
A studio that has been walking back its synthetic lines
ARC Raiders launched in October 2025 to big player numbers and a steady complaint: some of its voice lines were made with text-to-speech. In a March interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Embark CEO Patrick Söderlund explained how the studio used it.
VoiceEditSuiteClean a session in ninety seconds, not three hours.“We pay our actors for all time spent with us in the booth and continue to bring many of them back as we carry on updating the game,” Söderlund said. “For select usage, we also pay them for the approval to license their voices through text-to-speech for lines that aren’t as essential to the immersion of the experience, mostly ping system audio.”
He also said the studio had already started reversing course. “We re-recorded some of the lines post-launch and made them with real voices,” he told the outlet. “There is a quality difference. A real professional actor is better than AI; that’s just how it is.”
Players had noticed before he said it. In February a player posting as JohnMoth asked on the game’s Steam forum whether Embark was “cutting back on the AI voice acting,” writing that “a majority of Celeste’s lines are seemingly replaced with real voice acting.” Celeste, in other words, was already the character fans were watching.
What it means for the people in the booth
Söderlund was careful in March not to promise an end to synthetic voices. He described AI as “first and foremost” a production tool, used to test lines before recording them. “It’s also a way for us to work, not replace actors,” he said. “We don’t necessarily believe in replacing humans with AI all the time.”
The Celeste change points in a clear direction anyway. A performer whose voice was once licensed for some lines is now the full basis of the character, face included. Strandberg wrote that the studio plans “to bring more characters in line with their real-world actors” in future updates, which would mean more capture sessions and more of the cast becoming the people players see.
That also raises the stakes for the actors. When a character is modelled on a performer’s own face, the role and the person become harder to separate, for better and worse. The post doesn’t say which characters are next, or whether every actor will be asked to lend a likeness as well as a voice.
For voice actors watching how game studios use synthetic voices, the takeaway is simple. A studio that leaned on text-to-speech at launch is now telling its players that the most important human in its hub town needed more of a real actor, not less.
When players will see her
The Frozen Trail update arrives on Thursday, October 8, and Embark is also running a free-to-play window from October 8 to 12, so plenty of new players will meet the new Celeste first.
Strandberg called it a start. “It’s a start, and we will continue to improve our technology over time, to keep you all more immersed,” he wrote. The rest of Speranza’s traders are still waiting for their turn.
Image: Embark Studios, Frozen Trail launch trailer
Players who raised the voice question on Steam can read the original thread on the game’s forum.
Sources: Stefan Strandberg, “Bringing Celeste to life,” ARC Raiders official site (October 4, 2026); Sam Comrie, PCGamesN (October 5, 2026); Alex Forbes-Calvin, GamesIndustry.biz (March 13, 2026); Engadget (March 15, 2026); ARC Raiders Steam community forum (February 2026). Images: Embark Studios, including stills from the official Frozen Trail launch trailer.
Lee este artículo en español: ARC Raiders le da a Celeste la cara de su actriz de voz. Embark dice que vienen más personajes
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