I’ve put a lot of time into NetEase’s Destiny: Rising, a licensed, non-canon prequel to Destiny currently in closed Alpha on mobile. Despite having an abundance of the usual mobile game trappings, I actually have positive things to say about it.
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Destiny: Rising Is Good Fun And Bad Fan Fiction
Destiny: Rising is a non-canon prequel that takes plenty of liberties with the lore.
Its streamlined onboarding is something that Destiny 2 desperately needs, and it has a lot of great quality-of-life features missing from the main game, like a ping system and clan hall. Unfortunately there’s also a lot to critique, like its gross monetization, which trades the familiar loot chase for a never ending pile of ever-increasing arcane currencies. But worse than that, if you can believe it, is its use of AI voice-over.
There Is No Place For AI Voice Acting In Destiny: Rising…
It’s incredibly jarring the first time you hear it. After a couple of brief encounters with AI-voiced characters that felt off, I eventually met Ikora, a classic Destiny character, and was subjected to a truly abysmal AI ‘performance’, and it made me want to instantly install and never look back. Worst of all, the AI dialogue is mixed in with actual human VO. Ikora will start out talking like a normal person, and then after a few lines, swap to the lifeless drone of a robot making sounds that mimic human speech.
It’s clearly meant to be temporary. Just as early-access games and Alphas will feature temp assets like icons and character models, Rising uses temp AI-generated VO for all the lines that were written but not yet recorded by actors. If you have the subtitles on, all of the spoken AI dialogue is labeled AI too. It’s implied that by the time Rising reaches its full launch, there won’t be an AI featured at all. But I don’t care if it’s only temp. It shouldn’t be in the game at all.
This is exactly how this nefarious anti-human, anti-worker technology sneaks its way in. At first it’s just used as temp audio, and everyone understands that it’s going to get replaced with real VO so no one complains. But now we have an example of big IP with a triple-A budget using AI voice-over. It slowly starts to get normalized. Maybe NetEase realizes people aren’t that bothered by it and leaves some of it in, or maybe another game sees that NetEase got away with it, so they take it a step further and include a fully AI character as a novelty.
But it’s not a novelty, it’s all part of a long-term plan to desensitize audiences to something evil.
…Or Any Other Video Game For That Matter
Exposure leads to acceptance. People might make memes about some of the funnier AI deliveries in the Alpha, or even worse, claim they prefer a character’s AI voice to their real one. Every instance of AI slowly chips away at our resolve until, eventually, it’s completely normalized. We can’t allow any AI into our games, even in closed Alpha, because every instance of AI just leads to more AI.
It’s a baffling thing to even include in this test because it makes the experience so much worse. Hearing Ikor, Bazinet, and other characters oscillate back and forth between real VO and AI is jarring and distracting. It would be so much better not to have any dialogue at all and just show us the subtitles instead. It would still draw our attention to the fact that this is a work in progress, but so does the AI. At least with subtitles, you’re not insulting the actors in your game by supplementing their work with the thing that’s threatening to replace them.
Considering NetEase didn’t need to use AI for this Alpha, it’s hard to not feel like this is part of a coordinated effort to expose players to this kind of thing whenever possible in order to normalize it, and I refuse to let that happen. It’s disrespectful to the game’s cast, its players, and the entire industry. There’s no defending AI voice-over, even in a closed Alpha.
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