Ubisoft addresses Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown’s bizarre text-to-speech voiced NPC

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown publisher Ubisoft has explained why a minor NPC will be voiced by a text-to-speech program at launch.

Prince of Persia is back with a new game titled The Lost Crown. Reception to the revival, which releases on January 18, has been largely positive – Dexerto’s own review calls it “an absolute triumph, charting the future for this fallen franchise” – but that doesn’t mean it’s releasing without issue.

Some reviewing the game noticed something peculiar about one of The Lost Crown’s NPCs. Despite the game having full voice acting, the tree-spirit Kalux sounded suspiciously similar to a widely used text-to-speech program.

In response to questions from IGN, Ubisoft has confirmed the program was used but insists this was a mistake that will be fixed in a future update.

Ubisoft

Ubisoft explains Prince of Persia’s text-to-speech voice lines & promises future fix

After noticing the strange Kalux voice, IGN reached out to both SIDE UK, the studio that handled Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown’s voice acting, and Ubisoft itself.

SIDE confirmed that it did not use text-to-speech for the game but “did not have visibility of any other voice design plans, TTS or otherwise, Ubisoft had for the game.”

Ubisoft’s response confirmed that text-to-speech was used, but only as a placeholder. “The English version of these 8 lines of text for this character were not properly implemented,” they explained. The explanation makes sense, as placeholder assets are common in game development.

However, it’s not clear that any voice lines were actually recorded for Kalux. While the game credits all the voice actors who worked on the title, no one is listed as voicing the character.

On top of that, despite The Lost Crown having a day one patch planned, Ubisoft confirmed the Kalux fix wouldn’t be part of that, telling IGN to “expect late January or early February.”

Whether there was some issue implementing the lines or Ubisoft simply overlooked this exact minor NPC, it does seem like an honest mistake. Still, it comes at a time when the use of tech in gaming and voice acting, specifically AI, is under intense scrutiny.

Earlier this week, SAG-AFTRA announced a controversial deal with AI company Replica Studios regarding the use of AI-created voices in video games. Though the union called it “a fair, ethical agreement to safely create and license a digital replica of their voice,” the deal has been widely criticized by voice actors who say they were not consulted and did not approve as SAG-AFTRA claims.

While not the case for Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, it is worth noting that Ubisoft is among the first developers to confirm plans to use Nvidia Avatar Cloud Engine, an AI program for creating video game characters that was announced this week during CES.