I've been spending a lot of time with NetEase's Destiny: Rising, a licensed non-canon Destiny prequel that's currently in closed alpha for mobile. Despite a lot 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 a lot of liberties with the lore.
Its efficient integration is something Destiny 2 desperately needs, and it has a lot of great quality-of-life features that are missing from the main game, such as the ping system and clan hall. Unfortunately, there's also a lot to criticize, such as its crude monetization, which trades the familiar loot hunt for a never-ending pile of ever-growing mystery currencies. But worse than that, if you can believe it, is the use of an AI voice.
There is no place for AI Voice Acting in Destiny: Rising…
When you first hear it, it's incredibly jarring. After a few brief encounters with characters with AI that I found unpleasant, I finally met Ikora, a classic Destiny character, and was subjected to truly abysmal AI “performance” that made me want to install it immediately and never look back. Worst of all, the AI dialogue is mixed with actual human VO. Ikora starts talking like a normal human and then after a few lines switches to a lifeless robot drone making sounds that mimic human speech.
It is clear that this is temporary. Just as the Early Access and Alpha games will feature temporary assets such as icons and character models, Rising uses AI-generated temporary VOs for all lines that have been written but not yet recorded by actors. If you have subtitles turned on, all spoken AI dialogue is also marked as AI. It is assumed that by the time Rising reaches its full launch, AI will not be introduced at all. But I don't care if it's just the temperature. It shouldn't be in the game at all.
This is exactly how this nasty anti-people and anti-worker technology is creeping in. At first it's only used as a temporary audio and everyone understands that it will be replaced by real VO, so no one complains. But now we have an example of a big IP with a triple-A budget using AI voiceover. It's slowly getting back to normal. Maybe NetEase realizes that people aren't that it bothers and keeps 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 nothing new, it's all part of a long-term plan to desensitize viewers to something evil.
…or any other video game
Exposure leads to adoption. People can create memes about some of the funnier AI vans in Alpha, or worse, claim to prefer a character's AI voice over their real one. Each instance of artificial intelligence is slowly chipped away until it eventually becomes completely normalized. We cannot allow any AI in our games, not even in closed Alpha, because every instance of AI leads to more AI.
It's a confusing thing to 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 have been much better to have no dialogue at all and show us the credits instead. It would still alert us to the fact that this is a work in progress, but so does the AI. At least the credits don't insult the actors in your game by supplementing their work with a thing that threatens to replace them.
Since NetEase didn't have to use AI for this Alpha, it's hard not to feel like it's part of a concerted effort to expose players to this sort of thing whenever possible to normalize it, and I refuse to allow that. It's disrespectful to the cast, its players, and the industry as a whole. There is no AI voice acting, not even in the closed Alpha.
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