Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown Will Have a Character Voiced by Text-to-Speech at Launch

11.01.2024 - 18:27 / ign.com / Will

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown launches next week. While we really dug the game (you can check out our review for more on that), there's one odd detail that stuck out we can't help but give its own article: one of the game's minor NPCs will be voiced by a text-to-speech program at launch, seemingly because someone — probably Ubisoft — forgot to record and add a human being's voice for the role.

While in discussions with fellow early reviewers during the review period for The Lost Crown, it was pointed out to us that the voice of a tree spirit character, Kalux, sounded remarkably like either an AI or text-to-speech (TTS) program. Specifically, a TTS program that's available online for free for use by streamers. You can compare some of the lines we recorded (embedded below) to those same lines processed through the TTS program right here.

Notably, the character in question does not seem to be credited with a voice actor in the game's credits, despite — as far as IGN can tell — every other voiced character appearing there with a named human credit. None of the other characters in the game sound like AI or TTS programs, including multiple other tree spirits like Kalux. All in all, it's a weird situation; Kalux only has a handful of lines, and some of Prince of Persia's actors voice multiple characters, so it seems that it would have been easy enough to cast a voice actor to do these as well.

IGN reached out to production studio Side UK, which is credited as having handled the game's voicework, for comment, and received the following:

So SIDE UK didn't put the TTS in, which leaves Ubisoft the culprit. Ubisoft in fact confirmed it was their doing, but the explanation the developer gave is a bit bizarre:

Ubisoft is correct to point out that placeholder assets are common in development, and early builds will often use TTS programs, AI voices, or even just have random developers around the office record lines so they have something to work with until scripts are finalized and professional actors can be brought in and paid to record the dialogue. While it's a silly but understandably mistake if someone just forgot to stick the human-recorded dialogue into the game, the whole scenario gets weirder when you look at the credits and notice that Kalux doesn't have an English voice listed at all, despite apparently having cast and credited humans for all other voiced languages.

Additionally, while the game has a day one patch noted in a guide sent out to reviewers, Kalux's voice won't be fixed in that - Ubisoft told us to expect late January or early February. Ubisoft did not provide an answer when we asked why Kalux wasn't listed in the credits. And we followed up with SIDE UK to ask if the company recorded any English