Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown character was voiced by text-to-speech program, to be fixed after launch
Prince of PersiAI
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is scheduled to hit the Switch a week from today. This side scrolling Metroidvania style game is the first big one the series has had in a while, but apparently there will be something strange going on with one of its voices at launch.
While covering the game, several reviewers noticed that a character called Kalux sounds remarkably similar to an AI text-to-speech program that’s popular with content creators online. (Click here to listen to what that voice sounds like.) Sure enough, Kalux is the only character in the game who does not have a voice actor listed in the end credits.
IGN reached out to Ubisoft to try to get an explanation, and they confirmed that this was an error, along with the following statement:
During the development process of a game, some teams use multiple placeholder assets, including text to speech voiceover, until final dubbing is delivered. The English version of these 8 lines of text for this character were not properly implemented but will be swapped out and updated with an upcoming patch. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is fully voice-overed in English, French, Spanish, German and Farsi with more than 12,000 lines in total. It is also subtitled in Italian, Portuguese-Brazilian, Chinese, Korean, Russian, Arabic, Polish and Japanese.
According to Ubisoft, the voiceover will be removed and replaced with a human being via a patch released sometime in Late January or February 2024. If you’re purchasing the game at launch, you’ll just have to put up with an AI voice for Kalux for a few weeks. It’s certainly a strange oversight, but at least it seems like an honest mistake, and not Ubisoft attempting to replace voice actors with AI.
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