Bungie sets Marathon apart from Arc Raiders' AI-infused voices with a stacked cast of actors including Baldur's Gate 3 and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 talent

Bungie has unveiled a massive cast list for its upcoming shooter Marathon, featuring the likes of Baldur's Gate 3, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and Hades 2 actors.

Alongside confirming the March release date, Bungie confirmed that Marathon will feature the voices of a very short cast list including, ahem, "Krizia Bajos, Samantha Béart, Beau Bridgland, Ry Chase, Roger Clark, Darin De Paul, Jennifer English, Dave Fennoy, Nika Futterman, Morla Gorrondona, Reina Guthrie, Donnla Hughes, Keston John, Sohm Kapila, Rich Keeble, Elliot Knight, Erica Lindbeck, Piotr Michael, Brent Mukai, Neil Newbon, Ariana Nicole George, Emily O'Brien, Lee Shorten, Jason Spisak, Ben Starr, JB Tadena, Fred Tatasciore, Craig Lee Thomas, Elias Toufexis, Oliver Vaquer, Scott Whyte, Tracy Wiles, Erin Yvette."

So yeah, basically every single voice actor ever at this rate. Baldur's Gate 3 is well represented with Newbon, Béart, English, and Wiles, with the latter two also representing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 alongside Starr and Keeble. And, of course, there's a nice helping of industry legends like Fennoy, Clark, O'Brien, Lindbeck , Tatasciore, and Yvette for good measure.

Given it's a multiplayer game, obviously the voice acting isn't going to be as in-depth as some of these actors' other roles, but as far as I'm concerned it's already given Marathon a leg up over Arc Raiders for seemingly caring more about its voice acting instead of letting AI do a significant portion of the work. Embark uses "a combination of recordings of real actors" and text-to-speech (used for player pings, for example), with the former trained on those actors, but studio co-founder Stefan Strandberg previously said "there's no end goal in replacing any actors." Even so, the usage in Arc Raiders has been very controversial.

Of course, with the art plagiarism issue last year, I'm prepared to eat crow if AI use does somehow make it into the game, but as of right now, this stacked cast is a win for Bungie in my eyes.

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