Aerial Open-World Game Flopped on Steam for Its Use of AI Voices. Devs Explain Controversial Decision
The recently released game The Brew Barons from Lifetap Studio uses AI-generated voices. This didn't please several players, which they boldly pointed out to the developers. These, in turn, presented their point of view.
The devs of the arcade aviation game The Brew Barons, which was released on Steam on Friday, received many negative reviews from Valve platform users for using voices generated by artificial intelligence in the game. However, the developers provide specific arguments that stood behind this decision.
One player noticed the presence of AI voices in the game. He noted that artificial intelligence was detailed in the end credits. A few other users didn't like this, which they didn't fail to mention in their reviews.
First things first, its got that AI stank, voices obviously but I'm also pretty sure the dialogue and character portraits too, just very stiff and unnatural. Lol I'd rather have bad/no voice acting and writing than this - we read in one of the negative reviews.
However, there is also no shortage of players who defend the devs of The Brew Barons. Some people directly suggest that we shouldn't pay attention to people railing against the generated voices.
Oy!, don't listen to the fools who are complaining MAINLY about the AI voices and the UI while completely forgetting about the fact this is a game made by TWO people, not everyone's got the thousands of dollary does required to hire voice actors!
The Lifetap studio responsible for the title also commented on the whole situation. In a brief statement, the developers provided what influenced the implementation of voices generated by AI.
We can understand if not everyone is happy about the presence of AI voice actors. [...] I should note there was a need for voiced lines because unvoiced text was hard to read at times whilst flying around, particularly in combat. We also had non-native English speakers being exhausted from the text overload, the voices help alleviate that. Last, our budget was tiny for this project which can be found by looking up our kickstarter. Thus we had to find cost effective methods using AI voices.
Putting aside the controversy with AI voices, the game itself seems really interesting. In The Brew Barons we play the role of a pilot who has his own seaplane. With that machine, we can compete in the open world against pirates for dominance in the brewing market. It's worth adding that the game's developers were inspired by the film Porco Rosso, created by Studio Ghibli.
Despite negative reviews for the use of AI voices, the game has quite a few favorable reviews. According to SteamDB, 157 of them have been posted so far, of which 75% are positive. Let's remember that the title can only be played on PC.
