There was a really heated debate that started yesterday when a new review of ARC Raiders rolled in, this one published by Eurogamer. It’s a two-star review out of five, which equates to a 40/100 on Metacritic, making it the game’s lowest score by far. So low, it docked ARC’s Metascore a few points by itself, and cost it a few of its recent records, by the looks of it.
I have always taken issue with Eurogamer’s “they know what they’re doing” five-star review system where a “good” 3/5 is a 60/100 on Metacritic, where if a big game lands a 60, those are studio shutdown numbers. But the issue at heart here is why Eurogamer scored ARC Raiders this low, and it’s almost entirely because of its use of generative AI in its voicework.
The review of the actual game is almost entirely positive, from its mechanics to its social experience. But it ends with nine full paragraphs about the game’s use of generative AI in voicework. It’s a unique situation because it appears some VOs signed over their voice rights to be used in this fashion, mixed and matched with genAI for lines in the game. The counter-argument to this type of “ethical AI” is that other VOs may lose jobs if they don’t want their voices thrown into AI like these other actors.
Using this aspect of ARC Raiders as a cudgel to smash its review score to bits is…a choice. While some anti-AI folks are celebrating this, others are admitting that perhaps this was not really the place to go on a full-on rant about the practice, something best saved for its own article, or series of articles. Throwing it into a review and letting it dictate the score almost entirely seems misguided.
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I am firmly anti-genAI these days (as genAI has eaten every word I’ve ever written and spits it out again in Google summaries), but even I’m a bit “ehhhh” about this. I think something like this does more harm than good to “the movement,” as it were. While I am not amused with the “this is why game journalists are trash” refrain now (obviously 95% of other game journalists gave it very high scores), the larger issue is that now anti-AI people are being torched because of this “protest vote.” This may draw attention to the use of AI in games, but the reaction is not exactly “hm yes, I hadn’t considered this,” among pro-AI users. It’s just an inferno out there of people lambasting how stupid they think this was, for the most part.
Eurogamer certainly has the right to do whatever they want, score a game however they want, and no one should take into account raising or lowering a Metacritic score when reviewing a game. But to me, this seems similar to something like a game critic flipping a review of a good game from positive to negative because the studio used crunch to finish it behind the scenes. Is that a real issue? Yes! Will writing a review dictated by that be useful or good or helpful to the cause you’re trying to support? I would argue no, not particularly.
And (sigh), it sure doesn’t help the same writer gave Concord a 3/5 either.
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