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.

what a... weird thing to have happen. i'm not sure what the utility of it would be for one minor NPC but this being an accident honestly strains charitability, i think

I can believe it being an accident. The character only has 8 lines of dialogue and it seems (if I am reading right) it's just the English dub that has this problem? He's voiced normally in the 4 other fully dubbed languages. It's truly a bizarre thing to have happened though

Lots of companies "accidentally" including artificially generated works in their games/books/ads lately.

They probably pre-write the apologies.

I'm reminded of old video games where they had the developers help out with the voice acting. Like, couldn't you do this here? Just have someone who happens to have a high quality microphone do the lines? Maybe even pay a starving artist on one of those "voice acting for hire" sites?

I get that deadlines are usually way too tight on games, but this is just poor quality control. I guess that is the AAA games industry noways though.

Character so inconsequential, they forgot to hire a VA and record the lines.

I feel like if this was truly an accident because the character was overlooked, then wouldn't they just not have any voice at all? Even copy/pasting dialogue into some (free, according to the article) software and then inserting it into the game takes some effort.