The Blood of Dawnwalker's lead actor reminds us why AI will always struggle to replicate a human performance

Will de Renzy-Martin, the actor who plays lead character Coen in the English language version of The Blood of Dawnwalker, has reminded us of the value humans bring to a performance, versus AIs generating voice lines.

Speaking in a TikTok teaser for an upcoming episode of the My Perfect Console Podcast, de Renzy-Martin highlighted how the spoken lines themselves are only half - if that - of what an actor brings. "I think the least interesting thing about what I do is the way my voice sounds," de Renzy-Martin said. "That is really all that generative AI is able to replicate.

Watch on YouTube

"It's not replicating my personality and the things that I do when I'm in the room, and the choices that I make, which is all the reasons that a director or a producer would want to work with me. And there might be directors and producers who don't want to do those things [and to use AI], but then they've got to get really good at getting performances out of something - they need to have their own ideas."

The discussion reminded de Renzy-Martin of something he apparently said four or five years ago: "Actors are pretty cheap in the grand scheme of things. And if you end up with an AI that can produce the right noises, you're going to need somebody who can interact with it and get the performance that you want attached to those noises - and they're going to be much more expensive than an actor is."

The Blood of Dawnwalker project itself caused some controversy when developer Rebel Wolves revealed it had used text-to-speech AI tools while making the game in order to plan cinematics, before hiring actors to become the characters and perform the roles. Game director Konrad Tomazkiewicz has talked quite openly about potential AI use in game development as well, mostly referring to helping with laborious work such as bug fixing. Nothing in The Blood of Dawnwalker was created with AI.

Other gaming companies have taken AI's use further, such as Embark Studios, creator of The Finals and Arc Raiders, which controversially used AI to generate voice lines in both of those games.

Elsewhere, companies like Elevenlabs have established large businesses around licensing the voices of famous actors and then generating lines based upon those samples. Actor Matthew McConaughey is an investor in Elevenlabs - he who is set to appear in his first video game next year: Exodus, the Mass Effect-like sci-fi RPG. McConaughey's voice lines for Exodus have not been AI-generated, though.

Will de Renzy-Martin has appeared in a number of video games this year, including The Sinking City 2 (as Corentin de Grandemange), 007 First Light (Henry Bancroft), and Star Wars: Galactic Racer (Shade). However, it's his starring role as Coen he'll be best known for. And it's a very accomplished performance; his calm, velvety voice makes Coen a very easy and enjoyable character to be around, which is perfect for someone you spend so much time with in the game.

I awarded The Blood of Dawnwalker four stars in my Eurogamer review. "CD Projekt Red alumni create a familiar dark fantasy adventure, but one with bold and provocative ideas of its own, that's mostly, enormously successful," I wrote.