Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown launches next week. While we really dug the game, there's one odd detail that stuck out: one of the game's minor NPCs will be voiced by a text-to-speech program at launch, seemingly because someone forgot to record and add a human being's voice for the role.
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.
The article says that often during development they’ll put in simple text to speech stuff for characters as a placeholder. I’d imagine to make sure certain audio hooks work and sound isnt broken
A bad voice probably also just feels much better and complete than having no voice at all. At least based on the observations I’ve made when adding sound effects to my games as a hobbyist. A silent game just feels bad.