Ubisoft will fix a small amount of text-to-speech generated dialogue in Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown as part of a future update.
The upcoming 2.5D Metroidvania game features the regular human-voiced cast you’d expect, bar one character: a tree spirit named Kalux. Kalux only has a small handful of lines throughout the game, but these have been left with work-in-progress generated dialogue.
Ubisoft has said it plans to add human-recorded dialogue at a later date.
In a statement to IGN, Ubisoft explained its oversight as thus: “During the development process of a game, some teams use multiple placeholder assets, including text to speech voiceover, until final dubbing is delivered. The English version of these eight lines of text for this character were not properly implemented but will be swapped out and updated with an upcoming patch.
“Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is fully voice-overed in English, French, Spanish, German and Farsi with more than 12,000 lines in total. It is also subtitled in Italian, Portuguese-Brazilian, Chinese, Korean, Russian, Arabic, Polish and Japanese.”
As Digital Foundry’s John Linneman notes, using placeholder assets ahead of recording final in-game dialogue is common practice for projects during development. But what makes this story more unusual is that Ubisoft didn’t just forget to switch out the placeholder lines with the final version, it seems to have forgotten to actually cast the role at all.