Embark Studios is giving one of Arc Raiders‘ best-known characters a new face, and it belongs to the actor who plays her. In a post on the Arc Raiders site, chief creative officer Stefan Strandberg said the Frozen Trail trailer arriving on October 6 is the first time the studio has used full motion capture, including more detailed and accurate facial capture, for Celeste.
Celeste is the unofficial leader of Speranza, the underground settlement where players trade and regroup between runs. She has been voiced by Diana Gardner since the start of the project, but Embark admits the character never fully reflected that performance.
“Celeste’s limited expressive capabilities have been immersion-breaking for players, resulting in facial animations that fall short in communicating the stakes and stories we want to tell,” Strandberg wrote. With the new capture work, “Celeste and Diana are no longer hiding behind an imaginary face, they are now one and the same.”
That means Celeste will look different from what players are used to. The change is not limited to cinematics. Embark says that when the Frozen Trail update drops, Celeste in the game will also look more like Gardner, “her real voice and face matching up for the first time.” Frozen Trail arrives on Thursday, October 8, the same day Arc Raiders opens a free weekend that runs through October 12.
Embark plans to go further. “In future updates, we plan to bring more characters in line with their real-world actors,” Strandberg wrote, describing the goal as “finding more ways to integrate real human performances into every interaction.”
The update is landing at a moment when players are paying close attention to how studios use AI. PCGamesN tied Celeste’s stiff delivery to Embark’s use of text-to-speech technology and framed the change as a move toward real performances, while Embark’s own post focuses on facial animation and capture quality.
If you have been waiting to try the game, the timing works out: read RCG’s guide to the Arc Raiders free weekend, October 8 through 12.
