Ubisoft to fix Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown character's text-to-speech dialogue in future patch

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.

Kalux doesn't have an English voice actor mentioned in the credits. Additionally, as IGN notes, The Lost Crown's day one patch (which has been shared with press ahead of the game's public release) does not include a fix for Kalux's lines. This could imply Ubisoft is now in the process of sourcing a voice actor to record the lines, so human dialogue can be added. It has suggested we will see a fix either late January or early next month.

But, this small slip aside, reception to Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown as a whole has been positive. Digital Foundry took a look at the upcoming release and called it a "supremely polished, ultra smooth game that perfectly leverages every platform it has shipped on." Eurogamer's review is in the works - keep an eye out for that shortly.

If you are keen to give the game a whirl for yourself ahead of its full release on 15th January, there is a free demo available now across all release platforms: Xbox consoles, PlayStation consoles, Nintendo Switch, and PC (Epic, Ubisoft).