Fortnite players can channel their inner dark side as James Earl Jones‘ Darth Vader returns to the game.
Players will be able to recruit the Sith Lord and be able to talk to him, he will respond with the help of AI. Epic Games and Disney have brought Jones back with the permission of his family.
According to a release, the family said, “James Earl felt that the voice of Darth Vader was inseparable from the story of Star Wars, and he always wanted fans of all ages to continue to experience it. We hope that this collaboration with Fortnite will allow both longtime fans of Darth Vader and newer generations to share in the enjoyment of this iconic character.”
Jones, who died in 2024, had previously announced he was stepping away from the role. But before he died, he signed off on archival voice recordings being used by young filmmakers, who plan to utilize artificial intelligence synthetic speech technology to recreate Jones’ younger voice from his previous films for future Lucasfilm projects.
The company recurited the assistance of Respeecher, a Ukrainian startup that uses AI technology to craft new conversations from revitalized old voice recordings. Respeecher’s relationship with Lucasfilm began with the Disney+ series “The Book of Boba Fett,” for which they recreated the voice of young Luke Skywalker. The two also teamed for the voice performance of Darth Vader on the series “Obi-Wan Kenobi.”
In the game, Darth Vader will be a boss in battle royale. “Ask him all your pressing questions about the Force, the Galactic Empire… or you know, a good strat for the last Storm circle,” reads the official post on Fortnite’s site. “The Sith Lord has opinions.” It continued, “Darth Vader wouldn’t be nearly as sinister without the legendary performance of James Earl Jones, who voiced Vader in the ‘Star Wars’ films.”
However, the addition of Darth Vader has not come without glitches. Gamers have already created amusing video content with one gamer and Twitch streamer making the Dark Lord swear. A gamer called Loserthug has him saying “Fuck.”
Epic Games was swift to respond and said they have “pushed a hotfix immediately and this shouldn’t happen again.” “In addition, the company has added in safeguards and protections including Gemini’s configurable safety settings, and on top of that our team built system instructions to prevent the conversational AI model from generating responses that violate Community Rules or could be potentially harmful to players.”. Players under the age of 13 will need parental consent to turn the feature on. If players are attempting to get Darth Vader to violate settings and instructions, he will eventually leave the squad, and the player will be unable to recruit him again in that gameplay session. And If a player believes Darth Vader in Fortnite responded in a way he shouldn’t, they can submit a bug report to Epic’s team for review.
