Riot Games have received huge backlash from both the Wild Rift and League of Legends community for their lazy and cheap work after hiring a voice over artist off Fiverr.
Just a few weeks ago, the official Wild Rift Twitter/X account revealed the upcoming addition to the cast. None other than the iconic bot lane champion, Sivir, is going to be added to the mobile League of Legends game, but the reveal didn't go as smoothly as planned.
First, Riot was accused of using AI for the introductory voice over, then it turned out that it was actually a human, but the billion-dollar company didn't even bother to give the poor guy proper instructions, leading to well... this whole mess.
Riot Games Did Not Give Any Instructions To Voice Actor
Victory never comes cheap. And neither does this Shuriman! Get your money's worth and watch Sivir's quick tutorial below pic.twitter.com/LqPgeMLRoa
— League of Legends: Wild Rift (@wildrift) November 25, 2023
Sivir is one of the most iconic champions in League of Legends. Having been released in 2009, she's one of the OG champions on the rift and she is finally going to be making her way to Wild Rift as well, but when the initial video came out, fans were confused because her name was completely butchered.
Instead of 'Sivir' as we know her name to be pronounced, the voice-over called here 'Severe'... and yes this went live on the official Riot Games channels for Wild Rift, as though no one had bothered to listen to the voice-over before slapping it on top of the video.
Because of this huge issue with the pronunciation there were rumors stating that this was an AI voice over, but the VO-artist soon spoke out, stating that he had been hired by the company to do the VO, without having seen the video and without knowing anything about League of Legends or Wild Rift.
YouTuber and content creator Ryscu did some searching and realized that this was a voice-over artist from Fiverr that Riot had hired to do the voice-over. So, overall it probably wasn't his fault, but rather the fault of the editors who had to listen to the given VO and put it over the video.
Hey everyone, a few days ago we released a Sivir tutorial video to showcase to our players. In the video, we did not give proper direction to our Voice Actor, leading to the mispronunciation of Sivir's name. This is on us and we will make sure things like this don't slip through... https://t.co/YYU9KtMQDM
— League of Legends: Wild Rift (@wildrift) December 1, 2023
This video probably went through multiple people before going live... did they think no one would notice that her name was pronounced... Severe instead of Sivir?
Well, the official Wild Rift account took down the original tweet with the introductory video after the backlash, only to re-upload the exact same video. Now, on December 1, 2023 Riot did finally apologize, stating that they were at fault for not giving proper direction to the VO artist and that they will make sure something like this won't happen again in the future.