CD Projekt 为《巫师3》2027年扩展包使用 AI 修复波兰语配音

About a year ago, the developers at CD Projekt Red invited the voice actor Jacek Rozenek to their studio. They were quite familiar with Rozenek, as are many fans of the team’s most famous video game series.

Rozenek had played Geralt of Rivia, the hero of CDPR’s Witcher games, since the series’ inception.

He’d portrayed Geralt in the studio’s native Polish, winning praise for an effective performance that rivaled that of Doug Cockle, the celebrated voice of Geralt in English.

In 2014, Rozenek had recorded some 10,000 lines for The Witcher 3, the beloved fantasy role-playing game that would sell more than 65 million copies. Rozenek continued the role in two expanded adventures for Geralt, 2015’s Witcher 3 expansion Hearts of Stone and 2016’s Blood and Wine.

But in 2019, Rozenek suffered a stroke. For months, he was unable to speak, let alone do the work he was best known for.

In 2021, as he rehabilitated and as his speech returned, Rozenek briefly returned to the role of Geralt. He recorded lines for a quest added to a “next-gen” update to The Witcher 3 that would release in 2022.

Adding those few lines was tough. “I was so exhausted after this recording,” Rozenek told me, speaking in Polish during an interview last week (I had his remarks translated).

Recovery was challenging. He would train his voice for six or seven hours a day to get it back into a condition where he could act. When we spoke last week, Rozenek quipped that the recovery helped him relate to the hard quests that Geralt himself goes on. “Now I can understand what the Witcher's work actually is,” he said.

Eventually, Rozenek returned to acting.

Years after that next-gen update, CD Projekt made an audacious decision.

They would expand The Witcher 3 again, more than a decade after the game had launched. This new expansion, Songs of the Past, would add to Geralt’s adventures with a story occurring around the same time. The expansion was announced publicly in May, to the surprise of fans. CDPR also confirmed it is developing a brand-new Witcher game, the fourth mainline entry, set for release in 2028.

That meeting between Rozenek and CDPR developers a year ago was crucial for the creation of Songs of the Past.

The studio wanted Rozenek back. They wanted him to still be Geralt of Rivia.

But they were concerned about whether it was possible, given the plans for the expansion and what would be needed for Geralt’s voice.

Songs of the Past would be attached to the main Witcher 3 game, which features Geralt speaking the thousands of lines Rozenek recorded a decade ago. The expansion would still feature Geralt from the same era, with new dialogue that needed to be recorded for the new adventure. The expansion would also include new lines—”reactions, battle cries, one-liners” and more, CD Projekt’s localization director Mikołaj Szwed told me—that would even play during the portions of the game set in pre-existing Witcher 3 areas.

In other words, any newly recorded lines for Geralt would play in close proximity to the old ones.

“We invited Jacek to our studios to kind of see how his voice sounds now,” CDPR’s Szwed told me. “It was important for us to see how much the voice of Jacek had changed, because of both the time and also because of his condition.”

At that meeting, Szwed noticed that as much as Rozenek had recovered his voice was different.

It was lower, gruffer. Later, I would hear that difference for myself.

The developers at CDPR feared it would be jarring for Witcher 3 players to hear Geralt’s voice, in Polish, switching dramatically from the Rozenek of old in one scene to the Rozenek of now, from moment to moment.

The meeting confirmed that new lines recorded with Rozenek could result in a mismatch.

That’s when the studio decided, with the actor’s blessing, to call an AI company with whom they’d worked once before.

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