CD Projekt Used AI to Make Polish Geralt Sound Young Again, and for Once That’s Not the Scandal

CD Projekt Red has run Geralt’s Polish voice through an AI tool for The Witcher 3’s new expansion, Songs of the Past. Before you grab the pitchforks, the actor asked for it, recorded every line himself, and reckons it’s the right call.

Jacek Rozenek has voiced Geralt in Polish since the first game. A stroke in 2019 changed his voice, so CDPR hired AI voice company Respeecher to make his new lines sound like the Geralt he recorded more than a decade ago, according to an interview with Game File.

What CD Projekt actually did

• The actor: Rozenek recorded about 10,000 lines for The Witcher 3 in 2014, and voiced Geralt in Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine too, Game File reports.
• The stroke: it left him unable to speak for months in 2019. He told Game File he trained his voice six or seven hours a day to get back to acting.
• The problem: his voice is now “much lower, much gruffer”, localisation producer Mikołaj Szwed said. New lines would play right next to the 2014 ones, and the jump would be obvious.
• The fix: Rozenek recorded all of his new lines as normal. Respeecher then trained a model on his old Witcher 3 lines and reshaped the new ones to match.
• Consent: Rozenek signed off on it. “The point is that this voice should be as close as possible to my voice from 12 years ago,” he said, as quoted by VGC and PC Gamer.

Where CDPR draws the line

Szwed called it “a special case” and admitted AI is “a big concern” for voice actors around the world. CDPR says it was only on the table because of Rozenek’s health.

• English Geralt: Doug Cockle’s English lines haven’t been touched, and CDPR has no plans to change that, according to PC Gamer.
• Future games: Rozenek’s voice won’t be altered in any Witcher game set later in Geralt’s life, because there a changed voice makes sense, Szwed said.
• Not the first time: CDPR used Respeecher on Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty to recreate the Polish voice of Viktor Vektor after actor Miłogost Reczek died, with his family’s consent, VGC notes.
• The effort: Respeecher’s synthetic speech artist Dmytro Vasylets said it took “dozens of hours” and that AI artefacts “never fully disappear”, as quoted by PC Gamer.

When you can play it

Songs of the Past was revealed in May and is due in 2027, while The Witcher 4 is set for 2028, Game File reports. Steam still just says “coming soon” for the expansion, so there’s no NZ price yet.

Our take

This is about as clean as AI in games gets. It’s the same bloke, his own performance, his own old recordings, and he’s the one saying go for it.

The worry is what comes next. Every studio that wants to cut corners will now point at “the Witcher did it”, and most of them won’t have a stroke survivor, a signed consent form and a decade of the actor’s own lines behind them. It lands the same week Aussie studio House House copped heat for a sliver of AI code in Big Walk, so the line in the sand is getting very blurry.

More on the series lives on our Witcher 3 page, and you can catch up on this week’s Golden Joysticks winners. Fair use of AI or the thin end of the wedge? Come fight about it in the GetRekt Discord.

Sources

• Game File: For The Witcher 3’s 2027 expansion, CD Projekt is pairing Geralt of Rivia’s original Polish voice actor with AI
• VGC: The Witcher 3 expansion uses AI to adjust Geralt’s Polish voiceover because the actor suffered a stroke
• PC Gamer: CD Projekt used AI to modify the voice of Geralt’s Polish actor
• GamesRadar+: CD Projekt Red worked with an AI company on Geralt’s Polish voice
• Steam: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Songs of the Past
• The Witcher (YouTube): Songs of the Past Official Teaser Trailer