CD Projekt Red has revealed that it used – and is using – generative AI technology to treat and alter the voice of the Polish actor who portrayed Geralt of Rivia in upcoming Witcher 3 expansion Songs of the Past.
The actor, Jacek Rozenek, has portrayed Geralt of Rivia in all the major Witcher games, meaning his voice has become as synonymous with the role in Poland as Doug Cockle’s has for people playing in English. But Rozenek suffered a severe stroke in 2019 that left him temporarily unable to speak, and when he was able to talk and perform again, the tonality and quality of his voice had changed.
It’s for these reasons that CD Projekt Red – with Rozenek’s consent – employed the help of a company called Respeecher to alter the lines he recorded for The Witcher 3‘s Songs of the Past expansion using generative-AI technology. As confirmed to Game File, an AI trained on Rozenek’s previous Witcher work is retreating his recordings to make them sound more like the Geralt you hear elsewhere in The Witcher 3.
“The point is that this voice should be as close as possible to my voice from 12 years ago,” Jacek Rozenek explained. “I have great trust … for the creators of this game.”
Game File heard both treated and untreated recordings of Rozenek’s Songs of the Past work, and reported a “significant” difference between them. Rozenek’s untreated voice was apparently “deep and gravelly” and “noticeably rougher than his recordings for the original game”. But treated, the voice was “far smoother and sounds younger”, and closer to the original Witcher 3 Geralt recordings.
This isn’t the first time CD Projekt Red has used generative AI for voice recordings in one of its games. The studio worked with Respeecher in 2023 to produce new voiceover lines for Cyberpunk 2077
“I do think this is one of those ways where you can use AI ethically with consent and also to do something good,” CD Projekt Red localisation producer Mikołaj Szwed told Game File, referring to the Rozenek recordings.
“For future projects, when we consider Geralt is becoming older and has a deeper voice, this is not a problem for us at all. It’s more about this specific situation here, where we have both the voice from 12 years ago and from now next to each other, which could kind of take people out of the experience and feel that there is this difference.”
The third Witcher 3 expansion, Songs of the Past, releases at some point next year, an unprecedented 12 years after the original game launched. It adds an entirely new region, Letten, and centres its main story around Geralt’s missing bardic bestie Dandelion, whose family lives there.
In preparation for the expansion, a remastered version of The Witcher 3 was released a couple of months ago, overhauling the old role-playing adventure and bringing its baseline presentation more in line with what we’d expect from a modern game; it also overhauled some animations and enemy behaviours and reworked skill trees. For that reason, old-gen consoles PS4 and Xbox One won’t receive the Songs of the Past expansion, despite The Witcher 3 being available on them.