'This Was a Special Case': After a Stroke, Geralt's Original Polish Actor Recorded 100% of The Witcher 3: Songs of the Past Before AI Restored His 2015 Voice
In May 2019, Jacek Rozenek, the legendary Polish voice actor behind Geralt of Rivia since the very first entry in the series, suffered a severe stroke that temporarily left him unable to speak. Seven years later, as CD Projekt RED and co-developer Fool's Theory prepare to launch the surprise 2027 story expansion The Witcher 3: Songs of the Past, the 57-year-old actor stepped back into the recording booth to perform every single one of his character's new lines himself. To bridge the vocal changes caused by his stroke and blend his contemporary performance seamlessly with his 2015 dialogue, the studio paired his live studio recordings with a custom acoustic model built by Ukrainian audio specialist Respeecher.
A 100% Human Studio Performance Following Years of Vocal Rehabilitation
For Polish players, Jacek Rozenek's dry, gravelly delivery is just as inseparable from the White Wolf as Doug Cockle's voice is for English-speaking audiences. After his 2019 stroke, Rozenek underwent hours of intensive daily speech and physical therapy to regain his voice. He first returned to the booth in 2022 to record a handful of additional lines for the Next-Gen update of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, a physically grueling session that left him completely exhausted afterward.
When production began on The Witcher 3: Songs of the Past across PC and consoles, building on the studio's recent push to make the RPG more welcoming through the Bard's Ballad accessibility preset in The Witcher 3 Remastered, CD Projekt RED was determined to bring Rozenek back. The actor recorded 100% of Geralt's new dialogue for the 2027 expansion, which is headed to PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 2.
However, the audio team quickly encountered a major continuity challenge during testing. According to Mikołaj Szwed, localization producer at CD Projekt RED, Rozenek's raw studio recordings were noticeably lower and gruffer than his original 2014 sessions due to the lasting effects of his stroke and the twelve years that had passed. Because Songs of the Past takes Geralt to the idyllic, folkloric region of Letten (the birthplace of Dandelion the bard) and integrates directly alongside thousands of lines from the 2015 base game, hearing Geralt's voice shift abruptly from sentence to sentence would have been jarring for players.
How Respeecher Restored His 2014 Timbre Without Replacing the Actor's Craft
Rather than recasting the iconic role or leaving a stark audio mismatch, CD Projekt RED partnered with Respeecher with Rozenek's explicit written consent and full support. The two companies had previously worked together on Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty to recreate the voice of late Polish actor Miłogost Reczek (who played ripperdoc Viktor Vektor before passing away in 2021) with his family's blessing. For Songs of the Past, however, the technology is used strictly as a speech-to-speech timbre filter over the living actor's own performance.
Rozenek physically acted and recorded every line in the booth, providing all the pacing, breathing, emotional nuance, and dramatic intent. CD Projekt RED then supplied Respeecher with the complete archive of Rozenek's original 2014 recordings from The Witcher 3 so the team could train a dedicated voice algorithm. As Respeecher synthetic speech artist Dmytry Vasylets explained, the goal was simply to make Jacek's voice sound alive, rich, and young, just as it did in the original game (whereas English voice actor Doug Cockle required no vocal retouching for the expansion).
'This Was a Special Case': CD Projekt RED Draws a Clear Ethical Line
Jacek Rozenek himself praised the collaboration, noting that the goal was to bring his current recordings as close as possible to how he sounded twelve years ago while expressing his deep trust in the game's creators. At the same time, Mikołaj Szwed emphasized that this workflow was an extraordinary measure in an industry where generative AI remains fiercely debated, as recently seen in the controversy surrounding Embark Studios' use of AI voices in ARC Raiders.
Stressing that "this was a special case" prompted solely by Rozenek's medical recovery, Szwed confirmed that CD Projekt RED's contracts strictly require an actor's explicit permission before any AI tools can touch their work. For the localization producer, the partnership stands as a rare example of how voice technology can be applied ethically, with full consent, to support an artist rather than replace human talent.
My Perspective
When I look at modern deep learning and audio signal processing, I think it is vital that we stop lumping every neural audio tool into the same basket. Both technically and ethically, there is a world of difference between using text-to-speech generation to bypass hiring voice actors, and applying a speech-to-speech timbre-transfer model over the live booth performance of an actor who fought through stroke recovery to keep playing his signature role. Every pause, inflection, and emotional beat in Songs of the Past belongs 100% to Jacek Rozenek. Here, the neural network acts like an acoustic prosthetic or digital de-aging in cinema, empowering a beloved performer to reclaim his classic voice without surrendering a single ounce of his craft.
The Witcher 3 Remastered
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Based on the outskirts of New York City, Chaya 'Chayane' spent five years studying software engineering in Montreal before returning to her home state. A Full-Stack developer and Deep Learning AI architecture researcher, she explores neural networks and algorithmic optimization while engineering data pipelines for Retrocharting and Gamescharting alongside Grimtag. A gamer for over 20 years and an avid collector of Nintendo history and The Legend of Zelda, she explored World of Warcraft's Azeroth before bringing her deep technical background to video game analysis.
