CD Projekt used artificial intelligence to recreate the voice of an actor who had passed away after the launch of Cyberpunk 2077 so that the developer could reuse his character in the game’s recently released expansion.
Miłogost Reczek voiced the ripperdoc Viktor Vektor in the Polish localisation of the game. He also appeared in The Witcher and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt as Vesemir and Thaler, in The Witcher 2: Assassins Of Kings as Baran Ravanen Kimbolt and Thaler’s Spy, and in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt‘s expansion Hearts of Stone as Kestatis von Everec.
Reczek passed away in 2021, before Cyberpunk 2077‘s expansion Phantom Liberty was revealed in late 2022. Phantom Liberty allows players to add a lot more cyberware to their characters, and if they exceed the limit, they receive a call from Vektor to remedy their condition and reset their augmentations.
Speaking to Bloomberg, CD Projekt stated that it “received permission from Reczek’s family to do this” and the team had “considered replacing him in the expansion and rerecording his lines in the original game” before changing their course so that they wouldn’t have to recast Vektor.
“We didn’t like this approach,” said Mikołaj Szwed, localisation director at CD Projekt, regarding replacing Reczek with a different actor.
Szwed said that Reczek was “one of the best Polish voice talents” and that his performance was “stellar” in Cyberpunk 2077.
He also added that the actor’s sons “were very supportive” of the plan to recreating their late father’s voice to star once more in the story.
The team achieved this through the use of a voice-cloning software called Respeecher. Another actor recorded Vektor’s lines in Phantom Liberty and then the “pool of voice samples” from Reczek that were fed to Respeecher allowed the artificial intelligence to create an algorithm.
That algorithm changed the voice of the other actor in the recordings to sound like Reczek.
Localisation project manager Marta Cannilla said last month that this was the developer’s way of “honouring him” and his contributions to make sure he was still a part of the game’s future.
In other gaming news, Microsoft‘s acquisition of Activision Blizzard has been approved by the Competition And Markets Authority, meaning that there are no more obstacles to the deal.
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