WORDS BY THE TRUCKLOAD...

We got blasted for the English language dialogue and VOs in The Witcher when we released the game last fall. It seemed like everybody and their mother was complaining. Wow, what an outcry. I mean, we got it all wrong. Nonsense English! Of the Japanese T-shirt variety! Well, a little time/distance and now we can see that these features were deemed acceptable for the most part (that is, they didn't spoil the game for everyone), with both grossly flawed and shining moments. Yet in terms of voices from the two extremes of the spectrum – well, overt praise was pretty light compared to outright criticism and grievances, which were global in reach and damn loud. So it was pretty much a no-brainer – the dialogue and VOs were identified for improvement when CD Projekt RED decided to produce The Witcher: Enhanced Edition.

Criticism was certainly warranted. Though not awful across the board, the dialogue and VOs left a lot to be desired. True, the dwarves should have cussed like there's no tomorrow (as they do in the Polish version), an Alabama drawl is plain out of place in the slums of Vizima, "Farewell" is at best off color as a response to a beggar's "Spare some coin?", and we winced along with Geralt when Triss yelled at us in the boudoir. Dialogue and VOs should have really drawn us in, moving the story forward, engrossing us in relationships with other characters, providing entertainment in and of themselves. Instead, there were too many places where they were just confusing; there were too many NPCs who deserved no more than "Oh, shut your trap!" And when there's a jarring moment in the dialogue, be it a spelling error, a breakdown in logic or sentence structure, the wrong emotion underpinning an actor's delivery, or just an annoying voice, rarely can players (and even more so, reviewers) just move on. Criticism, of course, suffers from its own imperfections. Those who get up the gumption to opine, in an official or unofficial capacity, have their limitations, too. No, neither donjon nor vampyre were spelling errors. It's common for all kinds of people to elide letters/syllables and omit the subject pronoun when speaking, moments of silence have meaning of their own, and shop talk/jargon loses all its color and charm if explained in lay terms. Also, there are many medieval-esque fantasy worlds that are enriched with more modern details that seem to hail from a different time – and none of those details in The Witcher strikes us as outright unbelievable. But the time for that brand of ping pong is past...

An opportunity to reverse engineer the in-game dialogue and VOs – hmm, this looked both exciting and daunting. We had to contend with the sheer complexity of the dialogue trees (stipulated as unchangeable – sic!). Myriad branches, conditional links where you'd least expect them, scripts, flags, dependencies... Play testing, though hardly the most comprehensive tool, was our starting point; ultimately, however, we had to resort to the arduous process of reviewing the script and structures. It's amazing what you discover when you turn over every stone... We faced some painful decisions along the way.

The recording sessions were a separate matter, and invariably stressful in our case. The first time around – well, "if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch..." And we did. And it hurt. Let's see – 150,000 words in fourteen days is about a word every eight seconds... provided you're working 24-hour days. Things like Geralt saying "Let me cooooooommme with you" instead of just "Let me come with you" just slipped through the wordwork (yeah, ouch...). But the sessions weren't without their rewards. It's quite amazing to SEE a middle-aged woman sound like a ten-year-old boy, then like a macaw, then like Burl Ives. (Let me just pre-empt some comments: No, she didn't do all the voices in the game, nor half, nor a fourth, etc.)

So, what have we done? Well, we've re-recorded around six thousand lines of dialogue. We hope we've gotten rid of most of those "wtf?" moments, tamed the occasional annoying voice/character, deepened a few NPCs who were mistreated in the original editing process, and reintroduced some characterization and contextual color. It was tempting to have characters comment on certain non-modifiable game aspects that we saw as design flaws. "Sure you're all right? You don't look well" seemed a more apt response to the vacuous look that many commoners gave us. But if you want to keep a clear conscience, you can't really make fun of your own game (too much). Given more time and resources, we probably would've chosen to do the whole damn thing over. In another life, maybe... though comebacks of that sort often entail amnesia.

It's one of those eternal truths: the more you learn, the more you realize how little you know. The Witcher in its first edition proved a humbling experience, but also a highly educational one. Working on the Enhanced Edition proved even more instructive. Is the game truly enhanced? We think so. Is it flawless? Not by any means. But we're consoled by the thought that perfection should be left to the gods lest they grow angry at being rendered obsolete...

Borys Pugacz-Muraszkiewicz