Nowadays, though, I think there's simply enough appreciation for it that producers and studios are willing to spend the time and money to give all languages the full treatment. And yeah, TW3 and Cyberpunk knock voice acting right out of the park. I would say that most games, Bioware included, up to this point were doing really well if they could land a level of writing, acting, and delivery on par with sitcom or network TV. I can quite easily pick out scenes from both TW3 and Cyberpunk that are cinema levels of good.
Listened to those clips and Polish version is tonally clearly different from English version. It's impossible for me to speculate about it further as languages are both, simple and very complex. For example, emphasizing one word in sentence can change something in context of sentence. Can't really comment the Witcher series either, I only really ever played but the first one.
There are things in CP 2077 that are really huge and very dependent of how those things are delivered and I really hope that it's possible in other languages too. Our language group is too small for that sort of localization, but in principle I appreciate the way say, French and Germans do most things via dubbing while we rely on subtitles.
In game set in alternate history USA, English version could be used as benchmark and let's take Kerry Eurodyne and scene where we are on the boat with him when he is playing guitar and chatting with V.
There's dialogue bug in that conversation that I didn't notice during my first playthrough,
someone else spotted that though and now I can't unhear that and it was still there at least in 1.23 but let's not get stuck on that, it's useful for something else in context of this topic.
Why I didn't I spotted it, even I have experience? First is that I'm not native English speaker but second factor is that I was so involved what was happening there. My V didn't had any romantic angle there but it was still captivating segment a lot thanks to Kerry's voice actor. His story unfolds and it's intimate moment but it's also intellectual. Kerry goes on and tells about background of certain song, "People think it's about sticking it to corpos but..." and this is something very important because while it's impossible to make blanket statement behalf of every musician out there, it's in fact even banal that things are misinterpreted, context isn't understood. Think of real life, say "Killing in the name" from Rage Against the Machine. It's not about rebellion against every institution there is but police brutality and such,
"they killed the king" refers to Martin Luther King. Things like that, I don't know, when me and my brother were kids we used to listen to Iron Maiden among other bands but it took years to figure out that "Two Minutes to Midnight" looks like it's about military industrial complex and not just some nonsense.
So Kerry is this someone who is familiar with that and made peace what that and focusing to becoming the best version of him. There's so much in that scene, I was thinking Jimi Hendrix and how he probably had certain humor regarding some of the audience, they didn't come to hear the music but to see if he burned his guitar LOL.
So it's this emotional scene and how Kerry shows trust towards V by telling things, some of that are very true to real life. I mean my brother still does music and we discuss about these things every now and then. Kerry's voice actor and voice direction, you could put me or my brother in box with a mic but we couldn't do that and there was someone, think late December or January, musician who wrote about the same thing. Voice work here delivers on level that is difficult to achieve even with real serious hobbyist or even pro's, doesn't get any better than that.
Cinema is exactly right word IMO, as cinema tends to be not only about how but also about what. That part of Kerry's story line gives access to think critically about things that might be driven by generational experiences, say Woodstock and Vietnam war and European pop music in the 80's and how the Berlin Wall finally came down. Culture was part of things but we can't take them as universal and Afghanistan is very good example of how we can't change things in real life just by thinking of things or writing songs (and misunderstanding even those
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Where that puts CP 2077 is that despite age ratings, people find ways, someone might be 12 someone 16 but it's very different product as it can be different experience if someone is say 16 now, plays this game 10 years later. Graphics can get obsolete, but writing and voice acting, they do not. But it's huge task to make this work on different languages as some places, France and Italy, way they think about pop culture, rock stars and that, might be very different than other places around the world and voice actor needs to be some sort of middle man, finding the right tones that deliver that experience Kerry has to that audience that doesn't necessarily view rock culture in similar context as say Northern Europe and English speaking countries. Would be curious to know more about that, if anyone would be willing to share.