I find the voice acting to be a major factor for my personal immersion into the game. Although text sub-titles work for me the FIRST time I play the game, they do not work on subsequent playthrus because - I don't read them as diligently or as slowly, and by the third or fourth playthru, I doubt I read them at all. So, I kind of depend on the voices to keep me "in character".I also agree that Voices produced by AI are synthetic and in most cases take away from the mood. However, there is technology that would take Geralt's recorded voice overs and modify those voice overs so that they would sound like a different character. For example, by manipulating the sound waves in the recordings, (say a 25% increase in pitch, a 25% decrease in volume, and 20-25% increase in pace for example) the male actor playing Geralt could be made to sound female, albeit, a Marlane Dietrich or a Tahlula Bankhead female, but still female enough to allow one actor and one recording session to effectively play as two characters of different genders. If you imagine the recorded voice overs as a continuous sine wave on Rod Serling's ocilloscope, then you can imagine how a program could change the characteristics of that digitally recorded voice just like the adustment knobs on an ocilloscope can adjust the characteristics (wave length, hieght, volume, frequency) of that analog sine wave. Personally, I think playing this game with a Siegfried character that sounds more like Alvin the Chipmunk would be a rip.As for the "instantaneous spread of knowledge", that is a LOT tougher. The mechanism used for NPC attitude adjustments in response to a given action in most games is "time". News travels quicker than you can run from point "a" to point "b" and this "instantaneous spread" you are addressing uses this phenomena to simulate NPC involvement. Everybody knows the NPC's attitude changes immediately, with no actual passage of time, but it is easy to pretend that the "grapevine" spreads gossip faster than we can actually travel. Even the most primitive cultures generally have some sort of "long distance" communications medium. Smoke signals, drums, carrier pigeons, and flag semaphore to name a few. It only "seems wrong" because most gaming companies do not display animations of the "behind-the-scenes" information systems that would make most of the "wrongness" appear at least somewhat plausible.This has the makings of an interesting thread, Simon. Thanks for posting it.