Brussels targets loot boxes as AI voices reach Geralt

Jacek Rozenek, the Polish voice of Geralt since the first game, had a stroke in 2019 and spent months unable to speak. His voice has since returned but is lower and gruffer than the roughly 10,000 lines he recorded for The Witcher 3 in 2014. CD Projekt's localization producer Mikołaj Szwed told Game File that the studio feared players would hear jarring jumps between old and new Geralt, because the 2027 expansion Songs of the Past adds new battle cries and one-liners that play alongside the original dialogue.

After inviting Rozenek to the studio, CD Projekt decided, with his blessing, to bring in an AI company it had worked with once before. Rozenek told Totilo he trusts the studio's approach. The piece presents the decision as a special case, driven by consent and by a real medical history.

CounterpointPerformers' groups that oppose AI voice replication in games would likely say that one actor's informed consent does not settle the precedent for an industry where such consent may not be so freely given.

Previously: House House disclosed limited LLM use in Big Walk, and juror Austin Walker said a 19-signature statement is not a majority or IGF position. — Wednesday November 11 edition.

The Commission has now formally published the proposal, which Eurogamer's Robert Purchese says matches yesterday's leaked draft. It would bar paid loot boxes for under-18s, disable paid virtual currency for minors by default until a parent approves, and let every player switch paid loot boxes off and see the odds. Fines could reach 6% of worldwide turnover, and the law is expected sometime in 2028 or 2029.

Purchese draws on George Osborn of the Video Games Industry Memo, who expects big publishers to be worried. Age detection, a master off-switch and local-currency price display are hard to build, and Osborn argues that, as with USB-C, firms will likely ship one compliant design everywhere rather than several versions. EA Sports FC's Ultimate Team could be age-gated as a mode, but games built around random paid rewards face a bigger problem.

CounterpointGames trade bodies, which call the proposal unworkable and disproportionate, would reject the framing that this is mainly a design problem, and publishers could still choose region-specific versions rather than redesign globally.

Previously: The leaked EU draft targeted loot boxes, virtual currencies and pay-to-win, and would let players switch off loot boxes. — Wednesday November 11 edition.

Connor Makar says he played 78 hours and reached level 35 in the first week, and calls the result stunning. He credits new lighting, water and weather effects, buffs that make neglected specs such as balance druid less painful, and new dungeons such as Hall of Thanes and Excavation Site: Wetlands, which are built to be finished in one run. He also praises Blizzard's mega-server approach for making zones and cities feel full and prompting more chance grouping with strangers.

CounterpointPlayers who pushed Blizzard to raise dungeon monster XP by 50% evidently found the early leveling and dungeon pacing less polished than this enthusiastic week-one account suggests.

Previously: Blizzard raised dungeon monster XP by 50% after community feedback. — Tuesday November 10 edition.

Rock Paper Shotgun's Luke James argues that between 1998 and 2002 the graphics business stopped rewarding the fastest chip and started rewarding the fastest iteration. Nvidia, ranked fourth by 3D chip sales in 1998, restructured around PC makers' spring and fall release cycles and ran several chip generations in parallel by 2002. Others fell for their own reasons: 3dfx bought board maker STB for about $141m in stock and tried to sell Voodoo3 only on its own cards, pushing Diamond and Creative toward Nvidia. Intel's integrated graphics took an estimated 55% of the market by late 2001, squeezing S3, Trident and SiS.

CounterpointHistorians who put more weight on 3dfx's specific strategic errors or on Intel's integrated graphics could say a single cadence thesis oversimplifies, and the article itself notes each firm fell for its own reasons.