Geralt of Rivia voice actor Doug Cockle is eager to return for upcoming CD Projekt Red projects like The Witcher Remake, the next mainline game codenamed Polaris, and more.
Speaking to IGN, Cockle made clear his love for The Witcher by saying he wants to voice Geralt forever, even if Polaris is moving away from the character. "I would love to just keep voicing Geralt until I can no longer voice anymore," he said.
"It's just become such a part of me. I'm thrilled every time CD Projekt calls me up and says, 'Hey, Doug, are you available for such and such?' And my heart does a little flutter and leaps, and I go, 'Yes, of course I am,' because I love it so much."
I would love to just keep voicing Geralt until I can no longer voice anymore.
Cockle made clear he doesn't know much of what's happening at CD Projekt Red — or Fool's Theory, the developer making The Witcher Remake — but he's only ever had a positive experience working on The Witcher so would love to return.
"I don't have as close a relationship with many other developers, and a lot of the other developers who I know fairly well are indie developers so they're much smaller in scale in terms of what they're doing and everything else," Cockle said.
"I have a lot of respect for CD Projekt Red. I don't work for them, I work with them. So I sit a little bit on the outside of the company itself. I'm like a satellite that kind of spins around the inner workings of the company, which I know nothing about, and every once in a while, they call me in and I come in and do a little thing, and then I go back into my orbit. But they're absolutely lovely."
Another Witcher game is still years away, and as mentioned the story of Polaris, which kicks off a new trilogy, will move away from Geralt as a protagonist. That's not to say he won't feature somewhere in the story, but nothing is confirmed (and you can read Cockle's best theories here). The Witcher Remake is therefore a likelier opportunity for Cockle, as this will be, as the name suggests, a full remake of the original Witcher which starred Cockle as Geralt.
"I'm super excited about [The Witcher Remake], because if you think about it, when Witcher 1 was made, I was recording the voice in 2005," Cockle said. "I think the game itself came out in 2007. That was a long time ago. That was nearly 20 years ago.
"The technology has changed so much. I understand that they're going to be recreating it in Unreal Engine 5. So that's going to be really exciting because the stuff they can do with graphics in Unreal Engine 5 now compared to what they were able to do when they first made The Witcher 1, it's night and day. It's really exciting."
Little else is known about the remake. CD Projekt Red announced it as a game codenamed Canis Majoris in October 2022 as a "fully-fledged, AAA, story-driven RPG". The project was announced proper as The Witcher Remake later that month, with CD Projekt Red providing "full creative supervision" despite it being developed at Fool's Theory.
Nothing has been said since, though CD Projekt Red confirmed in November 2023 that development was progressing as planned.
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.
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