The localization process for Cyberpunk 2077 required more than 2,000 people

CD Projekt Red’s credits list 5,381 people. Cyberpunk 2077 Today it is one of the largest projects in the gaming industry. And as it turned out, almost half of these people contributed to the localization of the game.

As part of Polygon’s Culture Shock issue, we asked developer CD Projekt Red to shed some light on the localization efforts for a project of this scale—an open-world game containing nearly 1.1 million words translated into 19 languages ​​and nearly 82,000 lines recorded voice actors in 11 of these languages. The studio crunched the numbers and told us why it took thousands of people to get it right. Cyberpunk 2077 for a global audience.

It’s important to note that CD Projekt Red approached its sci-fi RPG with more resources than most studios have access to, thanks to the success of games like The Witcher 3: Wild Huntsold over 50 million copies. This allowed the team to bite the bullet on a project of this size from the start. However, while other parts of the studio faced hurdles at launch, that didn’t stop the localization team from encountering some problems along the way.

So why did it take so many people to localize the game? In short: voice acting.

Localization by numbers

According to CD Projekt Red, 2,456 people took part in the project. Cyberpunk 2077localization – more than 45% of the people working on the game in total. These included 20 people from the internal localization team; 117 translators, editors and proofreaders; 120 localization testers; 233 project managers, voiceover directors, voiceover engineers and producers; and 1,966 voice actors.

Some caveats: When calculating numbers of this nature, it is virtually impossible to account for every extreme case. Consider: If a designer makes a localization proposal in a meeting, does it count toward the localization team? (In this case, no.) It is also difficult to categorize certain roles; If an artist has spent time creating graffiti in multiple languages, do they count? (Also no.) Additionally, the above totals do not take into account anything written that was cut or rewritten during development, only what ended up in the game before version 2.0 was released. They also don’t account for personnel who dealt with local ratings boards and adjustments such as nudity censorship. And most importantly: not all of them were full-time employees.

The vast majority of people included in these numbers were not CD Projekt Red employees, but contractors or employees of third-party agencies. The team set itself the task of hiring separate agencies for each language – instead of outsourcing all languages ​​to one company – to improve quality control, says CD Projekt Red localization project expert Alexander Radkevich. This increased the overhead required to manage the various touchpoints.

The numbers reflect the extensive cast that could give Night City its verisimilitude. CD Projekt Red’s director of localization, Mikolaj Šwed, estimates that the company cast 120-200 actors for each language, and says the process of finding the right people for the roles wasn’t always easy. In the case of Takemura’s character, who was not a native English speaker, the team had difficulty finding actors who were proficient in certain languages; he brought in an actor who traveled between Berlin and Tokyo to record lines for the German version of the game.

For text translation, the team planned a work schedule of approximately 2,000 words per translator per day. According to this math, it would take a single translator about 550 weeks to cover one language, not counting quality assurance, voiceovers, and other parts of the process. The team divided each language into groups to distribute the work. For quality assurance alone, the project averaged four to six testers per language.

Another important part of the process was translating the script into English. Although CD Projekt Red is based in Warsaw, Poland, Cyberpunk 2077 The script was originally written in Polish, Swede calls English the “most important” language – both because it reaches the largest number of players and because it creates a base for translators who can then translate the game into other languages ​​since they are easier find for translation. work according to the English script, not the Polish one. (Cyberpunk 2077 is also set in a futuristic United States, and CD Projekt Red reports that a higher percentage of players in Poland played the game in English than in The Witcher 3which Radkevich attributes to the game’s setting.)

Due to the need to use English as a basis, CD Projekt Red hired an English adaptation team to translate the Polish text at an early stage, with the team beginning the translation process at the same time as writing the main version of the script. the start of background work even before this – which, according to Shved, allowed the localization team to feel like a central part of the entire project.

“It’s always funny to me when people say, ‘Oh, I want to play in the original language,’” says Swede. “For us it’s like, ‘OK, so… Polish, or what?’ The English is already an adaptation of the Polish source, so if you want to play the original, play in Polish, although the English voice acting is recorded first. So it’s not that easy to determine.”

When thousands of people are involved in a project, even the slightest change matters.

While a studio working in a single language without voice acting can easily make significant changes to the script late in production, late changes to Cyberpunk 2077 major repairs were required. According to Shved, making changes to the translated material meant coordinating changes in multiple languages ​​and returning the actors to the studio to record new lines.

Both Shved and Radkiewicz point to additional voice recording sessions, or “pick-ups”, as the most difficult part of the process, as they wanted the game’s story to be as strong as possible, but they also had to maintain a schedule. The two goals were often at odds.

The team also didn’t have their own project managers covering all the languages ​​they planned to release the game in. So with Shved overseeing the external team working on the German translation, and Radkevich overseeing the external team working on the Russian translation (and others working in different languages), CD Projekt Red did not have equivalent team members who could oversee each localized version. Swede says it’s important to make external agencies feel like partners, and in some cases the team has had to trust its partners without being able to check the work internally.

Swede says having a manager for each language is the localization team’s “ultimate goal” for future projects. But, according to Shved, even having an internal employee does not always allow you to check everything, given the number of texts and voice-over lines involved.

One specific issue the team faced occurred in September 2023 when CD Projekt Red released Cyberpunk 2077update 2.0. The large-scale patch fixed or improved a number of technical and gameplay problems in the game, and also added the ability to select the Ukrainian language, but the Ukrainian translation contained anti-Russian statements such as “Go fuck yourself in the same direction as the ship.” Rock Paper Shotgun reports.

CD Projekt Group publicly supported Ukraine in its war against Russia, stopping sales of its games in Russia and Belarus and donating money to help Ukrainian refugees, but said it did not intend to include negative comments in the game. The company said these transfers were made by an outside agency that did not follow the studio’s instructions.

“This is a very, very difficult situation and we as a company have been very vocal about our position on this issue. Also in the sense that, for example, we decided to create and provide Ukrainian localization to our Ukrainian fans, and to do this after the release of the game. CyberpunkAnd we do this not only because we feel that the market is promising, but also as a statement of our support for the Ukrainians,” says Shved. “And in a project this big with so many people involved, there’s always some weird stuff that happens – you can’t control everything – so, I mean, this was one of those situations.”

“Games are huge,” adds Swede. “So, of course, we try to check as much as possible, but it is impossible to read every line, every line. And, of course, we need to give our partners some guidelines. There was a situation here where the rules of what was acceptable for us in terms of changing or adding things to the game (were) kind of thrown out the window. So of course we had to provide that feedback. But in general we trust our partners, and in principle such things happen very, very rarely. We’d hear a lot more about this if it happened regularly.”

Almost three years after launch Cyberpunk 2077CD Projekt Red followed suit with Phantom Freedom – an expansion that added approximately 450,000 words and approximately 25,000 lines of voiceover. Next: The Witcher 4as well as many small games and transmedia projects that the localization team is working on in parallel with larger projects.

When Shved started working at CD Projekt Red in 2013, he was the only person on the studio’s internal localization team. The team now consists of over 20 people who oversee over 2,000 external contributors and are involved in much of what the company does. Swede says working on large projects increases the workload, but it also makes the work fun.

“Working on a big game for several years is always stressful,” he says, “because there’s always anticipation about whether people will like it, whether people will like what you’ve done, not just in the localization, but in the game as a whole.” . “

And despite the early struggles, Cyberpunk 2077 has sold over 30 million copies to date – with Phantom Freedom adding another 8 million – giving the team enough leeway to do the whole process again.