As an actor, Doug Cockle is no stranger to unsettling workplaces. From battling Nazis in Spielberg's Band of Brothers to rubbing shoulders with Christian Bale in dragon romp Reign of Fire, disappearing into a role on set – whatever the set may be – has become second nature. Yet when he landed his first video game role in 2001, Cockle found himself suddenly standing completely alone in a vocal booth. "It is bizarre," he says. "You just have to be in the character in that moment in that world, in your brain. On stage and screen, you have other actors, you have props, costumes … all these things that are helping you do this thing called'acting'. Cockle got into video game work while filling in his Hollywood downtime by contributing additional voices to PS2 games such as Timesplitters 2. Inadvertently he was laying the foundations for acting in this fledgling medium. He has now appeared in more than 45 video games, including last year's megahits Baldur's Gate 3 and Alan Wake 2, though he is best known for voicing the gravelly Witcher, Geralt of Rivia. "There weren't a lot of voices in video games when I started out,' Cockle recalls.

It was at this point 10 years ago that the future began. Obviously, I am referring to the almost simultaneous launch of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles in late 2013. These machines ushered in the era of universal high-definition gaming. They brought us into the cloud computing age, allowing games such as Forza Horizon and Titanfall to perform complex maths remotely, freeing up your processor for other tasks. They forged ahead into game streaming, allowing us to play retro games across broadband connections, and recognised the growing importance of sharing gameplay, including functions that made it easier to record and broadcast gaming experiences across social media and Twitch.

This week brings a preposterously generous gift for lovers of timesink role-playing games: Larian Studios's Baldur's Gate 3. Depending on your level of engagement with Dungeon and Dragons-inspired RPGs, you will know it either as the unlikely and long-awaited follow-up to 2000's Baldur's Gate 2 – one of the great computer RPGs of its era – or as the game where you can have sex with a bear. Look, technically it's not a bear – it's a shapeshifting druid in bear form. But still, the scene inevitably went viral when Larian showed it off during a livestream last month. It is the tip of the iceberg: you can romance pretty much any available character in this role-playing game, or several of them at once. You can try to steal almost anything, or throw it at an enemy as a makeshift weapon.

I have spent a few weeks talking to video-game voice actors, the real humans who bring verve and humour to our gaming experiences. Some of them have won major awards for their work. None of them have had a meaningful pay rise in over 10 years, despite the industry's exponential growth. They are furious – and they have every right to be. Over the weekend, Hellena Taylor, who played the lead character in Bayonetta, Platinum Games' stylish action series about a hypersexualised angel-killing witch who fights with extreme flair, went public with her frustrations.

Winter weather is on the way for most of the US this long weekend. I'm headed out into it because what says "beach weather" quite like snow? OK, maybe I am doing it wrong. If you're planning on hunting for a good deal, we've got you covered. We've found discounts on laptops, cameras, coffee makers, and games to help you while away the winter hours. Special offer for Gear readers: Get a 1-year subscription to WIRED for $5 ($25 off).

CD Projekt SA Chief Executive Officer Marcin Iwiński made a public mea culpa this week about the disastrous rollout of the video game Cyberpunk 2077 in December. He took personal responsibility and asked fans not to blame the team. In a somber five-minute video address and accompanying blog post, Iwiński acknowledged the game "did not meet the quality standard we wanted to meet. I and the entire leadership team are deeply sorry for this." Iwiński's apology, the second within a month, was an attempt to restore the Polish company's reputation with scores of fans -- and investors -- who had waited eight years for the game, only to discover it was riddled with bugs and performance issues when it was finally released.

Gaming never went out of style, but in 2020, it evolved from a fun hobby into an essential lifeline. Staying sane isn't easy when you're stuck in isolation for months on end. You can only watch so much Netflix before your brain starts dripping out of your ears. Games provide more active experiences that can help you forget that you've been staring at the same walls for weeks, letting you explore far-away virtual worlds or hang out with friends in multiplayer lobbies. In 2020, gaming became vital.

CD Projekt could use a big hit. The company has only one other major game franchise, and all eyes are on "Cyberpunk" because it is the industry's only original major title coming to market this holiday season. Executives at CD Projekt said the cost of making and marketing "Cyberpunk" was significantly higher than the roughly $80 million the company spent on its last game, "The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt," without providing specifics. They said they initially miscalculated how long "Cyberpunk" would take to complete, with the health crisis most affecting the latter stages of four years of development, following pre-production work that started around 2012. With employees homebound, making even a minor tweak--such as changing the placement of characters or objects in a scene--would take hours instead of minutes, said Marcin Iwiński, who co-founded CD Projekt with a high-school friend in the early 1990s and is now co-chief executive with Adam Kiciński.

Cyberpunk 2077 has a lot to live up to. We called its grand E3 2018 reveal "the most mind-blowing demo we've ever seen." Witcher 3, CD Projekt Red's previous game, earned a prime spot as one of our favorite games of this generation. Witcher 3 actually usurped Deus Ex as my personal favorite game of all time, so CD Projekt Red working on a first-person cyberpunk role-playing game is as close to a "dream game" as I could envision. Add in Keanu Reeves and a star-studded custom soundtrack that includes a banger from Run The Jewels--my favorite musicians of this millennium--and this hype train couldn't possibly be more stoked.

Cyberpunk 2077 is just a few weeks away and the action-packed RPG will launch with support for dialogue in 10 languages and subtitle options for several others. CD Projekt Red is aiming to add a deeper layer of immersion for players by using artificial intelligence to lip sync the dialogue in multiple languages. The game's lead character technical director, Mateusz Popławski, said in a presentation (via @shinobi602 on Twitter) that CDPR targeted better lip sync quality than in The Witcher 3. It wanted to do so in 10 languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Mandarin and Japanese. The goal was to do all of that for every character in the open world. Because of the game's enormous scope, CDPR needed to do all of that with zero facial motion capture.