How Localizing Return of the Obra Dinn Nearly Sunk the Game | War Stories | Ars Technica 

He has really good skin moisturizer.

He doesn't look at all like an echlesiastical leader, dissappointing.

Yes

he looks like a pirate.

Doesn't take too long!

I memorized all

@@roderrickgaming9949 Profile picture checks out.

@@En.GergerRacc sir loose cannon

I really wish it would have been longer, with multiple locations perhaps.

I'm a native english speaker and I didn't even know what half the positions were without using the glossary. Also I began learning a second language in school within the last year (German) and gotta say, it really helped me empathize with Lucas' ordeal here. I find learning about the specific structure and rules of additional languages opens up the world of linguistics in a way that knowing only one language can't.

@@mrroams5812 :) I had the privilege to be raised bilingual (german and turkish) and learned english at school (and throughout my life), unfortunately I chose latin instead of french, maybe I could have spoken 4 languages!

@@Crowbar Hey, 3 languages is still pretty good! Besides, I hear knowing Latin makes science terms easier to understand as well as the origins of a lot of other european language words.

@@Crowbar hey could you tell the accents apart at all? i feel like that is sometimes necessary

@@myopicaminataraffael1716 yea

i dont get it

Yeah I wonder how it performs the with Steam Remote feature. I have my gaming PC and the laptop that's connected to the TV separated by a switch and most games look almost perfect. I think it'll probably not be the case for this one.

​@@cannonfodder4000 Video compression struggles with small moving specks like snow. Instead of storing every frame of video perfectly pixel by pixel, compression has key frames and creates transformations that approximate movement.

@@wilekrowan3610 more specifically, it struggles with RANDOM moving specks, i.e. dithering with noise in this video

The shipping version of the game has two display modes, one of which I found plays very well with video compression.

You weren't paying enough attention, he was talking about the game being less than perfect in some languages, the English version (the one you played) is obviously without major linguistic problems.

I agree it's a very very good game, but there are tiny things that could've been better.

it's an absolute masterpiece

The only flaw that I can say is that the game’s structure is really well designed but if you havent played in a while it’s very intimidating to learn all of it from scratch.

its not perfect, there were plenty times i got disappointed. for example, when nochols goes on his boating trip, there was a potato setance.

Audio editor was aborted using a condom.

Audio editor was spiked

Audio editor was died of like old age by

u mean "expired" and spoilers: I wish there was one who died in that normal way on that damn ship

The horrible beast died because the audio-editor suffered from a heart-attack

Was the speech localised as well? In my language it wasn't, and while I was able to figure out the English accents, I realised my friends would not.

zmast333 voices are only in English, which is a damn shame for non English speakers

@@GAPIntoTheGame To be fair the game had voices in many languages, including russian, chinese and more. Even in english you hear the non-english speakers in their native language. I liked that effect a lot, and I think it was a good choice to keep it that way in other languages.

@@GAPIntoTheGame I don't think everything needs a dub. It's a historical game so the characters speak how they would speak, they speak their native language including Chinese, Russian, Arabic, and Danish/swedish. It makes sense to hear the characters how they actually sound, even if you aren't good at telling accents apart, you may still be able to tell that they're different. The voice work is an important aspect of the game that would be lost if it was dubbed.

laurenseltzer those are exceptions not the rule. Vast majority is spoken in English, and detecting nuances in dialects is an important part of the game. If we compare that to those who speak Russian, Arabic and so on, the most we have to do is tell them apart, and we know if they speak Russian they are from Russia. If the game was in Spanish and you were required to recognize different Spanish dialects to get important hints of where exactly they are from based on that, you would be missing out (assuming you don’t speak Spanish)

Martin spiked, hmm. did he land on his sword?

that's very interesting

What's the historical spanish term used for a ship mate? Could have the devs used "companero", or was there a specific term for "Bosun's mate"?

@@zigmar2 Spanish speaker here. I'm not an expert in english terms related to boats and the marine, but at least in spanish, there a lot of damn charges inside a ship like the one he mentioned, so i think wouldn't be correct to add "compañero". Also, there isnt some kind of "mate" for this case, i think the maybe most accurate thing could be "assistant" (wouldn't be correct neither, but it's the most closer one i can think about). And I agree, i had problems with the glosary too, but well, we live in 2020 so i used google

@@zigmar2 I'm not a ship expert, so there's probably a more correct term in Spanish for it, but I guess an acceptable substitute would have been "segundo del contramaestre", which roughly means "second bosun". "Condestable" on the other hand is a very specific term and unless you're absolutely into ships you won't have a clue about its relative position in the crew.

Yeah. Although when identifying "Condestable", it gets translated to "Ayudante del contramaestre". That's how I realized who the Bosun's mate was. (Spoilers) A bigger problem was that "Miss Jane Bird" was translated in Spanish simply to "Jane Bird", for some reason. That makes Identifying Jane Bird and Emily Jackson impossible, as far as I know.

It would be cool to see a sequel or even a movie in full color with the ocean waves etc.

probably got blown over by his horn section tbh

LOL! This gave me a great laugh. Okay, it's 4 a.m. I'm going to bed now

Scrolled down to find this comment after he specifically says "John Williams" twice.

Get premium, mobile skrub

@@gram. you PAY for youtube? what a loser

@@buttnutt He pays so that he does not have to watch ads all the time

Adblock is your best friend

@@Dashtikipchak that's what I did on my PC... and then I started using RU-vid on my mobile devices and at work where they run virtual machines.

His attitude is exactly why he made a superb game. Just embraces the imperfection and dials in everything he can.

❗️

Oh god i was going to a doom ost video after this omg thank you

Oh man! I'm glad I saw your comment a moment before the ad came up!

@@RNN1407 God capital G!

Can you name some of the other games? I like games like this.

Kushal Neil I was thinking in terms of a “show don’t tell” story the Dark Souls series does a good job? but it is an action game. Perhaps try Kentucky Route Zero if you’re looking for a slow paced game, but its not exactly a game, more a story that uses the gaming medium. Another would be “Inside”. It does a good job of being both a game and a good story teller. I’ll think about this a bit more and get back to you.

@@420_investment_banker Thanks man! I've played the games you've mentioned. Those are good examples.

@@kushalneil6582I thought about it a bit more and can't really give another example of something truly analogous to Pope's games. However my favorite piece of game story telling is "KOTOR II" despite its gameplay flaws I think (or at least the younger me thought) it posed interesting philosophical questions about morality/ethics, and the isolated yet comfy vibe works well. It's definitely not a "show don't tell" kind of game, since there's a boat load of dialogue but its nuanced and subtle enough that it felt like a good book. Sorry for the wall of text lol

@Csősz Máté Hmm this is a good list. I've played all of these except for FAR.

The spoken dialogue is not translated. Only the text.

@@felipe970421 You're right, I saw the option to change language and just assumed they did audio in other languages. Well, I know that all the characters identities can be deduced without having to listen for accents, but it sure helped with some of them.

Turn your volume up..

@@MorrisseyMuse That way anything else on youtube will deafen you.

@@MorrisseyMuse yeah, and die every time they cut away

I didn't even notice how quiet it was until an ad came up and blasted my damn ear drums

Your ears are too high.

[Spoilers] Thomas Sefton would like a word with you...

@@vinilla02 he just wanted to eat it.

theres a tf2 reference to be made somewhere there

It's even worse than death by muffin.

"sir gawain was slain with a fishing rod"

carpenters' solutions really punished my inherent racism

@@jakehopgood7446 To be fair though, while I will recognize my inherent racism as playing a part in that, you can also make the case that a knowledge of historical context would lead you to believe it would be very out of the ordinary to have that situation in the early 1800s even if you somehow had no inherent racist preconceptions. I suppose it wouldn't be impossible, as there were free black people who were quite successful and ran businesses, of course almost always in the North (see James Forten, for example), but still quite rare I think. Then again, these are Americans working for the East India Company so perhaps they are outside of the norm.

@@TheCyanSqueegee Well the english dialogue/voices for for the carpenters still seems backwards to the solution.

I am literally saving this game to play all the way through on a rainy Saturday

They are either ignored, or adapted to regional and national accents with somewhat equivalent connotations in the respective language. Easy examples, almost all languages have a specific accent, or several, that are thought of as "country bumpkin", or "posh", or "from an isolated community", or "those crazy nationalists on the edge of the map that somehow ended up speaking the same language because we went and took their stuff" or "that thing they speak in the colonies". Also, localisation inertia. Once a specific accent is ingrained into a public as a character trait because it is used in a popular localised piece, it's easier for further works to follow that trail and localise the same accent on the starting language to the same one in the translation, since you can bank on the assumption that your audience will instinctively understand what you're trying to get across because they've grown used to it.

@@coldDrive that may be the case for audio localization, but Obra Dinn only has subtitle localization. The audio is still English, probably because the accents and their origins play an important role in identification (eg. there's only one Frenchman on the ship and he only ever speaks in English with a French accent). I think the OP was mostly talking about how someone who only speaks, say, Russian may not be able to discern between a Scottish or English accent when they already don't speak the language since it's the actual origin not the cultural connotations that matter in Obra Dinn.

+Philip Oh, I meant for subtitles too. Even if the audio is kept on the original languages, the subtitles are often accented to reflect the cultural background associated with the accents so that people can draw parallels in the dialects corresponding to their language. I'm not an english native speaker, and I've played and watched a ton of media that deliberately accented the subtitles for that purpose.

While accents are a clue, it is completely possible to identify everyone without paying attention to their accent and without guesswork. You do have to recognize specific languages.

@@coldDrive what country? i think that not for language to language but for country to country.

*_ARROWED_*

Verbing weirds language!

I'd argue that English is more flexible than people realize, and if you say "Sworded" in a context where people understand what you are communicating, it might as well be a word.

@@Kryptnyt It's a sworded tale, certainly...

I thought we "sworded" this out!

I'm surprised it got a localization at all. It's usually the publisher's work but also some countries, like Germany I think, don't allow products that don't have a proper localization on German. Then again, I believe Germans in particular have some of the best translators in the world for books. Several of the most famous Japanese or Russian novels were translated in German first for the rest of the western world to read and translate later.

@@tomstonemale Similarly, it is said Italy has the best voice over artists dedicated to dubbing, in the world.

@@MrStronglime Brazil, too have some pretty good voice actors, the problem is that they are in small numbers.

Maybe a bit late, but it's on spotify now!

You have no idea how video production works in the real world. No publications hire those roles.

@@chumplafayette9561 You forgot to add the very important part to make your argument true: "These days" Which by the way would've made what you said not only true, but also exactly what I said.

So your comment is pointless?

@@chumplafayette9561 Nope, yours is.

@@pubcollize you're basically arguing for them to hire roles that don't exist anymore, at least in publishing or media.

Please don't put Irish and Scottish accents under the umbrella of English accents. We really don't like that, despite being mostly English speakers. Ireland, Scotland and Wales have their own languages and entire families of accents in English and their native tounges. You could say that Scottish and Welsh fall under the term British accents as Scotland and Wales are situated on the island of Great Britain. This doesn't apply to Ireland though. Calling all of these English accents is the same as calling a French accent 'English' just because the person is speaking the English language

me too!

It's all a simulation

Most AAA game use static text. There is no dynamic sentence in game at all.