How Localizing Return of the Obra Dinn Nearly Sunk the Game | War Stories | Ars Technica
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- čas přidán 18. 06. 2024
- Lucas Pope, creator of Return of the Obra Dinn, explains how the localization of the game's logbook put the game in some seriously dangerous waters.
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How Localizing Return of the Obra Dinn Nearly Sunk the Game | War Stories | Ars Technica - Hry
Lucas Pope looks exactly how Lucas Pope should look
He has really good skin moisturizer.
He doesn't look at all like an echlesiastical leader, dissappointing.
Yes
he looks like a pirate.
Loved playing Obra Dinn. My only complaint is that I have to wait until I've forgotten all of the correct answers to play it again!
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.
Thankfully this game was localized. English isn't a problem for me, but this game contains so many words that you normally don't hear, especially the roles of people on a ship, so I was glad that I could play it in german. Brilliant game.
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
Actually, Lucas Pope's original idea was to make a game that crushed CZcams's compression algorithm
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.
Doesn't want to create perfect game.
Proceeds to create perfect game.
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.
In Spanish they use a lot of old timey language, and they even use an old fashioned version of the pronoun "you", so they clearly put a lot of thought into it.
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)
"Audio editor died of old age."
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
Obra Dinn is an absolute masterpiece: outstanding technique, unforgettable story telling. Can't wait for Lucas' next game!
It would be cool to see a sequel or even a movie in full color with the ocean waves etc.
In spanish, "Bosun" was translated as "Contramaestre". But "Bosun's mate" was translated as "Condestable". This made it harder to realize that they worked together. As the two words are not related. Also, "Condestable" wasn't in the glossary. So there was no clue to who he was.
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.
I've always thought Maba had the most gruesome and memorable death. I'm glad Lucas agrees
Martin spiked, hmm. did he land on his sword?
Had to turn the volume ALL the way up to hear, which was fine until the adverts burst in and tried to injure me with sound. Please check your volume before uploading! Enjoyed the video.
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 CZcams on my mobile devices and at work where they run virtual machines.
Poor John Williams. After a long and illustrious career as a seminal composer, he died falling from a mast in the 19th century.
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.
I’ve been looking forward to this one since it was teased. “Papers Please” and “Return of The Obra Dinn” are my favourite contemporary examples of “show don’t tell” type of story telling (there are other games that do this too).
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.
No worries Lucas. You definetely made a perfect game. Greetings from Germany, where the localisation worked out perfectly.
His attitude is exactly why he made a superb game. Just embraces the imperfection and dials in everything he can.
I, as a Korean native who can read English well enough, tend to enjoy content (especially indie games) in English.
Usually the Korean translation is very awkward and not acceptable, because localization is a very time consuming job.
It requires a lot of money, effort and dedication to be put in, none of which indie developers have in sufficient amounts.
And also, let's face it, English being the most popular language in the world Americans usually don't care much about people of other languages.
That is, what I thought until I watched this interview, where I was genuinely impressed by how deeply Lucas had thought about localizations.
I will definitely play this game once again in Korean, this time focusing on how different languages make game experiences unique.
Reminder to turn your volume back down.
❗️
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!
Pope's next game will contain no words
As someone who translates video games, it was interesting to hear how the developer deals with these things. With JP>EN translation, you often have to omit a lot of the source material to fit within character constraints because Japanese is far more content-dense than English, but yeah, these are problems that most people probably don't think about at all.
Volume is too low
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.
I love the way each video has graphical elements from the games! Amazing work
I like that you have multiple right answers. There was so much going on with the death of the carpenters mate it was hard to tell what actually killed him. Crushed? Speared? Spiked? Fell down the stairs? That was all happening simultaneously.
Yeah, the whole time I played, I was just imagining how difficult translating the game for other countries would be. "Yeah, we need these lines spoken in mandarin with a scottish accent.... and THESE lines with an irish accent."
The spoken dialogue is not translated. Only the text.
@@NotaWalrus1 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.
One of the interesting grammar things in the game happens early on; a few mutineers force their way into the Captain's cabin and demand to know where "they" are.
The interesting issue here is that due to how English works, the mutineers could be referring to people or objects. We would ask "where are they" in reference to both a group of people or a bag of diamonds.
So you go most of the game not knowing what the mutineers want.
Lucas is one of my biggest heroes. Papers Please and Obra Dinn are both masterpieces and they never fail to inspire me.
This game absolutely bodies CZcams's compression algorithm.
"John killed George with a fish"
*ah yes, the worst fate anyone can suffer... death by F I S H*
[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"
This game is amazing. It also makes you question your assumptions of race and rank in small ways. Pretty cool how effective it is in that way - I kept getting small details wrong because I just assumed someone was a particular ethnicity or a certain rank on the ship.
Worth playing. :)
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.
Maba's fate ruined my heart, loves the dude.
I love how the conclusion is "Next time I know how to plan things" instead of what you'd expect from anyone: "I'll never do a text-based game again".
Great time period and fantastic story. This game was awesome to play on a rainy Saturday.
I am literally saving this game to play all the way through on a rainy Saturday
I always wondered how the audio clips are dealt with when it comes to subtitles. Being able to hear different accents definitely makes the game easier. An English speaker may be able to identify the difference between a Welsh, Scottish or English accent, but how about for speakers of other languages? Does it say "[Welsh accent] Over here, captain!" in the Japanese subtitles, for example?
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.
The German localization of the game is very well done for the most part, but there was a point where I had to switch to English to put in what I wanted, because I couldn't for the life of me figure out how they translated "clawed" in the list of possible causes of death (as it turns out, it's "zerfetzt", which carries a much more violent connotation - the best literal translation of that word back into English would be "shredded").
The localization team and you did a great job. Muchas gracias :)
"We don't have 'sworded' in english."
Strong Bad disagrees.
*_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!
Interesting issue I wouldn't notice bcause i played in original english instead of localisation i "should" be playing. Btw if there is ever a choice between not finishing a game as good as Obra Dinn or not localising it I hope it gets made even if I have to learn a new language to play :)
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.
Hey Ars Technica, I know these days the only two professions that anyone thinks are worthy of paying for are graphic artists and marketing directors, but maybe you should consider hiring a RECORDING technician and an AUDIO mixing technician when you make a video that includes RECORDED AUDIO.
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.
That's interesting. I've been playing the game for the first time in both my native lenguage and english and one of the things that made the game really difficult for me is that some of the shipcrew roles do NOT translate to each other at all in spanish. I don't know if it's a mistake or if it didn't really matter but playing it first in english and then spanish made me get stuck for a good while in the middle section of the ship.
haha, I'm glad I searched for various images of Lucas Pope and realized that he uses a hair clip at times on his left side...I was thinking, "that's a weird way to pin a lavalier microphone" xD
It's insane how bro made Paper's Please and then actually made a better game. Like, that's a career highlight type game and he still beat it.
The editing of all of these videos is just perfection.
Man, I'm curious about the dev footage at 1:56. I really want to see what Lucas had written for the possibilities of the "Fates".
This problem might not have occurred to me either. Great talk.
I was in charge of localisation for a big game, and unlike its predecessor, this one had way more menus and text boxes in it. We had already anticipated that some languages would be longer so we had scaling text and other methods to fit non-English languages in the space available. But what we didn't anticipate was just *how* long some of the translated text would be! In the end we had to go with scrolling text within boxes, which looked messy. IIrc Russian and German were the worst offenders for having really long text. Now I'm always curious to see how other games deal with localisation issues like this.
Return of the Obra Dinn and The Forgotten City opened the door for me to these kind of games. Now I am addicted!
I wish there would be more games like that!
Currently taking an introduction to Linguistics and I love the explanation of the difficulties of translation.
Best game of 2018 right here. This man is a genius.
I watched a let's play of Obra Dinn by French streamer Antoine Daniel and, for what it's worth, it was a very enjoyable experience. The localization did a sound job and it didn't look that awkward to me.
What was more of a handicap for non-English speakers though, is that since the cutscenes were subbed, a lot of clues were lost, mainly the accents (if a character was Scottish, a French player would not recognize it as such, and would not think to look up Scottish-sounding names in the list).
There's another problem with localisation and it's that mates have different names. I'm Italian so I played the game in Italian, and the surgeon's mate is called "infermiere", but that is a person who prescribes medicine. So I was convinced that the actual surgeon was the surgeon's mate and vice-versa.
Very interesting concept. I am looking forward to this.
The musical score alone had me absolutely hooked. Wish I could find it on Spotify.
Maybe a bit late, but it's on spotify now!
Great episode
As a language student I found this video incredibly fascinating. I also wonder, apart from the written translation of the ways of dying, how accents (that make you distinguish Scottish from English or Irish or Americans) are recreated in other countries' versions of the game...
What a great game. As a non native English speaker, the most difficult nuances for me were to notice all the different English accents. You can tell the Russians apart pretty easily, for example, but if you're not native, the difference between an Irish and a Scottish accent is not so obvious, and the game uses that kind of info and expects you to notice it in some places.
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
An underappreciated masterpiece
This is the best one so far, super interesting! I would love to see more indie developers here
me too!
lol I love that exasperated feeling that's shared in a great project, progressing dutifully until you notice that its scope needs to become much, much larger to become 100% properly amazing. 2nd verse, same as the 1st.
Amazing game, very cool to hear from Lucas Pope!
War Stories is my favorite gaming show right now
amazing!
Hey Mr Video editor, we need to talk.
I love this guy, awesome stuff
In french, most projectiles the spidercrabs thingies threw was considered arrows to me, but it didn't work, and I had to used spikes/spears instead.
That would really be a great game to have a linguist look at it; as well as to try to get it into uncommon localisations (Ergative language like basque, or into Finnish or Hungarian). I would love a video of a linguist looking at localisations in different fundamentally different languages & explain what was done and how, eg. how the parser works to put it into Finnish, Arabic, Japanese, Korean and Basque.
this game is one of a kind. love it.
So much to point out. My love for uncharted 1 & 2 are considered my fave out of the series! And my love for detective games is up there! as a civmar sailor for the u.s navy, this game will have more of an eerie vibe when deployed! Pope is a genius!
Great episode. Way too quiet.
Wow this is creepy
Literally yesterday I was thinking "How the hell did they translate this game for different languages" and thenthis video pops up :)
Creepy
It's all a simulation
Really intersting video ! Would love to see the same with Chants Of Sennaar devs
Great dev story and fantastically creative game. Great example of letting limitations drive creativity in game design.
Fascinating
Absolute masterpiece of a game
Had no idea that Obra Dinn was by the same guy who did Papers Please! Now I understand why the vibes match up.
Obra Dinn is a gem of a game & I love Lucas Pope :D
This gives me flashbacks of Tom Scott's computerphile video about internationalisation. What a nightmare.
Localization really is hard and should be something to be aware of not only in games, but all other places as well
Zero Punctuation sent me here. Mebbe with each spoken phrase in original language, have a clue that tells you the accent, local translation, and original language text with glossary. Sure, it's work for the player, but this is a hardcore game that's not spoon -feeding the player. Thanks for the videos!!! 🐚🐚🐚
fromsoftware, japanese game company:
try tongue but hole
everybody gets it, ain't a big deal
I know that some of the answers in the English version can be ambiguously answered (spiked vs speared). In other languages, is there a similar system? Meaning that each language would have a differently programmed set of answers if so.
Great on Pope though for being so dedicated to localisation. I speak English (and it does help with knowing the accents in the voice acting) but I highly respect the decision to make it more accessible for as many as you can.
This is one of the best games I have played ever. But I do have to admit that I found it difficult to understand some of it and by the end I felt I was cheating by checking the meaning of some of the positions in the boat hierarchy. Even then, the game was absolutely incredible.
this guy is a genius. I wish there was a movie about this
Loved obra dinn, but man, papers please is one of the best games of all time. Keep on truckin, Lucas!
I hope you have more games in thr works
I loved that game so much.
Lucas Pope kinda looks like Cornelius Hickey from The Terror, which is honestly just perfect
DUDE. (Sides the tedious and awesome clue searching, personal op mind you) THIS GAME IS CAPTIVATING. Im a story sider in any game, and the story is completely captivating.
This is one of the greatest games of all time, without question.
wow...good sound
What a gem of a game this is.
One of the most original and completely well made games I've ever played.
I like this guy!
Pretty much the best looking game I've ever seen
Curious why the dialogue volume in far lower then other videos published around h same time. Super quiet compared to some other War Stories videos ARS put out.
2:31 that explains "killed (sword)"
Lucas Pope
Lucas Pope (Creator) was stabbed by Edward Nichols (Second Mate).
Man, I'd love to work on the localization of this game. Translating short sentences in an interesting way is such a good challenge
Volume is extremely low compared to previous episodes of War Stories. What's with the varying quality here Ars?
Oh I'd decide not to localize it at at that point
Also I get why it says "Killed (sword)" now 😀
And when is the next game?
I returned this game because some puzzles depended on accent recognition
I recently picked this up. So far the best part for me (SPOILERS)
was using a conversation the Bosun had to determine the identity of the guy who got ripped apart (0:08)
("Where is my frenchman," "Your mate was torn apart"). There is only one Frenchman on board, so we know that's him (using other contextual clues that can't be briefly explained). The logbook tells us he's the bosun's mate, so we know the other guy was the Bosun ("Your *mate* was torn apart," not friend).
It was a kind of circular elegance that I liked - using one of them to identify the other, and using that identity to identify the first.