Cyberpunk 2077 considering multiple languages, translator implants needed to understand them
By Tim Colwill on March 5, 2013 at 9:32 am
Cyberpunk 2077‘s plan for a translation system will leave you unable to understand people speaking other languages unless you pick up a translator implant — with better quality implants providing better translations.
“As of yet no decisions have been made, but we’re thinking about a system that could tell the world’s story,” said CDProjekt RED’s Sebastian Stepien in an interview with a Polish site (fittingly). “The idea is to record everything in original languages, i.e. if we’ll meet Mexicans in the game, they’ll be taking – Mexican slang even, portrayed by Mexican actors. The player would be able to buy a translator implant, and depending on how advanced it is, he’ll get better or worse translation.”
“You can’t reliably recreate street slang of Los Angeles or some other American city, you can’t simply dub it and reproduce those emotions, rhythms of speech, mannerisms. Everything has to be cohesive. Otherwise we’d simply hear that Polish actors are trying to imitate Americans. That won’t work.”
I think this is an exceptionally radical idea, right up there with the fact that the enemies on the hardest setting of Crysis spoke Korean so that you couldn’t understand the orders they were shouting at each other. The translation comes to us courtesy of darcler on the Cyberpunk 2077 forums. Thanks!
CD Projekt RED on putting the ‘cyber’ and the ‘punk’ back into Cyberpunk 2077
Other stuff including 'dialogue' and 'character appearance' and 'choices'.
Two smaller 20-hour Witcher or Cyberpunk games in development at CDPR
CD Projekt thinks a "20 hour game" is "small". Take that, AAA developers.
Cyberpunk 2077 confirmed to have multiplayer elements
And.... and that's all we know. Okay!
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That’s actually quite cool.
Freaking awesome!
this is true to CP2020′s mechanics. I’m really glad to see them considering it.
Sounds like an interesting idea. What if you’re a Mexican gamer though? Does that mean you’ll instantly understand the sections you’re not supposed to?
That’s the benefit of being multi-lingual.
That sounds amazing.
vcatkiller,
I’d imagine it would just be a bonus for them.
I don’t think there would be any portion of dialogue in the game that you’re not meant to understand. At least that’s how I perceive it?
Bike.
Do it. It could backfire but i’m keen for them to experiment and try it out. The quality of translations varying could be interesting though I wonder how it will work. Will the people in question suddenly start speaking in english complete with proper lipsycning or will there be a robotic translation sounding of in your head as they talk?
yeapal,
Yeah makes sense. It would be a pain if you couldn’t play half the game because you don’t speak English for example. Besides it kind of means you’ve got the whole “collect language upgrades so you can learn more of the backstory” thing happening.
jidensha (need a language upgrade for that)
exe3,
My guess would be that it’d be subtitled, though machine voices could be an option.
If it’s just subtitles then i’m unkeen.
This IS what make S.T.A.L.K.E.R. so amazing is they never had any intention of doing a complete English translation :)…
Speak for yourself, those of us who are deaf are pretty damn happy they’re there, as well as many other people I know who have no hearing problems and yet still use subtitles. Testing new mechanics to keep game types fresh is never a bad thing.
The conversation branches would have to be very extensive for this to be implemented. I can imagine a few interesting encounters based on the quality of translations. I’m sold!
mrthumpy,
I’m not suggesting no subtitles (they’ll be included regardless of what they do just like with all the english dialogue, that’s common sense). I’m saying that there should be voiced translations. Not everyone likes reading subtitles when there could and should be a voiced translation (thematically it fits, how the world of Cyberpunk 2077 doesn’t have the technology for voiced translations is beyond me).
Best Idea for this game