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xzar_monty
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Everything posted by xzar_monty
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Good post, that. I also dislike grinding, and I have no interest in leveling up to infinity (having said that, PoE was very, very deeply flawed in the sense that you reached the level cap way too early). I think BG2 style random encounters were excellent, especially because some of them also carried the story forward. Sure, they were not completely random, but they had enough qualifiers to make them appear fairly unpredictable: you had to have certain members in your party, you had to sleep outdoors after a particular thing had happened, and so on. Had I been a game developer, I would have carried this theme forward and made it even more interesting, probably to an extent where not everybody's game was the same. With PoE, everything is completely predictable, and everything in the game world just stands still in its place until you go there and meet it. Back in the day, there was a game called Ultima V, and the world of that game was alive. The resistance met near a well at midnight (you had to go there at that time to meet them), a certain bloke hid skeleton keys near a tree for a certain purpose at certain times, and so on. It baffles me somewhat that this line of aliveness has not been pursued by game developers with an awful lot more power at their disposal.
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It would be nice to hear why random encounters should be left in the past or why they are garbage. Nobody has said anything as to the reasons.
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There are plenty of areas where you can rest but there's a chance of monsters waking you up (this, I'm happy to agree, isn't particularly great). Anyway, I simply feel PoE missed a glorious opportunity to add an extra layer to the game. A game (in this genre) with random content is inherently more interesting than one without it, although the random content can obviously be implemented badly.
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"Kind of", and "most" were your qualifiers. I'm not sure which percentage of maps went dead, but I would hazard it was less than 50%. You are right, though, that some of them did. But that's vastly different from PoE, where they ALL go dead.
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That's only true to a certain extent. I agree that they are not completely random, when you think of what the word "random" means, but they are random in the sense that you don't exactly know when they're going to happen. So, for example, in BG2: -- You may come across some thieves and/or vampires at night -- You may be ambushed when you sleep, either by "random" monsters or more specific encounters -- You may come across monsters when you move from one location to another. PoE had none of this. I think it was a shame, because as soon as you had gone through a map, it instantly became dead. And resting was always perfectly safe, even with monsters right next to you.
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Random encounters can be extremely interesting. For instance, in Baldur's Gate II, they were great.
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This was already a problem in PoE1: the world is completely "dead" apart from the stuff that has been scripted into it. This "dead" nature of the world goes pretty far. For instance, if you want to rest when you have monsters right next to you (just outside of your reach, within the fog of war), you can: they will not move an inch, they will just stand there. There is not even an illusion of a world that is alive. And nothing random will ever appear in any location you have visited.
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Yes. The translators were working under impossible conditions. Thus, the result is rubbish.
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Now, if this word count (1 million words) is anywhere near accurate, that alone pretty much explains why the translation is rubbish. A million words is approximately ten regular-sized novels (350 to 450 pages, depending on the layout). If a very good translator worked at it full time, it would take approximately two years to come up with a good translation for all of it. So, what I think has happened is that either, 1) a lot of people have worked on the translations independently of each other with no one to co-ordinate their efforts and make sure everything is consistent, or, 2) a small number of people (perhaps just one) has run everything through google translate and pretty much left it at that, with some minor revisions. The enormity of the work is such that it seems more obvious than ever that Obsidian have no idea what they're doing. IF that 1 million words is correct.
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It's really embarrassing when a product is brought into the market in such a state that a lot of people can legitimately claim "I could do better than this!" -- and they are right.
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<quotation error, cannot delete post, ignore>
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Just out of curiosity: how much do you actually know about what you're talking about? I've been doing translations for twenty years, I've translated 70+ books and quite a lot of academic writing, song lyrics, poetry, magazine articles etc. I have always had time to translate properly. That is a prerequisite for me taking the project in the first place. There are specific areas where translators often don't have enough time (television and movies, for instance), and interpreters nearly always have to work under incredibly tight time constraints, but what you're saying simply isn't true.
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This is not true. Although I agree that it is generally best to translate into your first language, this is by no means a rule. I, for instance, have translated quite a lot of stuff into English, which is not my first language. This may not be true abroad, but in France, in translator studies, it's what you learn. Whether something is true or not does not depend on the country where you are. If this is what is taught in France, it doesn't make it true. It may also be the first rule in professional translation in France, which is fine with me, but even this does not make it true. (I would go so far as to argue that any proper discipline should also encourage its students to question the discipline itself, just to keep themselves from becoming too dogmatic.) It's perfectly sensible to start with the idea that translations should be done into one's native language. But translating into other languages, too, is not only a possibility, it is also something that people do incredibly well. But, I agree, this is slightly off-topic.
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Abel: The likely problem, I would say, is that Obsidian doesn't really care, doesn't pay properly, doesn't give enough time for the translators, doesn't care who the translators are and isn't qualified to make sure whether the translation makes any sense. Consequently, the translators make an awful mess in an awful hurry, and get paid very little. It's heartbreaking.
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General Feedback
xzar_monty replied to JayFef's topic in Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)
Yes, but the game has been paid for and released. It is perfectly reasonable to expect it to be in fine shape, which, judging by these forums, it manifestly is not. -
This is not true. Although I agree that it is generally best to translate into your first language, this is by no means a rule. I, for instance, have translated quite a lot of stuff into English, which is not my first language. Just think of writers like Joseph Conrad or Vladimir Nabokov who happen to be some of the most remarkable users of the English language of the past 150 years. They were not natives. Or, just think of any internet forum and how they demonstrate to you that a stunningly large proportion of native English speakers have a very tenuous grasp on the only language they know. Besides, it's not as if PoE represents ambitious, extremely well-written English that is demanding to translate. I am happy to admit that there are good ideas there and the writing is by no means bad, but in terms of challenge and literary quality, it's fairly straightforward and easy stuff.
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I very seriously doubt the translator gets paid well. Of course we will have to define what "well" means here. Is it well for Tokyo, Reykjavik, Helsinki and London, or is it well for Delhi, Mogadishu, Lima and Hampton Roads, Virginia?
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English-speaking people tend to be particularly poor when it comes to learning other languages. The funny side of this is that a shocking number of English-speaking people speak very, very poor English. So, they are fluent in no languages at all. But anyway, I don't think foreign-language markets are that big a deal for a company like Obsidian, so the honorable thing to do would be to refrain from these godawful translations altogether. It would reflect much better on the company.
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What you said last is precisely the point. A very poor translation is a waste of time and money, for everybody, and it frustrates the player an awful lot. Really, if the choice is between making an awful translation and not making one at all, surely it is best not to make one at all. Unfortunately, we are unlikely to hear Obsidian's view on this, I suppose.
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Google translate understands nothing about context, so it is bound to produce terrible translations. If you worked in a context where quality of translation matters, relying upon google translate would mean instant career suicide. Apparently it doesn't matter here.
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As a professional translator with twenty years of experience on this, I feel qualified to comment. Mind you, this is speculation, not fact. My hunch is that Obsidian, being a North American company, understands nothing about languages other than English. Therefore, it is absolutely not qualified to make any judgement about whether the translations it receives are worth anything. Also, translations are likely to be extremely unimportant to Obsidian. Thus, whoever does them is paid next to nothing and needs to work in a terrible hurry. What you get, as a result, is a shambles, and nobody at Obsidian knows enough about languages to notice this. Also, they don't really care. It is extremely sad, but the likelihood of the situation getting any better is realistically zero.
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I am only going to comment on the itemization question, because my experience with PoE2 is extremely limited, as I am still waiting for the game to be properly balanced (it'll be no problem if this takes six months, I have other things to do). I loved much of PoE1, but itemization was frankly very poor. As I recall, there were essentially just two items in the game that were really something you wanted to work for and keep: Persistence and Tidefall. I am perfectly willing to accept that there are/were more, but this is how it looked to me. Conversely, there were tons and tons of unique items that were completely mundane, and once you earned shedloads of money, you also learned that although there were many stores in the game, none of them had anything you wanted to buy. (What I did buy, in the end, were the figurines that allowed me to summon nasties to combat.) This was a major shock. A game absolutely brimming with unique items that you couldn't have cared less about. Somehow, the concept of "unique" lost quite a lot of its meaning in the process. So, what you said about feeling sorry for the designers really hit home here.
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Ok, so there is a reasonable logic to it. Good, thanks. In the two screens I tried this, there were no important people to make me aware of the distinction.
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In PoE1, when you entered a new location and pressed the tab key, it highlighted all the characters on screen, thus enabling you to see who was a Commoner, a Peasant, and so on, and who had a unique name and was therefore worth talking to. But in Poe2, this does not happen. You have to move your mouse cursor individually to each character, and only then can you see who is who. Why? I don't see any benefit in making this more complicated than it was. Is it like this in everybody's game? It seems unlikely that it is a bug only existing in mine.
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I did reload an Auto-save and managed to get through it that way. I was able to bring both of us through. So that was that. Strange, though. I went back for Eder because I thought it would be a better idea not to go alone and because the air pockets wouldn't disappear, so there was really no reason not to go back.
