Not enough hyperlink use!

[Wormerine]

After beating Deadfire I started another playthrough of Tyranny I realised how underused the “hyperlink” feature was. That, and reading through Guidebook, and feeling like I am learning some things I should have known when playing the game. From what I remember Deadfire uses hyperlinks mostly for two functions:

1) translating handful of reappearing foreign works (Gellarde! Ekera etc.)

2) recapping stuff from PoE1 (who was Eothas, Caed Nua etc.)

 

Tyranny used them in, I believe, a more beneficial ways - giving background lore to characters/concepts your character is familiar with but you as the player isn’t (DF example: who are Children of Dawnstar? Got a rough idea from context by playing Deadfire, thanks to the Guidebook now I know), and giving content to game reactivity - why does Deadfire tell me: “that is the result of your previous choice!” But won’t tell me what choice it was? Tyranny had some other neat uses for it, like Voices speaking to your telepathically.

[Casper]

After beating Deadfire I started another playthrough of Tyranny I realised how underused the “hyperlink” feature was. That, and reading through Guidebook, and feeling like I am learning some things I should have known when playing the game. From what I remember Deadfire uses hyperlinks mostly for two functions:

1) translating handful of reappearing foreign works (Gellarde! Ekera etc.)

2) recapping stuff from PoE1 (who was Eothas, Caed Nua etc.)

 

Tyranny used them in, I believe, a more beneficial ways - giving background lore to characters/concepts your character is familiar with but you as the player isn’t (DF example: who are Children of Dawnstar? Got a rough idea from context by playing Deadfire, thanks to the Guidebook now I know), and giving content to game reactivity - why does Deadfire tell me: “that is the result of your previous choice!” But won’t tell me what choice it was? Tyranny had some other neat uses for it, like Voices speaking to your telepathically.

have to agree here.

[Yosharian]

I've seen quite a lot of complaints about this, but I think it's great.

 

I really like being able to refresh my memory on who a particular faction is, when they're referenced in a dialogue, for example.

[the streaker]

Totally agreed. What a waste... 75% of the hyperlink text seemed to do nothing other than explain what some foreign exclamation meant. The whole foreign word thing was poorly done as well, everyone just inserts a "gallarde" or "ekara" or whatever at the start of the conversation, then it's back to English, with few exceptions. Who talks like this???

Edited June 2, 2018 by the streaker

[Taevyr]

I definitely agree, especially concerning reactivity. Being able to see how your choices during the conquest and throughout the game influenced the world in Tyranny was one of it's best features, which felt really hollow in Deadfire.

 

The odd part is that some of the writers for Tyranny moved on to work on Deadfire, so we can assume it's not because they didn't know how to implement it further.

[Casper]

Totally agreed. What a waste... 75% of the hyperlink text seemed to do nothing other than explain what some foreign exclamation meant. The whole foreign word thing was poorly done as well, everyone just inserts a "gallarde" or "ekara" or whatever at the start of the conversation, then it's back to English, with few exceptions. Who talks like this???

huana & vilians i suppose?

[Taevyr]

Totally agreed. What a waste... 75% of the hyperlink text seemed to do nothing other than explain what some foreign exclamation meant. The whole foreign word thing was poorly done as well, everyone just inserts a "gallarde" or "ekara" or whatever at the start of the conversation, then it's back to English, with few exceptions. Who talks like this???

Honestly? As a bilingual guy who lives abroad, randomly substituting a certain word in one or the other language since you momentarily forgot it in the proper one, cursing and making other exclamations of surprise/shock in my mother tongue, and misusing one language's idioms in the other are all rather common occurances for me. I'd say they did alright in imitating it in-game.

Edited June 2, 2018 by Taevyr

[Porcelyn]

why does Deadfire tell me: “that is the result of your previous choice!” But won’t tell me what choice it was?

 It's so irritating to me. Why have the icon there at all. It does nothing.

[Mikeymoonshine]

 

why does Deadfire tell me: “that is the result of your previous choice!” But won’t tell me what choice it was?

 It's so irritating to me. Why have the icon there at all. It does nothing.

 

 

yeah I hate that, on several occasions I couldn't even work out what choice it was at all.

[Yosharian]

Totally agreed. What a waste... 75% of the hyperlink text seemed to do nothing other than explain what some foreign exclamation meant. The whole foreign word thing was poorly done as well, everyone just inserts a "gallarde" or "ekara" or whatever at the start of the conversation, then it's back to English, with few exceptions. Who talks like this???

Multilingual people? Baka.

[Casper]

it's not so surprising that most of the people in deadfire are multilingual, back before radio, television, and computers... people actually decided to go out and about, picking up and reading books, learning an interesting trade for a hobby, or picking up useful languages, if for nothing else to pass the time, as there wasn't much more to do but work, eat and talk way back when.

now, the deadfire itself is a sort of battleground between 3 civilizations, the Vilain Trading Company, the Royal Deadfire Company, and the local Huana (wasn't the leading tribe itself called the khanga or something? i have no idea how to spell it), so multicultural melting pot to boot, no?

[Tigranes]

In our world, you're more likely to find weird and interesting hybridisations, where a Vailian comes to the Deadfire and picks up some bastardised Huana phrases in a Vailian accent with a distorted meaning - just as you see with the weird infusion of pseudo-English in, say, Singapore. But it would be far too complicated to handle derivations of fantasy languages and would get impossibly confusing, so what we have is perfectly fine.

 

Folks who insist that it is 'totally unrealistic' might be right in whatever area they're in, but it's well within the bandwidth of plausibility.

[Sven_]

I initially liked that feature in Tyranny, but I've since taken a different stance. If dialogue needs a Wiki hyperlink, it may fall under what is considered "lore dumping". E.g. if you don't get from playing the game what the meaning of a phrase is, the thing to address may be the writing (and design), rather than adding a second layer that explains everything. In particular when designing expansive new worlds, perhaps even language, but also rule-sets, it seems tempting to go overboard here.

 

This bleeds over into other areas as well: Item and spell design, etc. -- each one given its distinctive name and story, and the more the merrier, apparently. A computer RPG is not a tabletop system that players get to know over years of playing. It's typically a standalone piece of campaign narrative, which is a huge difference. Does one really need to know about the world at large here, and can't be keeping things ambiguous and up to the player's imagination such as Thief's The City be undervalued here?

That said though, I am a fan of in-game encyclopedia that explains various things optionally for anbybody who loves to get a bit deeper into it. This dates all the way back to the very first Civ game -- and various game manuals of old. The TES games also have quite a bit of lore, but it's implemented in the form of books mainly. Granted, isometric games have a bit of a harder time in showing rather than telling.

Edited June 3, 2018 by Sven_

[CAlmond]

Totally agreed. What a waste... 75% of the hyperlink text seemed to do nothing other than explain what some foreign exclamation meant. The whole foreign word thing was poorly done as well, everyone just inserts a "gallarde" or "ekara" or whatever at the start of the conversation, then it's back to English, with few exceptions. Who talks like this???

 

go to singapore or spend some time talking to a singaporean

[Wormerine]

I feel it might be the case of time constraint. Adding the generic: "This is the result of your choice from PoE1" is easier, than writing an individual note for each one. Still, it is something to consider - adding both reactivity info and lore info in later patches. I think it would benefit the game a lot if they find time to do it. 

 

[wih]

I initially liked that feature in Tyranny, but I've since taken a different stance. If dialogue needs a Wiki hyperlink, it may fall under what is considered "lore dumping". E.g. if you don't get from playing the game what the meaning of a phrase is, the thing to address may be the writing (and design), rather than adding a second layer that explains everything. 

 

This is probably the right stance to take in general. In my opinion, with PoE 1 the developers made a mistake to introduce an entire new world while at the same time choosing an overly abstract and philosophical main story involving gods and reading souls. They failed to consider that the players will have much less knowledge about the world that the writers themselves. As a result the writing was often hard to follow.

 

With Deadfire they had to continue in the same vein. Again there is a new world, new cultures and a plot that is overly abstract. The players have to be brought up to speed quickly and it becomes necessary to choose between lore dumps and this hyperlink system. 

Edited June 3, 2018 by wih

[Wormerine]

One and only SBH with Deadfire review and some narrative/lore criticism:

 

EDIT: Though seriously, how can you not know what biawac is, after beating PoE1? I still stand by my opinion that using Watcher as protagonist was a mistake, bringing with him a lot of lore baggage, which has to tie in to the sequel, while limiting his investment in Deadfire itself. 

Edited June 4, 2018 by Wormerine

[Purudaya]

Totally agreed. What a waste... 75% of the hyperlink text seemed to do nothing other than explain what some foreign exclamation meant. The whole foreign word thing was poorly done as well, everyone just inserts a "gallarde" or "ekara" or whatever at the start of the conversation, then it's back to English, with few exceptions. Who talks like this???

 

If you spend some time off the beaten path in the real-life Caribbean, you'll find all kinds of kriol dialects that incorporate aspects of different languages into English. Belizeans, for example, have a widely spoken dialect that incorporates words and phonologies from indigenous Miskito and west African languages. Granted, Deadfire doesn't make a real attempt at kriol, but the mishmashing of different languages is actually fairly consistent with real world colonial settings. Hawaiian-American culture is possibly a better example - they generally speak standard English but may still use native terms like "Aloha" and "Mahalo" in everyday speech. 

 

Real world examples aside, it adds flavor and helps characterize the cultural differences between the various factions and cultures in the game. The Huana's "Ekera" and "I say" seem to indicate objective emphasis (German Rhinelanders do the same thing with the word "genau"), while Valian expressions are often passionate/emotional signifiers and exclamations. It's a subtle nod to the character of each faction and is more nuanced and artful than players give it credit for, imo.

[Casper]

I still stand by my opinion that using Watcher as protagonist was a mistake, bringing with him a lot of lore baggage, which has to tie in to the sequel, while limiting his investment in Deadfire itself. 

i actually liked the fact that we got to use our old watchers again. and i don't really see what you're complaining about?

[InsaneCommander]

I've seen quite a lot of complaints about this, but I think it's great.

 

I really like being able to refresh my memory on who a particular faction is, when they're referenced in a dialogue, for example.

 

This makes a big difference for me. I'd get bored really fast if I couldn't easily check to see what the different castes are in the Huana culture. Obviously, you eventually get to know these things, but it helps in the beginning, making it interesting instead of annoying.

[the streaker]

 

Totally agreed. What a waste... 75% of the hyperlink text seemed to do nothing other than explain what some foreign exclamation meant. The whole foreign word thing was poorly done as well, everyone just inserts a "gallarde" or "ekara" or whatever at the start of the conversation, then it's back to English, with few exceptions. Who talks like this???

 

If you spend some time off the beaten path in the real-life Caribbean, you'll find all kinds of kriol dialects that incorporate aspects of different languages into English. Belizeans, for example, have a widely spoken dialect that incorporates words and phonologies from indigenous Miskito and west African languages. Granted, Deadfire doesn't make a real attempt at kriol, but the mishmashing of different languages is actually fairly consistent with real world colonial settings. Hawaiian-American culture is possibly a better example - they generally speak standard English but may still use native terms like "Aloha" and "Mahalo" in everyday speech. 

 

Real world examples aside, it adds flavor and helps characterize the cultural differences between the various factions and cultures in the game. The Huana's "Ekera" and "I say" seem to indicate objective emphasis (German Rhinelanders do the same thing with the word "genau"), while Valian expressions are often passionate/emotional signifiers and exclamations. It's a subtle nod to the character of each faction and is more nuanced and artful than players give it credit for, imo.

 

 

It's not nuanced and artful at all, though. 99% of the time, the formula is "hyperlinked foreign exclamation! Perfectly spoken English language sentence." Non-native English speakers that are fluent in English generally don't throw in random native language words in the mix... if they do, it's because they can't think of the English word for it, so they will use the two languages interchangeably in a sentence. At least half the races in Deadfire are based on real world colonial powers (i.e. Europeans) and this is not how Europeans speak English.

[algroth]

 

 

Totally agreed. What a waste... 75% of the hyperlink text seemed to do nothing other than explain what some foreign exclamation meant. The whole foreign word thing was poorly done as well, everyone just inserts a "gallarde" or "ekara" or whatever at the start of the conversation, then it's back to English, with few exceptions. Who talks like this???

 

If you spend some time off the beaten path in the real-life Caribbean, you'll find all kinds of kriol dialects that incorporate aspects of different languages into English. Belizeans, for example, have a widely spoken dialect that incorporates words and phonologies from indigenous Miskito and west African languages. Granted, Deadfire doesn't make a real attempt at kriol, but the mishmashing of different languages is actually fairly consistent with real world colonial settings. Hawaiian-American culture is possibly a better example - they generally speak standard English but may still use native terms like "Aloha" and "Mahalo" in everyday speech.

Real world examples aside, it adds flavor and helps characterize the cultural differences between the various factions and cultures in the game. The Huana's "Ekera" and "I say" seem to indicate objective emphasis (German Rhinelanders do the same thing with the word "genau"), while Valian expressions are often passionate/emotional signifiers and exclamations. It's a subtle nod to the character of each faction and is more nuanced and artful than players give it credit for, imo.

It's not nuanced and artful at all, though. 99% of the time, the formula is "hyperlinked foreign exclamation! Perfectly spoken English language sentence." Non-native English speakers that are fluent in English generally don't throw in random native language words in the mix... if they do, it's because they can't think of the English word for it, so they will use the two languages interchangeably in a sentence. At least half the races in Deadfire are based on real world colonial powers (i.e. Europeans) and this is not how Europeans speak English.

The questions of dialect is very strange because whilst I can agree with your criticism for example regarding the Vailian language, I feel there are real-world cases that seem to skim pretty closely to how the "language" is treated in Deadfire. I'm from Argentina for example, and using my own language and regional dialect I feel like I do many things rather similarly to the Vailians in this game - for starters the Buenos Aires accent by and large takes more from Italian and Brazilian accents than it does from the Spanish one as such, so much so that we're often labelled as "Italians who speak Spanish" (I cannot count the number of times I was mistaken for Italian whilst in my visits to Europe for example); meanwhile our "lunfardo" deliberately replaces Spanish words for Italian and Portuguese words, the likes so that "birra" is a much more common casual term for "beer" than "cerveza", or "laburo" for "work" instead of "trabajo" and so on. We say these even as most of us do not actually know how to speak Italian or Portuguese, or are aware of the origin of these terms and so on. It's sort of grown naturally into our everyday jargon, and to us it's every bit a part of our Spanish as "hola".

 

Now, don't take my word for it necessarily as my history is a bit rusty, but to my understanding the reason for this is largely because of the influx of Italian immigrants during the 19th and early 20th century, which led to an unordinary number of Italians being essentially forced to adapt to the language of their new home and kind of changing the dialect forever in the process. I mention this because it might not be too far off from the Vailians' own situation in the Deadfire, where those who have been around for a generation or two may have adopted Aedyrian to best communicate with the other cultures across the archipelago, but who have retained a certain root from the Vailian tongue that has essentially morphed into its own Aedyrian-Vailian dialect in turn. It's interesting to note here that we do meet a few people across the Deadfire who are *not* Vailian yet have adopted the dialect as their own, whilst to the best of my awareness we never actually see two Vailians discussing with one another in *strict* Vailian either - granted, this last point could be a matter of practicality instead. But nevertheless there is a possibility that we are merely seeing a regional dialect opposite to a representation of "foreigners speaking foreign".

 

Granted, this all doesn't mean it's artfully done or otherwise, and to some extent I would agree that there's something that is pretty jarring about the way Vailians in particular are handled here (I don't mind the "ekera" really as it seems to act more as a pet word for them and that's fine). Our "lunfardo" may incorporate foreign terms into our day to day speech but it does so in a manner that is smooth and unintrusive - the cadence of Spanish spoken by an Argentinian isn't really interrupted by the sudden inclusion of an Italian term. In comparison the whole Vailian makeover, whether by means of accent or foreign terminology, seems to often be at odds with the English language, like the same hasn't gone through a process of adaptation or transformation whereby it finds a natural flow amidst its foreign influences and accent and so on. I would say the weirdness comes because the logic seems like that of a dialect but the clash of sounds and accents makes it all feel like it's spoken by a foreigner uncomfortable in said tongue. I think the criticism is valid in the end, though I will say that I just love the whole Vailian imagination and the sound of the words themselves enough to not really mind this at all. But again, YMMV.

Edited June 9, 2018 by algroth

[Purudaya]

 

 

Totally agreed. What a waste... 75% of the hyperlink text seemed to do nothing other than explain what some foreign exclamation meant. The whole foreign word thing was poorly done as well, everyone just inserts a "gallarde" or "ekara" or whatever at the start of the conversation, then it's back to English, with few exceptions. Who talks like this???

 

If you spend some time off the beaten path in the real-life Caribbean, you'll find all kinds of kriol dialects that incorporate aspects of different languages into English. Belizeans, for example, have a widely spoken dialect that incorporates words and phonologies from indigenous Miskito and west African languages. Granted, Deadfire doesn't make a real attempt at kriol, but the mishmashing of different languages is actually fairly consistent with real world colonial settings. Hawaiian-American culture is possibly a better example - they generally speak standard English but may still use native terms like "Aloha" and "Mahalo" in everyday speech. 

 

Real world examples aside, it adds flavor and helps characterize the cultural differences between the various factions and cultures in the game. The Huana's "Ekera" and "I say" seem to indicate objective emphasis (German Rhinelanders do the same thing with the word "genau"), while Valian expressions are often passionate/emotional signifiers and exclamations. It's a subtle nod to the character of each faction and is more nuanced and artful than players give it credit for, imo.

 

 

It's not nuanced and artful at all, though. 99% of the time, the formula is "hyperlinked foreign exclamation! Perfectly spoken English language sentence." Non-native English speakers that are fluent in English generally don't throw in random native language words in the mix... if they do, it's because they can't think of the English word for it, so they will use the two languages interchangeably in a sentence. At least half the races in Deadfire are based on real world colonial powers (i.e. Europeans) and this is not how Europeans speak English.

 

 

I didn't say the hyperlinking itself was artful, but that the differences in how different factions choose to apply their expressions was. I gave you a real-life example of a culture that blends key native terms/slang/expletives into English re: Hawaii. Germany is an inverse example - they've incorporated so many English words into their everyday speak that the phenomenon has earned itself a Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denglisch. Having visited recently, I can confirm hearing select English words - especially slang - regularly peppered into otherwise full German sentences even without English-speakers present.

 

I'm not arguing whether you as a player should find it natural or whether you should think it's well-implemented in Deadfire, but real people do indeed speak like this. 

Edited June 9, 2018 by Purudaya

[Myztik]

That's different, where you substitute individual nouns from one language to another. Deadfire is just shoehorned in words at the beginning or end of sentences

Edited June 10, 2018 by Myztik