Guild Wars 2

Imagine a gaming revolution where you no longer need language specific servers, where your party of 5 could each speak and read completely different languages and still comunicate as if they understood all 5 languages. Imagine you as a gamer reading the all chat with everyone typing in your language. there would be no “left out” feeling or asking for translations or having to use third party webstites like google to translated a sentence for you.

A program like this would revolutionize gaming accross all platforms. and it doesnt have to stop there a program like this could help in any language barrier indestry. The implications and money to be made on such a program could be endless.

I do not possess the skills to make such a program but im betting there are a few people that you have hired that could created such a masterpeice of technology.
to write a program that will auto translate all written text comming into a terminal into the desired language picked in the options menu.

so say i have all my information set to english, this means what if anyone PMs, Emailes, chats in the chat window, NPC chat log, and other game related text would all be automatically changed to english before popping up on my screen. this could work alot like the implemented system for cuss words where they are blocked or changed into “kitten” before they can be seen by others. there could be the option for translation on/off. so those that still want to see all the languages can.

this could allow say a german, french, chinese, english, and mexican player group to work together without a language barrier keeping them from playing with the other do to no comunication.

This program will only increase you player base and increase the feeling of a huger community. PLease Please take this idea seriously as id pay for the game all over again if it had this program integrated into the game.

Does this sound like a Possible program that any other gamers would also like to have implemented if someone were to create it and it work properly?

FFXI had a rudimentary version of this. It worked pretty well. I regularly grouped with JP who spoke no English (and I don’t speak Japanese). However, it does require a fair development effort. Fully automatic translation is pretty far from being able to make decent translations on the fly, but it’s good enough for players to communicate if they’re moderately tolerant of translation mistakes.

Cultural differences are more of an issue when creating full-world servers. Taking the FFXI example, it wasn’t common for JP & EN to group. It took a bit of extra effort to communicate. There was also a difference in emphasis on the importance of the team versus the individual for JP/EN. JP tend to be more team oriented than EN, while EN tended to be more focused on individual gearing. Even so, there was enough similarity for many players to cross-group.

That kind of grouping might not always be possible. I didn’t experience this myself, but I’ve heard that GW1 actually had to create a separate server for the French and completely segregate them from the rest of the world due to play-style differences causing friction in the game.

Also, the pace of FFXI play permitted typing and playing at the same time. GW2 does not. You pretty much have to stop playing in GW2 if you have to use chat to communicate anything more complex than a terse command to a newbie. Hell, I’ve killed my character just by joking around on vent and missing a dodge, much less typing in game.

So, while I loved the translator and world-wide grouping in FFXI and would love to see that kind of cross-cultural thing again in another game, I don’t think it would work in GW2 until actual live voice translation was possible and integrated into game. GW2 just has too much arcade-level play in it to make typed chat viable for communication.