Guild Wars 2

From GW2 official twitter feed.

Guild Wars 2 ?@GuildWars2 8h

Reviewed our China plans today – super excited – it’s not far off. #GW2 as a global phenomenon takes a huge step forward with this launch.

No date = useless tweet.

Since they tweeted it on their own account I would guess the release is 2 or 3 months away. If you want to call it useless that is your business.

We already knew that it will come sooner or later this year

The just started 2nd round of beta Jan 26th with Humans, Norns and Charr. 1st round had Humans, Syvari and Asura. I expect 3rd round will have all races and open up the higher level areas. Then open beta with gem shop leading into it going live which isn’t much different from open beta. Plus they are recruiting for the voice over work.

That’s the way Blade & Soul is rolling out in China. 1.5 million simultaneous players in the “beta” but a fully functioning cash shop.

That’s why were drowning in bugs and —-- living story over here? for china?

Korossive.7085:

That’s why were drowning in bugs and —-- living story over here? for china?

How developer intensive is a translation? In my mind I can’t help but think all they need to do is translate text (the implementation of which shouldn’t take a programmer too long to do), record new audio (which might be time consuming but probably not requiring of the main development team).

Mmm although by all appearances it would appear I’m missing something, particularly if your assumption that core team members (or at least a significant number) at ANet are being used to create the translation is correct.

CureForLiving.5360:

Korossive.7085:

That’s why were drowning in bugs and —-- living story over here? for china?

How developer intensive is a translation? In my mind I can’t help but think all they need to do is translate text (the implementation of which shouldn’t take a programmer too long to do), record new audio (which might be time consuming but probably not requiring of the main development team).

Mmm although by all appearances it would appear I’m missing something, particularly if your assumption that core team members (or at least a significant number) at ANet are being used to create the translation is correct.

I don’t have much experience with this, but games in China are very different to the ones we have over here.

For example things have to be more grindy. And you can’t have bones showing, so every single item or zone in the game that has bones in it has to be redesigned.

But it’s great to hear that it won’t be long before it launches in China, cus then the primary focus will most likely be for GWII to get an expansion of some sort.

I doubt the programmers are doing any of the translating, for a start I doubt many of them even know Mandarin and/or Cantonese.

But even if they do know the language video game translation is a whole specialisation in it’s own right. It’s not as simple as running it through Google translate, you have to make sure it actually makes sense which means changing the sentence structure, various cultural references, idioms and sayings etc.

More likely they’ve contracted people who do that as their entire job, moving between different companies as they’re needed.

Grats ArenaNet – may your China launch be as smooth and as successful as it was in the west!

They are doing more than just translating text and voice overs. From what I have read they are integrating a different sort of tutorial type system, hints and other things. Apparently these things will be added to all GW2 at some point.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/07/19/guild-wars-2-outlines-china-release-new-rewards-in-dev-update/

Here, peruse at your leisure.

http://gw2.kongzhong.com/index.html

Behellagh.1468:

Here, peruse at your leisure.

http://gw2.kongzhong.com/index.html

Thanks for the link I had an LoL with what Google translate did to the page, specifically race “Charles” and profession, “Stalker”. haha See screen cap.

Some of the news/announcement items include cute infographics that are a tad more informative.

Naus the Gobbo.5172:

For example things have to be more grindy. And you can’t have bones showing, so every single item or zone in the game that has bones in it has to be redesigned.

There goes Orr and the Godskull weapons. They’ll love ascended crafting though.

Usually that would be right (about having to cover up the bones) but the Chinese website has screenshots of Necro minions with their skeleton faces. So I am wondering if they’ve somehow managed to bypass that?

Wow… GW2 china looks better than the current GW2! CYA GUYS!

…Santa Kodan and … I don’t even.

Best… Fan? Art NA.

Will the GW2 china release have any effect on the TP?

IVIUIEI.9631:

Will the GW2 china release have any effect on the TP?

No, they’re playing on completely separate servers to us. The game’s being released by a Chinese company (in conjunction with Arenanet). So their client shouldn’t have any impact whatsoever on ours – except for the things Arenanet has been working on to add to both clients.

That second piece of fan art is AWESOME. That person was obviously a GW1 player – hence Jora <3

Finally they will have lots of people that actually like all the grind, well played ANet.

This appeases the Nexon gods.

Judge Banks.9018:

This appeases the Nexon gods.

Yes Nexon owns a share in NCSoft.
But Nexon is a KOREAN company. Korea is not China, and in fact the two countries don’t share a lot of love for one another.

Well if GW2 is a succes in China, we might get “even more” quality updates. Lets wait and see

ps, inb4 cantha!

I’m sure the bots cant wait to get started.

the bots already started… Also how does a chinese version of the game mean more bots?
They would be playing the chinese version, not the US/EU version. (I’m pretty sure Arenanet has blocked China from the NA/EU version – at least I remember them saying that close to launch – as a preventative measure against botting)