Guild Wars 2

In the last TESO update support for cyrillic symbols was added, which made translating game to Russian much easier. Why can’t something seemingly simple be done in gw2, as well as support for 3rd party localization? That will free anet from need to ever think about Russian localization themselves – and one of the reasons Russian players (willing to pay for the game) is the lack of Russian language (even though purchase page was translated). EDIT: No, all the stupid Russian kids tend to hang out in Free-to-play games like Black Desert or Blade and Soul or Warframe, so it’s safe.

Perhaps, ArenaNet and/or NCSoft prefer to retain control of localizations. I don’t know.

I do know there is a Dev response pertaining to this issue; you could use the search engine of choice to find it, if you are so inclined.

Good luck.

The short story is: it’s not as simple as the OP suggests. There are costs to ANet (time, money, personnel) and only relatively minor business benefits.
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In theory, ANet could add a bunch of different alphabets. The game is missing a small number of characters from kanji and cyrillic and of course it lacks anything in arabic or any number of other languages spoken by 100s of thousands or even millions of potential gamers.

Unfortunately, it’s not free for ANet to add them. They need to be rendered in a font appropriate for the game at several different sizes. QA is required. And they need to hire customer service experts who can make sure everyone on the relevant staff can identify when someone has tried to get around appropriating naming/chat rules by substituting letters.

None of that is necessarily difficult or really expensive; it’s just not free. So the community would have to give something else up.

Further, there’s very little benefit for ANet: how many more people will buy the game because it supports Cyrillic? of those who already paid, how much improved will they find the game, compared to other QoL changes that ANet might offer?

If you look at the supported alphabets, they include all the languages for which ANet has a language-specific server or localization: English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese. The exception: Korean, the home language used by ANet’s holding company, NCSOFT.

tl;dr adding characters isn’t free; ANet is unlikely to add more without a compelling business reason to do so.

See also:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Add-Cyrillic-Symbols/5464217

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

The short story is: it’s not as simple as the OP suggests.

It could be. If ArenaNet only wanted to support fan translations, you wouldn’t be able to use the fonts anywhere else. They wouldn’t even need to implement the fonts themselves, only the ability to add your own, essentially supporting any language.

Translating the game is probably already possible. You could for example modify the strings in Gw2.dat and the existing font.

Healix.5819:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

The short story is: it’s not as simple as the OP suggests.

It could be. If ArenaNet only wanted to support fan translations, you wouldn’t be able to use the fonts anywhere else. They wouldn’t even need to implement the fonts themselves, only the ability to add your own, essentially supporting any language.

Translating the game is probably already possible. You could for example modify the strings in Gw2.dat and the existing font.

ANet can’t support “fan translations” without accepting responsibility for bad translations and making it more difficult to deal with unauthorized translations. Plus, QA is still required to ensure that the system used for people to inject their own fonts works, for any possible font family.

The task of localization isn’t simple, either: it includes all skills, dialogue, interfaces, tooltips, and all future additions and changes to those. We’re expecting that some group of bilingual speakers can manage to crowd source all of the above and keep it going for the lifetime of the game, simply because they enjoy doing so.

As an example of just how unlikely this is, take a look at the officially supported wikis:

• English has >54,000 articles
• French has just over 35,000
• German has just over 33,000
• Spanish has under 4,000

(To summarize: neither the German nor French wikis has caught up to the comprehensiveness of the English wiki and Spanish isn’t doing much better than the non-official wikis for non-supported languages — that’s before addressing how thorough the articles are, although from experience, I know that both German & French articles are quite good when there’s a finished article.)

This makes it seem unlikely that even a small group of dedicated individuals is going to be able to translate the entire game, maintain those translations (and add new ones), and offer a quality that is sufficient that it’s going to get a lot of people to buy the game, who haven’t yet done so because it lacks localization in their native tongue. (The wikis have built in tools that make it easier for volunteer editors at each to adapt or at least link the other versions.)

tl;dr it’s not that simple

In case it’s unclear: I would love to see support in the game for more languages. I just don’t see that it’s likely to happen, because it’s a high-effort project that probably won’t generate much revenue.

Healix.5819:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

The short story is: it’s not as simple as the OP suggests.

It could be. If ArenaNet only wanted to support fan translations, you wouldn’t be able to use the fonts anywhere else. They wouldn’t even need to implement the fonts themselves, only the ability to add your own, essentially supporting any language.

Translating the game is probably already possible. You could for example modify the strings in Gw2.dat and the existing font.

You could modify Gw2.dat but I am pretty sure that also happens to fall under the “violating the ToS” category.