That feeling when you’ve been out-pedantried.
Prague Castle has the best collection of medieval armour and weapons (real and reproductions) that I have ever seen. You’d have hoped Warhorse would have used such a local resource…
Seriously though, if you’re ever in Prague, visit the Castle and walk through the Armoury on Golden Lane.
Admittedly, my post was snark. Let me elaborate. You are right that asking about various choices made in development, including which ethnicities are in and why, is fine. If someone did that - researched the time period and geographical location in detail, spoke with the development team and their historians, asked about their choices…that would be good. I am sure Kingdom Come does not get everything 100% accurate, for various production, knowledge or budgetary reasons, and no doubt there are things to scrutinize. But this obsession with inserting nonwhite people inside a game that takes place in 16km2 of rural area around Rataje nad Sázavou, in a place that you would have a difficult time finding nonwhite people even today?
Sure, they could have included some nonwhite, but what purpose would it serve? Then there would be criticism of tokenism. These guys made a game about our country’s history. About our ancestors. They are not obligated to portray africans or asians in it to satisfy white-guilted americans or brits.
Saw one of the reactions to the eurogamer review:
“Eastern Europeans. Repressed for centuries, no colonialism, no black slavery, suffered under Nazism, Communism, and were underrepresented in all media. Never bitched. They make games influenced by their culture/history. Uneducated ignorants call them racist. Thx regressive left!”
Yep.
From what I read of that reddit post, it seems he was mostly criticising screenshots taken from 3 years old trailer. Not sure how up to date armors were there, but I would be interested to read critique like that about the actual game.
That’s a great quote. It’s already a miracle that such a big-budget game wasn’t sidetracked to be about anglo-saxons (cough, cough, Battlefield 1). It could only be made by people from that culture too. I think we should applaud that. It’s always funny how much people want “diversity”, but what they mean by that is pretty narrow and specific.
I saw this yesterday too. I am hopeful.
The voices don’t sound very historically accurate. I guess you can change the language in-game?
At least in one review I watched (maybe IGN?) it mentioned the accents were from all over the modern world. TBH I can be fine with that. I dont speak middle ages… whatever the hell they spoke… So the accents can be whatever they like. In fact I would prefer it to be modern vs faking some weird olde worlde kind of accent.
Sure they are! All ancient and Medieval people talked with an English accent! Geez, some people . . .
Except Macedonians. They had Scottish accents. Oh, also some Spartans did too, apparently.
Oh I don’t mind, I was kind of pointing out that those quibbling over tiny armour inaccuracies seem to have overlooked that one rather glaring aspect. ;)
Same island, close enough :)
Of course they shouldn’t try to force in some kind of fake medieval (or fake Slavic) accent.
But I do sometimes wish that a little bit more care was taken with internal consistency. Characters with similar socio-economical and ethnic backgrounds should ideally have similar accents. Or if you can’t do that, go with something fairly neutral. But a ton of totally different and incompatible accents? Ugh.
This kind of thing bugged me the most about Witcher 3: Blood & Wine was exactly this kind of thing. The Duchess had this outrageously thick Swedish accent that did not fit in at all with any of the other characters (including nobles).
I would wear this on a t-shirt.
You can use german, french or english. They wanted to do czech but didn’t have the time, it is half a year of work. And even then it would not be accurate because modern czech is very different from one spoken in 1403. I suppose when someone invents actual time machine and we can import people from those times, then we will finally be able to create 100% accurate videogames!
No need for a time machine. I’m reading a book that addresses the unfolding of language.
When I get home I’ll update the post with a name and a link.
Essentially, we can observe replicable linguistics shifts happening now (pronunciation of every being evry and not ev/e/ri) and what we know to have happened and recreate the structures and the sounds, through backwards following, like a trail of breadcrumbs.
It’s an intensive process and subject to error ofcourse, but search the Internet and you can find the Lord’s Prayer in modern English (obviously) and Shakespearen and Chaucerian and pre Norman conquest.
I mean, they’ve decoded Beowulf and that’s 2000 odd years old.
So it can be done.
But it’d be pointless really because no one would understand it.
If you made a fantasy rpg with authentic Shakespearen syntax etc modern native English speakers would find it difficult to follow.
To get a sense of what I mean get any Shakespeare playscript in the original English and read it.
Doable if you’re native but challenging.
Now what if English is your 2nd or 3rd language?
I occasionally open up Don Quijote in the original Spanish and bounce right off, and I’m supposedly C2 level (near native proficiency.)
Edit: forgot to mention that using Shakespearen language would mean accounting for shifts in meanings of words, resurrecting dead words and killing off most of our modern vocabulary.
This would go far beyond knowing that “wherefore art though romeo…” wasn’t asking where he was, but why he was a Montague. …
I dunno, I’ve watched plenty of good foreign films with English subtitles. :)
(also quite often in JRPGs the original Japanese voices are best, with English subtitles)
Subtitles!
I was talking about a game etc with no subtitles.
:)
If they wanted to be hardcore they should have recorded just the one set of voices in period-appropriate Czech (Bohemian?), with subtitles for all the plebs who can’t understand it.
But no - we get this disappointing dubbed version instead. ;)
Yeah it’s a clear example of society’s detioration!
You already included the name of the book ;-) Unless there’s a major coincidence, you’re talking of The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher. It’s great.
https://www.amazon.com/Unfolding-Language-Evolutionary-Mankinds-Invention/dp/0805080120