Whenever I play an american developed game, I’m amused of abuse they inflict on the american language…
Its not just Rockstar, its every damn developer out there who has spelling issues, grammatical issues, syntax issues, missing words issues. Even as a european I cringe whenever I see them.
Sometimes translations can be funny though - I still fondly remember the Star Trek movie that started with the crew in a forest, sitting near a campfire and talking about roasting Marshmellows…or, as the translator appearently thought, Mars Melons…
Anyway, one WW2 game that they did a good job with back in the day was Medal of Honor Allied Assault. I thought the German coming over the P.A. system in the mission when you’re going to sabotage (the world’s tiniest) submarine was pretty good. I remember being impressed with how good it was (I’ve lived in Germany and studied German in grad school).
Try listening to American actors trying to speak any Nordic language in games/movies. Most of the time I honestly can’t tell what they’re trying to say and have to rely on the subtitles!
They even had some Serbian and Russian voice actors for some characters who really should have known better. I would have thought that some guy at Rockstar would have heard names like Karadžić or Milošević once in a while too.
I’m with Papageno and Tom on this. It’s clear Rockstar isn’t trying to screw with anyone, really, in RDR. Maybe naive people in general who say stupid, dated, things we’d consider politically incorrect in the modern world. But even then that sorta fits the period.
I haven’t gotten to Ricketts yet, just made it into Mexico, but I have heard phrases like “That was a hairy one, John” and other slang figures of speech that just don’t sound right for the period.
Why should this matter? In many games I’d agree it’s not worth bothering about. But, unlike even GTA IV’s attempt at self-seriousness with all its pretensions of verisimilitude, Red Dead Redemption does a brilliant job of bringing a setting to life in a videogame. As someone else noted in another thread, the closer you get to real immersion the more you notice little things that can break it.
As for Spanish language content in particular, first, I was rather pleased and surprised to find the natives actually speaking Spanish in Mexico and not accented English. I was even more impressed that I wasn’t getting a translation in my subtitles (at least for generic NPCs). That’s kinda ballsy but cool.
But if they’re screwing it up, yeah, how much crap do we give Japanese games that mangle English? And how hard would it be for Rockstar just to go over the dialogue with a Mexican-born Spanish speaker.
Considering how much blood, sweat and tears seems to have gone into every other aspect of the game why let something so easily fixed crop up and, for some, mess with the experience?
Giantbombcast had a nice discussion about the few things that have been bothering me with the game. Notably the awkwardness that comes with ‘figuring’ through the ambient challenges. Too often I am penalized for seemingly doing the ‘right’ thing by saving a hooker or taking down a raving band of derelicts in a town. I’m still at the point where I’m having a bit of a brain fart trying to assess each of these situations properly so as NOT to mess them up, but by the time I figure the correct course of action, it’s usually too late.
It just sometimes feels like a crapshoot on when it is safe to kill or not. I’ve had random strangers try to steal my horse only to lose honor when I shoot them off my stolen steed. (Protip: just call your horse back when this happens and it will buck off the thief allowing you to hogtie them which I guess is what the game wants).
I also really wish chests and loot able stuff had the glowing aura that they do in Multiplayer. It can be a bit of a bear trying to scour the environment for these things in single player.
Is this the proper place for me to lament the use of Latin as a “magical” language in countless fantasy movies and several RPG’s, or should I save that for some other time?
I think it’s actually a good sign that the immersion level is to the point that something like this can detract from it - in many games, proper pronounciation and grammatical structure of foreign languages and occasional anachronistic references is so far down on the list of troubles that it often doesn’t get noticed let alone merit being mentioned on QT3. That said, it’s something that really shouldn’t have been that hard to get right.
I seriously still think the honor system is bugged for a lot of you. Like the physics engine, it seems like some of you get a bad “seed” at the beginning and the systems are just flat out not working correctly from then on.
For example, I see the complaint about the guy knifing the woman, and I have never seen a loss of honor in my game when I just shoot him. Guy stealing my horse? Shoot him. No honor loss.
It’s disappointing that the honor system is so quirky. This is something that needs to be gotten right. I do love the game, but it has more than its fair share of flaws.
Yeah. Rockstar, that venerable American institution, can make errors. Along with other American video game developers, like BioWare. Relic. Ironclad. Radical. Great American software developers! There’s also Ubisoft Montreal. EA Vancouver. EA Canada. Why, I could just go on and on. Lionhead. DICE. Starbreeze. CD Projekt. Square. Nintendo. ソニックチーム,
Yessir. Lots of good American companies.
…oh, wait, dang. Rockstar’s not American. RDR was made by an American branch, but GTA4 and its DLCs were made by the damnable Scots!
I’ve never had honor losses from shooting the guy knifing the whore, but have had it when shooting horse thieves. But the whole honor system’s not really fully cooked anyway–there’s plenty of plot missions just in the first island^HNew Austin that reward honor on completion that really shouldn’t.
My biggest problem with Rockstar sandboxes remains that they’re stuck in the formula of gating everything in them to arbitrary missions. I just played one the other night that popped up tutorial tips that I could use dead-eye time to lock onto multiple foes quickly…which I was doing at least seven or eight hours ago already (but at least the game was letting me before that mission). Types of side activity jobs only unlocked after missions having nothing to do with them. Gunstores only discover that newfangled device the double-barreled shotgun after plot mission X. On and on.
On the upside, the gating in RDR isn’t nearly as irritating as GTA IV; it’s more back to Vice City or San Andreas levels. But it’s still an unnecessary annoyance: open up the world you varmints!
I see you keep making as much sense as in your previous post!
Anyways, if you missed my point because of me being obscure, the point was that Natively english speaking countries mess up all the time language-wise. Perhaps even more so, since outsiders are more prone to check their syntax and language in general.
Its a shame, but it happens, but personally I am not bothered by it.
One problem I have with all the GTA games is that after many if not most missions you end up with police chasing you around - and I hate getting permanently chased in games, it triggers some primal fear or something. This was not helped by the controls in GTA IV with resulted in me being unable to shake off even 2-3 star police chases…
