https://www.playlostark.com/en-us/news/articles/september-team-update
In what is not surprising to me (but is pretty much something a lot of the “Amazon Games is lying about the reasons for delaying the release” crowd are being largely incorrect and ignorant about), one of the biggest reasons both Amazon and Smilegate RPG is delaying the launch, is due to the localization (something I’ve mentioned numerous times not only with Lost Ark, but many other titles that try to provide proper text and audio localization of all the languages that ends up being supported for the EU region).
Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, are often times very contextual; they do not translate directly into English. I still remember the talk that one of Trion Worlds Korean localizer for Devilian gave, regarding the challenges she encountered. Devilian did not have a large overarching story compared to Lost Ark, but it’s quest dialogs still had a small amount of story that needed localization including all of the usual stuff like items, skills, and game systems. She translated all of the Korean first to English, and then worked with the other (French and German) localizers from the English translation. Things like humor and cultural references proved to be challenging. One “gotcha” type example was the dungeon rating system (the tier rating system in many Korean games is “S”, “SS”, and “SSS” for the highest ones; in Devilian KR, it was “SS”). The German localizer quickly pointed out about the cultural faux pas with using that in the German localization (this is in regards to the SS in Nazi Germany). They quickly resolved this one by making the highest dungeon rankings stop at “S”.
Additionally, Asian languages are 2-byte and take up different amounts of display space. So you have things like kerning issues that needs to be taken into consideration with text display for other languages. Readability is also something easily to overlook and depends heavily on the type of font that is used (ELYON is a huge offender in this area with the font choice). Some publishers take the easy way out by using unstylized fonts that don’t require a lot of effort, but look really bland, generic and ugly (an example of this is the font used in games like Black Desert Online, Riders of Icarus, Astellia, and Bless Online; they all use that same god awful font). That is what impressed me with the stylized font that was used in Devilian’s NA/EU client; it was nice looking, very readable, and a huge amount of back end effort expended to eliminate all of the overflowing display issues that is the norm when using such display fonts. Lost Ark’s NA/EU client similarly uses stylized fonts (adding to the same display challenges with having to deal with overflowing and overlapping text). The following was the livestream where the localization topic was discussed.
After that, I personally gained a much larger appreciation for the complexities involved in localization. Lost Ark does have a significant amount of text and audio for the main story quest dialogs. That is where the localization challenges are located in terms of proper translation into other languages (taking into account grammar, social and cultural references). I know that some folks look at the community created translations (some of it done automatically using Google Translate; which works well for menus and short skill descriptions) and see it as being done already. The problem with that simplistic view is that localization of actual dialog does not work that way. All text localization needs to be properly completed first before voicing is done. Besides the production budget required, that is one of the main reasons why a lot of western publishers of Korean MMO’s, do only minor voice overs for western versions.
Smilegate RPG has always been committed with having at least some of that dialog voiced in the localized languages that are being supported (this was known years ago); for the NA/EU region, that means English, French, German, and Spanish at launch. EU also has other languages that many publishers also support including Italian and Portuguese. If I personally was not aware of the challenges involved in terms of creating quality localizations, I would probably be thinking the same as the “machine translation is done” crowd.
I’m the last person who would white knight for Amazon Games and am very familiar with the shenanigans of Korean development studios. I’m also in no way a white knight for Lost Ark or it’s development studio (Tripod Studio which is the development subsidiary under Smilegate RPG). I had a huge amount of criticism for the end game direction back when Rohendel was released (when I stopped playing the KR server). Smilegate RPG’s long delayed IPO hinges upon launching the western version (international expansion was very much written into their prospectus), has never been into rushing out this game, and have always been concerned about the localization with their publishing partners. I knew this would be the biggest hangup for this game in the west given the sheer amount of text dialog (with decent portions of it also vocalized). If their Korean stock market debut was more important, they would’ve just rushed out a low grade effort like most other Asian MMO’s. Take a look at Swords of Legends Online (SOLO) as an example of just bad localization quality; I tried the demo and it had very poor quality English localization that was all over the place (bits and pieces of Chinese text and audio dialog intermixing with English). I hear this still exists in the launch version with small amounts of it having been cleaned up. That is not acceptable in my book and also not the quality that Smilegate RPG would fine tolerable for Lost Ark. But nah, according to the peanut gallery, they are all lying about the delay so that New World can launch first /s.
