[MUD-Dev] Questing (was Re: AI not worth doing in our games?)

[Vincent Archer]

According to amanda at alfar.com:

> wonderful things about AC2 is that there are no NPCs.  No shops,
> no artificial dialogs, etc.  There are a few "guardians", which
> are mobs that protect a resource, and a few quest triggers that
> resemble

And the only "dialog" you need with quest triggers is to right-click
on them. They check what's your quest status (finished, not done
yet, too low level, have the required item), and grant you the next
stage.

> EQ, in contrast, has way too much in-game UI.  Quests, for
> example, are all about magic words in dialog.  I found in
> extremely tedious; while I was playing, I ended up looking up
> "quest guides" just so I wouldn't have to spend minutes trying
> variations on dialog lines until I hit the magic word.  It sure
> didn't feel like cheating--it felt like looking things up in a UI
> reference manual.

Everquest tried to simplify this by highlighting the required key
words with [ ] around them. DAoC copied this, but added the idea
that simply clicking on the word advances the quest.

It tends to work relatively well.

Until Everquest is translated that is.

If you haven't followed it, on Nov 21, "Everquest New Dawn"
launched.  Basically, it's Everquest, fully localised in
europe. There isn't much difference between a "US server" like
Antonius Bayle and the "european" Venril Sathir, as they're both in
english, and located in london, but players on the first pay in US$
and players on the second can pay in english pounds.

Where the fun begins is with the french and german servers. I
started playing EQ again with the french server. Oooops, bad
mistake.

If you can read french, or german, I invite you to read the
appropriate language fora at the Ubisoft (european distributor) EQ
site: www.eqloft.com (select language by clicking on the FR/DE/UK
banners in the corner first).

Roughly, if you trust me on this, the core problem is this:
translation was botched. No one's speaking, but I suspect large
parts of it were done by people who do not speak french (college
level french at best). There's grammatical errors a 7-year old would
immediately spot everywhere, and there are completely erroneous
translations.

Worse: because it was a large job (translating the names of
thousands of MOBs, thousands of NPCs and their dialogs, and tens of
thousand items), it was done by a team, and no one on the team seem
to have spoken with other people (nor even read about the lore they
were translating).

I'll illustrate with a couple examples:

  There's two people in Qeynos hills, a brother and sister, Baobob
  and Chandra Miller (who make garments). Unfortunately, Miller =
  Meunier in french (the profession).

  Result: we have Meunier Baobob (first name was translated like a
  job name, so it's now Baobob the Miller) and... Chandra
  Miller. Hard to guess they're brother and sister, eh?

There's a full armor set, called banded mail, that player make. You
can equip yourself in full banded mail in the US game. You don't in
the french, because the names of each piece seem to have been
translated by a different person. "Cape a bandes", "Bracelets a
franges", and so on.  Unless you know it's a matched set, it's
impossible to see this in french.

And quest (since that's what prompted me to derail slightly the
thread)?  Well, at one point you are asked if you want some form of
training. The text, in usual everquest fashion, says "Je suis charge
de [l'entrainement] des jeunes recrues". (training = entrainement in
french). Obviously, you must reply with "entrainement" somewhere in
the reply. Not so. You must ask about "formation" (a synonym of
entrainement with more formal connotations, formation is what you do
in a classroom, entrainement is what you do in a workshop or in the
field).

And, of course, all the guild masters who give similar quests in the
US version and all speak about [training], in french will speak
about either [formation] or [entrainement]... and reply to one of
those two words, but, of course, not always the one they used. It
might be the other.  Or even a different one (and there's known
instances where you need to use the original english sentence to
advance the quest, because it wasn't translated).

So here's a caveat about text interfaces.

Make very very sure, when you design your text interface, that it
translates well, and DOCUMENT for the translation.

If you're thinking that your game might be one day distributed
outside of the US, that is. :)

--
	Vincent Archer			Email:	archer at frmug.org

All men are mortal.  Socrates was mortal.  Therefore, all men are Socrates.
							(Woody Allen)

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