No Russian language support in The Secret World

I am from Russia and I just saw the trailer of The Secret World. I liked the game and I have downloaded it. After starting to play, I realized that it doesn’t have support for the Russian language in it. Now being a Russian I think that this game deserves to have Russian language as there are many gamers in our country who are bad in understanding English. Also many games that I had played in past has Russian language in it. I think that developers of The Secret World should release a patch which will provide Russian language in The Secret World. What do other people think about it?

Having Russian language in a game proves to be a disadvantage for gamers who communicate in other languages. You know, I have played many MMO games in past that supported Russian language in audio as well as text. So when playing against or with a Russian player, I wouldn’t understand a single word he would type in his chat box. It would all seem gibberish to me. I agree that Russian gamers are good to play and they too deserve to play among other gamers, but the language creates a big problem. There are many gamers from all over the world from many different countries. If every such gamer starts demanding their language to be used in the game, then it would be problematic for the game developers. Not having Russian won’t hurt the developers as they would get enough gamers from other English speaking countries to fill the game.

Now that the game has been developed completely, I think it will be difficult for the developers of The Secret World to include a new language support in this game. Adding Russian means developers will have to hire new writers who will translate the original dialogues in Russian. After conversion of dialogues in Russian, the writers will have to again convert those dialogues to match the emotions and the expression of the characters. Again more Russian recording artists will be needed to record the dialogues for the game. Now after all this things are achieved, the developers will need to hire software engineers who can integrate this new data into game. So you see this whole process is big and will involve many more sub processes. So the developers will have to invest a lot of amount of time and manpower. Along with time and manpower, developers will have to invest money too. So I don’t think that having Russian language in The Secret World will be practical at this moment.

The process of having Russian won’t end just after developing the language for the game and implementing it. The developers will have to moderate the content that is being fed into chat box or any other medium of interaction in The Secret World. Developers will need to blacklist the swear words and other bad words from Russian language. Now the computer responsible for maintaining the blacklist will just edit the blacklisted words as they are fed. But they cannot replicate the human like sense which will detect edited words. What I mean is that, I used to play an MMORPG game named Gunshine. So this game had blacklisted some rude words in English like ‘screw you’. But if I typed ‘sccreew you’ or maybe ‘screeew u’, then it wouldn’t edit it. But if a human moderator is reading it, then he will understand it and mark it as rude word. So I mean to say is that developers will have to hire Russian moderators who will keep look on the communication part for inappropriate content. This will again cost developers their money.

The best way to have Russian language in The Secret World is by providing a separate server to Russian Gamers. Anyhow gamers from other languages won’t understand Russian. Also communicating with them in their languages will be useless. So having a dedicated server for Russia will be more useful. Also the country is so big, that accommodating all gamers from this country on international server will be difficult. This will also help the Russians to play together without any interference from other gamers. Anyways, I too think that developers won’t have Russian after development. If this is so, then every person from every country will demand their language in the game. The Indians will demand for Marathi, the Chinese will demand for Mandarin and so on.