Destiny should become a game for the whole world and not just feel like a second home for the English and Americans. Bungie explained how they wanted to achieve this at GDC.
The Tower Building at Bungie
When Bungie was still exclusively developing for the Xbox, they were little concerned about things like “the world”. The Xbox is particularly significant in North America. At that time, they did not have a “localization” team. This changed with the move to Activision and a huge franchise like Destiny: It should, of course, work worldwide.
What used to be called “translation” is now referred to as “localization”, because it has been recognized that there is more to it than simply translating everything “English” into the local language, cultural differences must be taken into account. This becomes more challenging the more languages there are to consider.
Destiny, for example, is available in:
- German
- English
- French
- Italian
- Spanish
- Japanese
- and the Brazilian version of Portuguese
The Problem: Textures and Languages Don’t Really Like Each Other
And Bungie’s goal was for all these different cultural groups to feel like Destiny and especially the “Tower”, the central place of the game, felt like a “home” and not like a trip to an English-speaking, foreign country. The future is foreign enough.
Initially, they had signs and indicators in the Tower only in English. Everything in the game was covered in English text. They wanted to remodel and translate that for the international versions. But it didn’t work out.
It didn’t look good. What is just a few characters in English was significantly more in other languages. Much more than could fit on the simple sign in the Tower or on the body of an automatic rifle or a handgun.
The Solution: Multi-Culti, Everyone Just Doesn’t Understand Something
Therefore, they changed the strategy: Instead of focusing on words in one language, they relied on symbols and universally understandable indicators. For weapons or industrial goods, for example, they used “Techno-Speak” as inscriptions: letters and designations that were hoped to be understood or equally misunderstood everywhere. Only with the logo of the “Future War Cults” did they overlook this: It’s a stylized “F”, which somehow seems illogical in German because they call it “Kriegskult der Zukunft” – so one would need a “Z”.
In the Tower, they introduced multiple languages, so in addition to English, there are now Japanese signs and those from Brazilian Portuguese. And a lot of Latin. As Tom Slattery, who was responsible for localization, said: “Looks cool, nobody understands anyway.”
They actually wanted to translate the intro with the astronauts on the moon into 7 languages, but that would simply overwhelm the storage space on the discs. So they left the intro international: “Maybe one of the astronauts is Japanese, the other Brazilian, the third American?” Slattery said.
Actually a nice idea.
