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Racial languages
Asgerr
Member
What would you guys and girls and everything else in between and beyond, think of each race having their own language, that you could select in your chat box.
The idea would be that other players of the same race would see the message appear properly and readable, while everyone else would get something akin to absolute freaking gibberish. If you must draw a source of inspiration and comparison, think of the language barrier between Horde and Alliance in WoW.
This, in my opinion, would further reinforce the decision of what race you're playing. And while not restrictive as an opt-in check in your chat box, it could definitely add to the immersion and sense of racial belonging when races are so diverse.
Maybe even have some algorithm modify languages of one race, to make it read as if having a weird accent to the other half of your race (Empyreans vs Py'Rai elves for example), or as lore requires.
Would this be something interesting to you? How would you expand it or modify it? How can it break the game and how do we avoid that?
The idea would be that other players of the same race would see the message appear properly and readable, while everyone else would get something akin to absolute freaking gibberish. If you must draw a source of inspiration and comparison, think of the language barrier between Horde and Alliance in WoW.
This, in my opinion, would further reinforce the decision of what race you're playing. And while not restrictive as an opt-in check in your chat box, it could definitely add to the immersion and sense of racial belonging when races are so diverse.
Maybe even have some algorithm modify languages of one race, to make it read as if having a weird accent to the other half of your race (Empyreans vs Py'Rai elves for example), or as lore requires.
Would this be something interesting to you? How would you expand it or modify it? How can it break the game and how do we avoid that?
3
Comments
What about guilds and guild chat? Everybody's going to be in discord anyway for the most part.
It's cool to think about, but I wouldn't put any sort of priority on it.
@Bricktop
I would think the best course of action, were this to be implemented, would be to have it be opt-in.
Make it a toggle option in your chat where you can choose to speak in either "Common" or in you own "Elven/Orc/etc",
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
The starting portal is not going to determine racial speaking language, for sure, because any race can start at any portal.
If race plays a bigger role in Ashes (e.g. if race choice actually determines your starting location or possible affiliation etc., i.e. the game groups players by their races, and have implemented mechanics to allow/encourage interesting interactions/conflicts between these racial groups), then racial languages may indeed see some meaningful uses.
But so far race feels more like just yet-another-character-attribute that affects mainly your character's appearance, and some of its skills.
In the early days of WoW there used to be a racial-language system, but wow divides players by factions, not races. Players within the same faction need to be able to communicate efficiently, and there're also plenty of reasons why players in different factions shouldn't be able to do so (to discourage co-operations, encourage conflicts, and may be act as a way to disable verbal insults between fighting players). Eventually most of the racial languages faded out and "Common" (alliance language) and "Orcish" (horde language) were the only ones left.
Well you could point to the fact that nodes develop to aesthetically highlight the primary contributing race.
So maybe to an extent it could have some extra meaning. Doubly so if some of them are perhaps more closely related to a specific religion etc.
It would be interesting if your character could learn all languages and then see which racial language becomes the dominant one on the server (besides the obvious Common).
Hell it could even happen to be that at launch everyone is using elvish as they are the most influential but later on in the sever's life cycle, elvish is considered a dead language or at least something like Latin or ancient Greek.
I think it adds to the immersion, and having it be an opt-in element of the chat box, could ultimately mean that no one uses it. But I am of the belief that it's best to give the option rather than not.
Sure it'd add to the game on a flavor, immersion, & lore level. e.g. Elven languages still remain in WoW as flavor-texts on items, or as greetings from some NPCs. My point is outside of that, I doubt whether racial languages will see any practical use between players, and therefore, it's probably not worth the devs' time to implement a full-blown racial language system.
It's a regional server, so multiple languages are the norm?
EQ2 did this, you had common, you had a language for most player races, and then there were many other non-player races you could learn a language for as well (giant, dragon, gnoll etc).
While you could change the language you were using in game, I only ever saw people do that to show off a specific rare language they knew, or to say things in open chat that only a few people could understand.
As long as there is a basic language that all players understand, there is no concern about it being a source of segregation, confusion or barrier between players, as literally everyone will use that common language when wanting to communicate with others.
This does leave the whole thing as seeming pointless so far - and if left like that it would be.
However, the way these languages were presented to players in game that didn't understand them was literally just as a font. Each font would have a character style that makes sense for the race it is representing (One races font may be sharp and angular, while another races may be rounded characters). This font works like any other font, with each character in this racial font corresponding to a letter.
This meant that the developers of the game were able to leave messages in the game world in these languages, and leave it to players to first of all find the language it is written in, then translate it.
Since these languages were also things players had to go out to learn specifically, they also made great pre-requisites for larger quest chains - needing to learn how to speak dragon in order to be able to speak to a dragon just makes sense to me.
Star Wars: Galaxies had a similar system. You could type out things in normal chat, or you could use a /command to make it come up as gibberish, to anyone who hadn't learned that language. To learn one, you had to meet with someone who spoke that language, and they had the option to teach it to you.
Indeed - a feature that would definitely serve solely RP purposes. Doesn't harm anything.
Ok...I think this is a pretty bad ass idea
They're probably unintelligible.
Even to each other.
Maybe if they have 103 int they can start to understand each other.
Maybe at 542 int they can understand common.
The social aspect of mmo's as they were before is kind of dead and it has shifted. So there are a lot of things that back in the day were super amazing, today they wouldn't work or just be avoided/ignored.
Not going to be the case in NA, which is what I am mainly concerned about. It might be different in other regions. While I practice other languages in my spare time, I don't want to deal with other languages when it's game time. Unless they want to make a classical Latin server. Which is extremely unlikely.
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
Yeah in EU servers you usually have people speaking German, French and Spanish no matter what the "official" language on the server is (strangely most Italians never speak Italian in chat).
Many people like the game text to be in english, as it feels more "authentic" somehow, but then don't wanna speak it, or can't.