Racial languages

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?

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

tautau

Wasn't there another game that did this, where you had to learn other race/country language to descramble the chat?

Bricktop

Just seems unnecessary and overly restrictive. I thought we wanted everybody talking to each other and have the ability to be working together where they can. Maybe I'm confused is this completely opt in?

What about guilds and guild chat? Everybody's going to be in discord anyway for the most part.

Shoelid

I wouldn't use it, but I could see it being a cool feature for the RP inclined guilds who have members of only a specific race. Having some languages that are affected by player choice would be cool too, like thieves cant for those in the thieves guild, or maybe divine/demonic languages for certain religions.

It's cool to think about, but I wouldn't put any sort of priority on it.

Asgerr

Bricktop wrote: »

Just seems unnecessary and overly restrictive. I thought we wanted everybody talking to each other and have the ability to be working together where they can. Maybe I'm confused is this completely opt in?

What about guilds and guild chat? Everybody's going to be in discord anyway for the most part.

@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",

Dygz

I don't particularly like the idea of racial languages for chat, but I love the idea of racial languages in writing - books, scrolls, runes, etc.

Vhaeyne

Not a fan of this. It is already bad enough that we are going to get random non-native language speakers on regional servers. Now we want to add built in language barriers for the sake of a little RP flavor?

BigRamble

Perhaps having a common language (allowing opt out), the five core languages by race (not subrace) and which gate you enter the world through.

Dygz

Having the ability to switch to racial language in chat ends up making gameplay too divisive for what Ashes is looking, I think.
The starting portal is not going to determine racial speaking language, for sure, because any race can start at any portal.

Voidwalkers

Race isn't "center" enough in Ashes to justify a racial language system imo.

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.

Asgerr

Voidwalkers wrote: »

Race isn't "center" enough in Ashes to justify a racial language system imo.

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.

Khronus

@Asgerr I like the idea but I have to ultimately disagree. It would be a cool thing but honestly would be annoying when trying to organize things. If the game were split into factions of the races and you could NOT be on the same team as other races, this would be amazing. With the way things are shaping up however, this would have little actual impact on gameplay. Looking back at WOW I honestly feel that it would have been a better experience if we were able to communicate with alliance/horde to either work together or shit talk.

Voidwalkers

Asgerr wrote: »

Voidwalkers wrote: »

Race isn't "center" enough in Ashes to justify a racial language system imo.

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.

BigRamble

Perhaps pull inspiration from Firefly and have the chat language censor change the whatever swear/derogatory word for a madeup racial equivalent.

BlackBrony

Vhaeyne wrote: »

Not a fan of this. It is already bad enough that we are going to get random non-native language speakers on regional servers. Now we want to add built in language barriers for the sake of a little RP flavor?

It's a regional server, so multiple languages are the norm?

Zaxsin

Honestly, I really like the idea. If it’s opt in and definitely encouraged not to use it as a norm, I would love to see something like this. But I understand why it wouldn’t be a popular idea

Noaani

I'm a fan of the idea.

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.

Tyranthraxus

Would only support this if it was optional.

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.

Khronus

BigRamble wrote: »

Perhaps pull inspiration from Firefly and have the chat language censor change the whatever swear/derogatory word for a madeup racial equivalent.

Ok...I think this is a pretty bad ass idea

ViBunja

Everyone will speak common, and there won't be any languages because they said they don't have the time for it.

maouw

Maybe for the Tulnar.
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.

Child Item