Language and communication

Community
#1

Hi everyone!
I am so looking forward to this game and can hardly wait for beta. I am curious about the spread of nationallity of players. I have absolutely nothing against playing with people from all over the world but my non-english/swedish is a bit cough rusty so I started to wonder how things will work at its best with voice as the primary way of player to player communication.

I assume that english is the default and possibly only supported language when it comes to the actual game but could it be benefitial with some way of flagging which language players understand? For example say that you can examine a player somehow and see how you best could communicate with him/her? Small flagicons beside the nametag perhaps? Extending that thought would be that players with only language you absolutely don’t understand could be “filtered out” if the user wishes. More ideas is specific language channels or group of them.

Please, read this as a way of quickly determine how to communicate without having to go through a complete interrogation of your intended communication partner. By no means should it be used to group players in separate “societies” instead think of it as a tool.

My embryo of a thought here. I might be totally wrong and this is nothing that works but anyway, what do you think?

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#2

I don’t know if the playerbase is large enough to start filtering people out/separating them, or if that is even something the dev team wants to pursue if they could.

I’ve been kinda pleasantly surprised at how effective non-verbal communication can be in an environment where our head and hand movements are perfectly tracked, and have had a number of positive interactions with people who either spoke super limited english or were completely mute (no mic for whatever reason).

As another long term brainstorm idea to throw on the pile, I know that google voice translation has been getting better and better every day. I wonder if we could integrate like, a magic orb of translation that would work organically in-game to translate various languages, which would also be really cool tech and bring people together.

#3

Something that FF14 does which I think makes sense is in places like the Group Finder tool you can put down what languages you understand. We would probably be willing to add something like that. I don’t want to separate players or make them think that they can’t play with each other just because they don’t speak that language, but at the same time if there’s a large enough player population it could be useful. Maybe not right at launch, though.

Another thing that we could consider doing is providing pre-translated text for common phrases used in the game (e.g. “Looking for group for Wilds” or stuff like that). We’ll dive into that more when we actually get into the Group Finder tool.

#4

In reply to Draven:

“I’ve been kinda pleasantly surprised at how effective non-verbal communication can be in an environment where our head and hand movements are perfectly tracked, and have had a number of positive interactions with people who either spoke super limited english or were completely mute (no mic for whatever reason).”

You are right! I didn’t think of that! It takes time to getting used to the fact that you can actually communicate visually with your “avatar”. VR is SO new and with so many completely new aspects of online gaming and things like this is something that at least I forgot. Man, this is exciting!

Also, thank you Riley_D for you take on this. I agree that FFXIV’s GroupFinder option is really usable. I have secret wishes that a GroupFinder in OrbusVR would be a place rather than a UI-element. Perhaps you go to an inn and announce your wish to group and people who are looking for groupmembers can go there to find your announcement. You could still be able to leave the inn when you have put up your announcement and do other things while waiting for the group to be assembled but the idea is to avoid some immersionbreaking dialogbox with autosummoning and things like that. Make the R in VR a thing!

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#5