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Those of you who know me outside of GB may know I'm a bit of a linguaphile.

Now, is there a good way to find out in how many spoken languages any game was published? I can't seem to find a solid source on it. Wikipedia usually doesn't mention, unless there's something interesting to it. Amazon seems to be quite consistent in showing me English copies of games. I Googled around a bit, but I had to give up.

Usually it's just the standard three, English, French and German. But I'd love to run into a Russian copy of a game, or an Asian one. Jade Empire is a good example of a game that would improve much atmospherically, if spoken in Cantonese, Mandarin or any other Asian language. I'd also love to hear Skyrim in Norwegian (I could easily mod both games with English subtitles) or some other Scandinavian language. I hate that quasi German-English accent so many Nords use.

Anyhow, looking for any kind of reliable source on this. I'd appreciate any help!

I'm afraid I'm no use for your main request, but I wanted to ask, have you played the Witcher? I don't recall if the 2nd one was like this, but the first had an incredible selection of (spoken and written) languages, among them English, French, Spanish, German, Polish, Hungarian, and Russian, and I'm confident I missed one or two. It was actually very much fun for me to set the spoken language to Hungarian while keeping subtitles in English- the voice acting was really poorly directed, and that wasn't as obvious in a language I couldn't understand .

I haven't actually, but I might pick it up some day.

Tricky wrote:Those of you who know me outside of GB may know I'm a bit of a linguaphile.

Now, is there a good way to find out in how many spoken languages any game was published? I can't seem to find a solid source on it. Wikipedia usually doesn't mention, unless there's something interesting to it. Amazon seems to be quite consistent in showing me English copies of games. I Googled around a bit, but I had to give up.

Usually it's just the standard three, English, French and German. But I'd love to run into a Russian copy of a game, or an Asian one. Jade Empire is a good example of a game that would improve much atmospherically, if spoken in Cantonese, Mandarin or any other Asian language. I'd also love to hear Skyrim in Norwegian (I could easily mod both games with English subtitles) or some other Scandinavian language. I hate that quasi German-English accent so many Nords use.

Anyhow, looking for any kind of reliable source on this. I'd appreciate any help!

No love for Spanish? That makes me sad, Tricky

Myself, I try to get anything in the strategy, RPG and adventure department that gets dubbed in Spanish with any competence (FX interactive titles, for instance, are a must), I like to reward dedication to my native language. One of the primary reasons I'm buying the Witcher series, and I supported Project Eternity and Wasteland 2, for instance. I hope Torment makes an effort in that direction, too.

This won't cover everything, but if you go to the Steam page for a game, they list the languages it's available in. For example, for the Witcher they list 9 languages and for the Witcher 2 they list 12.

SWC

Thanks!

It's giving me the best results yet. It's weird that you can find a game like Skyrim in Japanese, but not Jade Empire.

Myrr Disparo wrote:No love for Spanish? That makes me sad, Tricky

I've rarely spotted Spanish audio tracks on DVD's and such. I'm from Holland and while we sing about our 'Spanish allegiances' in our national anthem, there's actually very little going on with that.

I live in Norway these days and it's actually a little worse here. DVD's are usually subtitled in all Scandinavian languages, meaning three very similar ones (Danish, Swedish, Norwegian) and only two that stand out (Finnish and Icelandic). It's actually strange there's never any Russian around, since Norway does share a border with Russia in the north.
I haven't really bought any games here locally yet, but I assume it's the same holy English/French/German trinity.

Garriath wrote:I don't recall if the 2nd one was like this, but the first had an incredible selection of (spoken and written) languages, among them English, French, Spanish, German, Polish, Hungarian, and Russian, and I'm confident I missed one or two. It was actually very much fun for me to set the spoken language to Hungarian while keeping subtitles in English- the voice acting was really poorly directed, and that wasn't as obvious in a language I couldn't understand .

I do have the Witcher 2 and it does contain a wealth of dialogue and subtitle languages. Just left them in its original setting which is English for both dialogue and subtitle as the voice acting is much better compared to the 1st one. I still remember how the VO went from middling to mediocre after the Enhanced Edition patch in the latter's case. Prior to it, while parts of the dialogue are obviously chopped for certain reasons, at least the VO have some life in it compared to after the patch where the VO became rather monotonous.