John Smith

Often overlooked? Ncsoft/arenanet can't go one week without blaming localization for their delay or exclusion of content in their korean-port titles.

Indeed it is an artform, the art of lieing to your customers and deliberately delaying content. It's no secret that the content cycle for aion, lineage, and lineage 2 were on a 1:1 basis with Korean updates. 2.5 will be arriving in the na/eu the same week as 3.0 in korea. Just like 1.9 was released here when 2.0 was released there. Any old lineage player could tell you the same deal with chronicles and episodes up until the point where the servers had to be deleted and merged.

Localization has and always will be a joke. On one hand they claim to custom tailor content by modifying lore and story, and on the other hand update after update is transliterated directly from Korean to English. In arenanets case, from English to Korean. The only customization is the direct exclusion of content that either doesn't match the foreign payplan (cash shop/f2p vs monthly subscriptions) and holiday content that doesnt get patched in soon enough (we saw this with aion's lack of Christmas decor).

The final lines are very telling. Text has to match legnth of the original? No, it does not. True localization would attempt to accommodate that limit.

@Arkanaloth
It's much more sophisticated!

This is a very beautiful game.

@Loopy
@Kismet

Prius predates both aion and aika. It was originally called Anima Online. If I remember correctly, it was around back in 2006/2007. It was fairly successful and many games have copied FROM IT, not the other way around.

We western players don't ever get to see even 1/10 of the mmorpgs that have been released in korea and japan. Many of the innovative or unique features that we think originated in our favorite games actually were done elsewhere long before.

Here's an old forum post about it with some videos and screenshots. Not sure if they still work.

http://www.onrpg.com/boards/48730.html

@Xpander
Are you brain damaged? This is looks and plays nothing like Aion.

Insurance is a scam in the real world, why would people intentionally add it to their virtual world?

@Pingles
"I think it's especially important in Eastern translations when the Western audience is not playing the game the way it is played in another market. "

That is complete and total nonsense. The only real differences between the eastern and western versions of any other game tends to be the price tag and release times, and we always find ourselves with the short end of the stick in that regard. Sometimes companies take that mentality of "less for more" any apply it to events and support. Either way, it is almost never in our best interests for a game to be "westernized".

Stop giving publishers and developers so much unearned wiggle room. They are fleecing us and getting free marketing every week by keeping their games "beta". I would say you are all acting like naive children, but the harsh reality is that the majority of you are naive children. No insult intended, that is the targeted fanbase of f2p mmorpgs.

I successfully registered but hotmail sent my confirmation email straight to my junk folder. Had to fish it out but other than that, no issues.

"good for the company doesn't always equal being good for the company."

Should be "good for the company doesn't always equal being good for the community."

Fail-trolls? It's a point of fact that aion lost 75% of it's eu/na servers in less than a year. The game is making money, no doubt, but what's good for the company doesn't always equal being good for the company. Sales are up because they have introduced numberous cash shop items for their pay to play games, but player count is down across the board.

Aion and lineage remains extremely successful in the east, but that is entirely irrelevant to it's western player base and any conversation related to it. Western players do not recieve the same content, events, or support. It is journalistically dishonest to imply otherwise.

Another point of fact to explain the large proportion of western value is that we are charged 2 to 4 times as much as our korean counter parts for access to ncsoft's games. If anyone is trolling, it's the article poster.

(S)He states: "Much to the chagrin of fail-trolls across the internet, NCsoft has also publicized the fact that Aion continues to be a financial success after "recording consecutive growth for the last three years." but aion in the west is barely a year old.