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What does cultural localization mean for Aion, exactly?
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Taken from one of the screenshots in the slideshow
Aion looked great at E3 2006, and since the November '08 launch, it's been doing great business in its home Korean market. These days, many MMOs launch in multiple markets, usually with a relatively short delay for each additional language.
But Aion isn't going to be available to NCsoft West territories until the fall of '09.
To define "NCsoft West" - they count this as North and South America, Europe, and Australia/New Zealand. To suggest that all these...continents... are culturally homogenous is silly, but not quite as silly as the tendency of U.S. citizens to lump China, Japan, and Korea into one homogenous bucket labeled "Asian." (Hint: We should not do that. Ever.)
The people behind the product have long been talking about how their port of Aion is far more than translation, but a full "cultural localization." They're going to "launch right," with "high standards." Another common phrase is "cultural relevance." Such pretty words, but MMO players have been burned a thousand times by pretty words. What are the specifics? How is Aion being altered for "western" tastes?
I spoke with NCsoft West PR's Janna Bureson, and she in turn spoke with people on the actual editing team to get us some specifics.
More than 1500 quests are being individually examined. Each one is being evaluated for cultural relevance, i.e., can it be translated without losing meaning? Is it based on any cultural references not widely known to western audiences? Does enjoying the quest require any particular mindset?
For example, one of the starting area quests (and others like it) is based on a Korean folk tale. You've been led to an iron axe, when a mysterious figure appears and offers you much more valuable equipment. A Korean player would know the folk tale, and furthermore, instantly recognize that the moral of the tale was honesty - and therefore the "right" answer is to turn down the expensive replacements.
The western equivalent would be something like this: A mysterious figure appears and says "My, what big teeth you have," and gives three dialogue options. Every western kid knows the "correct" answer is "The better to eat you with." If you'd never heard the story of Little Red Riding Hood, you'd be flying blind.
So, to return to the Aion quest, the NCsoft West team is rewriting the quest to put the emphasis on the axe, to cue the player towards the expected response. The edited quest has to be play tested to see if there's any lingering confusion, and if there is, the quest faces further adjustment.
Rinse and repeat fifteen hundred times. No wonder it's taking so long.
Furthermore, the NCsoft West team is not working in a vacuum. They are working closely with the developers in Korea to make these changes, as well as suggesting changes to the gameplay itself to better appeal to the western market.
As a side note, early interviews with the Aion team in Austin alluded to the difficulty of coordinating with the Korean team, with the time difference allowing for no overlap between the two sets of working hours. Conversations with anonymous recently unemployed NCsoft employees all tended to end up in a discussion about the way a west coast location would create convenience (and shorter flights) for the Korean owners. And in fact, a brief look at a time zone map shows that it was 9 AM in Seoul when it was 6 PM in Austin... and 3 PM in Seattle. Guess there was something to those rumors, eh?
Anyway, back to the game. The PR person told me that Aion was developed from the beginning with the intent to port the game to the west. That makes sense, given the unusually (for a Korean game) robust PVE. Ms. Bureson says that "Aion includes all the story telling, questing, and PvE that most western MMO gamers have come to love (and expect!)."
She also told me that "saying a game has to focus on PvP or PvE is a false choice... It's like asking if a developer is focused on graphics or gameplay. MMO gamers like to do a wide variety of things and good MMOs can support multiple types of gameplay. Certain gamers want to play predominantly PvE... Other players love PvP, and again Aion has a great PvP experience on its own, and adds an innovative twist with its dynamic PvPvE system. Many gamers like a combination of both, and we think Aion is a great experience for those gamers as well."
I'm still going to wait and see how it plays. We've seen lots of MMOs lately that try to have it all, in terms of both PvP and PvE, and it's just not that easy. Game mechanics that make PvE lots of fun (area of effect stuns and roots, to name just one example) are miserable in PvP unless they've been effectively neutered with lots of resists, immunity timers, and more. Game designers usually focus on just one aspect, leaving the integration to someone else. And I've seen all the lovely ways evil minded players, which is to say "all of us," can exploit the environment to gain a PvP advantage.
But there is hope. I'm convinced that "cultural localization" is way more than a buzzword for Aion. And my hopes of a true "east meets west" MMO hybrid, mixing strong storytelling and hardcore combat, are rising just a little higher.
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