ARK: Survival Evolved
Stranded on the shores of a mysterious island, you must learn to survive. Use your cunning to kill or tame the primeval creatures roaming the land, and encounter other players to survive, dominate… and escape!
Supported Platforms
Project Information
Featured screenshots
UNLOCTEAM INPUT
Many words can be said about this project. As itself, ARK is a tremendous game. It has everything you need to easily spend hundreds of hours playing, investigating an island, desert, another planet and even the future. The storyline is hidden in the game, revealed by finding explorer notes. But it’s one of the strongest in the game industry.
Localization, Variables and Other
Game has tons of text. 30% — system texts, item descriptions, characteristics etc. And this part has most problems we found. Text structure has two pain points any developer should avoid:
- Variables. All translators in one voice will say it is the worst variable implementation you can have in games. What do you think about a string, that looks like this: %s %s %s %s. And these are 4 different variables with different text, and you simply can’t change the order because, well, variables are the same. We constantly talked with other translators (game is open for localization), and together we tried to create a way to make text organic. Unfortunately, even English version sometimes can cause eye-bleeding due to second reason.
- Bad UI. No, overall interface is easy to navigate, intuitive and has good readability. When there is no text. All text fields are intended to be only in English, and they do not consider the fact, that most languages are wider at least in 15-20% and require more space or better optimization. No text auto-shrinking, no normal auto-wrapping and simply in many cases font color makes it hard to read.
Within many translation iterations and tests we managed to find best solutions for variables handling, but the problem is that devs haven’t linked all translations to text, that is why, playing with Ukrainian, Italian, German, French, Korean or any other localization, you will find many English lines or strange texts.
But not everything is that bad.
Other 70% of in-game text — beautifully crafted and written stories of those few survivals, who lived enough to tell their stories. And these stories are truly masterpieces. If you ask us — each of them can be a part of TV-show or full movie about ARK. And here we had full freedom, and we proudly say that our translation of these stories here are like reading a book. We looped through all characters, built their personality, adding small tiny pieces into each line, which can immediately distinct characters one from another during reading. And players, who played with our translation, say that these stories are better in Ukrainian than in English. And we can’t disagree with them.
Fonts
Game has many custom fonts… like, A LOT. And this is another big reason why we consider the attitude of developers as fail.
Game is translated more or less into 20+ languages. And there are many specific languages with specific character sets. Standard fonts do not support most of them. Devs added possibility to use custom fonts with translations. But they do not simply use these fonts. We prepared all 12 (yes, 12 fonts, different types for different places), many times sent to devs as other translators did. But, once again, we simply do not receive any feedback or help from developers, though we see them online each day.
Afterwords
This game is amazing as it can be with concept and content, but for last several years devs did everything to lose audience and it seems that… they don’t really care. Sometimes they show up, but all existing localization issues are still present.
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