I smell a management decision that made the devs cringe when they implemented it.
these are the people who are saying we can’t find ways to optimise games anymore so everything has to be turned into garbled AI mush
By a quirk of Bethesda’s game engine they actually have to rewrite the entire game from scratch whenever they change the language. For some reason the game wouldn’t launch in Spanish unless the source code is in Portuguese. For the German version it has to be in Cantonese. For Russian it’s in English except with a Japanese accent.
Through the forces of innovation, Microsoft found a way to force Todd’s inflation fetish upon all of our hard drives.
Not good enough. Remake the game each time for every language on earth.
Fallout 3: Inuit Sign Language edition
Real-time interpreter in the corner of the screen going nuts whenever you have the radio on.
if i had to guess, this is a confluence of byzantine platform vendor requirements and wanting to dedicate as few development resources to maintenance of a 15 year old game as possible.
Actually the Xbox app just does this by default with everything. A developer has the option to make this not happen by simply not distributing the game in other languages, or by preparing a single version of the game that contains all language files.
Both of these options are decisions they would have had to make 15 years ago, based on a psychic prediction that a single future platform would invent an arbitrary requirement to only allow you to distribute your games in the worst possible way.
Worth noting, if they somehow had seen this coming and chosen to do this, it would’ve meant that fallout 3 would’ve been a (if I did my math right) 16 gig game in 2008 and thus on Xbox 360 would necessarily have been distributed across no less than 3 discs, because game discs which were allocated a mere 7.3 gigs at the time and would have required a hard drive. If you had one of the Core or Arcade models with no hard drive, hopefully you remembered to buy a hard drive while you were at the store.
I mean youd think itd be worth the bandwidth for microsoft to just add an option for which one to download. They obviously have all versions available on their servers so just have them all listed as separate downloads in the store.
Nooooo don’t you understand??? That would take effort! Our little engineerinos must spend all their time on profit-generating features!
Inspiring.
i love it when it just works
