“Maybe they shouldn’t have bothered localizing it at all”. ^ That’s actual player feedback. Oof.
Cult of the Lamb just released its 1.5 patch, introducing the WOOLHAVEN story expansion alongside 5 new languages.
The Arabic localization? You guessed it. A complete disaster.
”Unreadable” is thrown around quite a lot when criticizing a localization. In COTL’s case? The Arabic localization is, quite literally, not readable.
That’s something the developers sadly only found out after pushing the update to their 4.5+ million players. And why wouldn’t they? The other 12 languages worked just fine.
That illustrates a bigger problem than “Arabic is hard”.
And don’t get me wrong—Arabic is indeed hard to get working in games. I know that, probably, better than anyone in the biz.
But that’s exactly why LSPs shouldn’t sell it if they can’t get it right.
The vast majority of multilingual gameloc LSPs - yes, even the goodest of good guys - are offering Arabic to their clients like it’s any other language.
At best, they have no idea what they’re doing. At worst, they’re selling something they know is unusable.
Be it ignorance or malice. Doesn’t really matter, does it? The results remain the same regardless.
Developers are stressed. Players are furious. And I’m just tired.
If you’re not considering what, not COULD, but WILL 100% go wrong during implementation, then maybe your LSP shouldn’t be selling Arabic.
Just a thought!
One silver lining: Massive Monster acknowledged player feedback and got in touch with their LSP to try to debug the issue almost immediately.
I’ve heard devs promise to fix Arabic internally more times than I can count—just before facing the realities of RTL localization engineering and giving up.
I know better than to set myself up for disappointment at this point. Yet my fingers remain crossed for this one.
Hopefully, we’ll get to play the game in proper Arabic down the line—it deserves it.
By Seif Chaib.
Originally posted on Linkedin.