When writing and scripting dialogues, how do you deal with the possibility that, in 2945, Humans might be using a bit different language? Even in english, some words, phrases, will be gone, while new words and terms, vocabulary, even grammar might appear.asked by Dargnon
TL;DRThey won't try to realistically evolve English centuries ahead, since the game must be understandable to everyone; they use flavor language like "creds" and a distinct Cathcart dialect where lore calls for it.
It's... 930 years into the future, we know things are going to be very different. If you look back at what english was 930 years before right now, I'm not sure how many conversations we could really have that would be understood. That's our concern. We need to make a game that can be understood by everybody. Obviously English is the main language of the game, but we also have people who are playing the game who it's their second or third language, so, we need to make sure that, when we are writing stuff, that people will be able to understand it right now, even though we understand the world would be different than it is right now. So, from our perspective, we try to use flavour language when the Lore requires it. Think technology like mobiGlas, ship components, stuff like that, money, it being creds instead of dollars, the dialogue of Cathcart is distinct, and that was a conscious choice on our part, because Cathcart is a lawless system and it has a different history than the UEE, and that was a way for us to be able to distinguish that and be able to add that little flavour, so if you are on a planet somewhere, and able to hear that, it'll give you a hint to their background. And as exciting as it can be, Clockwork Orange, Blade Runner, both used mutated language to give a sense of the future and how it's changed and why it's changed, to do it on that massive level all throughout the game would be extremely difficult, especially since, accessibility issue, and there's also alien races and their dialects that I think take precedence in having to figure out.
We don't want the humans in the game to sound like we're reading Cantebury Tales today. That is not the goal.
We want you guys to enjoy it, and not have to bang your heads against the wall cause we decided to go off and create our own language, but yeah.
That's the idea.