Localization Questions

Beyond Language: What Localization Actually Affects

Tim defines localization as making a version of your game for distribution outside the country you originally made it for. While most people think of text translation, localization affects far more:

Terminology and Content Restrictions

In Fallout, the team originally called consumable items "drugs." This was frowned upon in the US and outright prohibited in some countries, so they renamed them "chems." Tim notes that some games use the word "potions" for items that are obviously drugs — and somehow that's acceptable while "drugs" isn't.

Art and Visual Content

Art frequently needs to be modified for regional compliance:

• Germany prohibited showing blood — specifically, red-colored fluid coming out of a living creature. Changing blood to a different color made it acceptable. Some games claimed their characters were robots to sidestep the rule.
• China has a rule about bones: you can show a full skeleton (just bones), but you cannot show bones protruding through flesh. A zombie with ribs showing through its chest is not allowed — but ripped-open skin showing muscle and blood is fine. Either cover the bones with flesh or strip them completely.

Children in Games

Many countries prohibit showing children who can be harmed. Tim says this is why several of his games shipped without children. In Temple of Elemental Evil, simply making children invulnerable (untargetable) wasn't enough — children could still provide cover or trigger proximity-based game rules. The solution was to remove them entirely.

The Hidden Complexity of Language Translation

Even "just" translating text is far harder than expected:

Gendered Pronouns

Some languages have ungendered pronouns — a third pronoun meaning "I don't know the gender of the person I'm referring to." This is useful for referring to unknown characters, but many languages lack this, creating translation headaches when the source text is deliberately ambiguous.

Poetry and Wordplay

Poetry is extremely difficult to translate. For something like Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky," the nonsense words are portmanteau constructions (e.g., "brillig" combining "brilliant" and "frigid") that evoke connotations in an English speaker's mind. To translate the poem, you must decompose the invented words back into their component parts, translate those, and recombine them in the target language to preserve the same feeling.

Puns and Misunderstandings

Tim gives a specific example from Temple of Elemental Evil: a dumb character talks to a Miller (someone who grinds grain into flour). Someone suggests bringing flowers to court a local widow. The character can misunderstand "flowers" (f-l-o-w-e-r-s) as "flour" (f-l-o-u-r) — a pun that simply doesn't work in most other languages. The translator must invent an equivalent misunderstanding that fits the context, and hope there's no associated art showing the specific items.

Do Different Cultures Prefer Different Game Mechanics?

Tim says he has never specifically designed a mechanic for a particular country. However, he's repeatedly heard that nonlinear games are less popular in some countries, particularly Japan — the reasoning being that players want to know "the right way" to complete a quest, and open-ended design with no single correct path can feel unsatisfying to that audience.

He's heard similar cultural patterns with superheroes: some countries prefer self-made heroes (like Batman, who trained and built his equipment) over heroes born with powers (like Superman). Tim is cautious about these generalizations, noting that people sometimes confirm them and sometimes push back.

Abandoning Ideas for Wider Audiences

Tim addresses whether he ever cut content proactively (without publisher pressure) for localization reasons. Most content cuts he experienced came from publisher interference — he mentions a lesbian character removed from Temple of Elemental Evil, name changes, and quest removals.

The one self-driven example he recalls is abandoning gender-based stat differences after Arcanum. In that game, male characters got +1 Strength while female characters got +1 Endurance (based on research about average physical differences). The stat difference was minor and could be undone in character creation. His design rationale was that every other character creation choice affected gameplay — gender was the only one that didn't, which felt inconsistent.

The feedback was intensely negative, and Tim found it "bizarre." He tells a parallel story about a researcher who discovered in the 1990s that a drug on the market had different effects on men versus women. The researcher wanted to publish the finding but was advised not to because of the backlash he'd face. Even 10-15 years later, a female PhD student under him considered studying it but decided she "still didn't want to touch that." Tim's point: acknowledging biological differences became culturally radioactive, even when the information was medically important.

Surprising International Fan Bases

Tim was surprised to learn how popular Fallout became in Poland and Russia — countries for which they didn't even make localized versions (as far as he recalls). In Poland, fans organized live-action role-playing weekends where people went out to the woods and played Fallout in real life. Tim found this "mind-blowing" and said he'd love to watch it.

He notes that several of his games became unexpectedly popular in very specific countries, and he's never been sure whether it's the mechanics, the storyline, or something else entirely that drives that regional appeal.

References

• Tim Cain. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfBcWu22wIE