Originally Posted by The Composer

To summarize, it's not a matter of economic cost therefore Larian isn't expecting money of you for Italian localization. It'd be pretty strange if they did, wouldn't it 😁

As someone who's communicated with enough developers in the past, and had enough projects of my own, I could try to offer you my insights as to why Italian didn't make it through first pass. In short, I'd say it's more about the scope, how much you can aim to do vs the outcome. Localization is nice to have, but not a functional must for most entertainment media. English and French (Sometimes Spanish) usually makes its way into localisations in games from day 1, at least in text format, since it's such a high target audience potential and people often known at least one of those languages, even if it's not their native tongue. What ever you add beyond there, is extra cost in form of staff and time, where the efforts go in terms of workload.

In development, one of your main "expenses" is time spent > result gained. So in a development process, you want to spend your time as effectively and 'with the eyes on the ball' as much as possible. Therefore, lots of languages are often left to be added retroactively once the more important tasks are done and finished. If Larian were to add localization for a lot more languages before EA, that'd been broader scope, more staff to work on something else than the game, more workload on QA (Quality Assurance) to make sure that translations are correct, actually occurring properly in all the dialogue in game, etc.) - Naturally most QA probably doesn't speak Italian, so they'd need a specialist. That specialist would need to coordinate with a supervisor, which delays the effectiveness of that supervisor's other tasks. This would likely cause further development delays and September 30th would seem even more like a stretch.



Sorry but I think they knew how a development process works even before going to 2019 E3 to release interviews to the press. I mean, it's pretty easy to promise something to raise the expectations of an entire community and then remove it without even giving notice. And we're not talking about a minor feature. Ok, you are free to do it, but this is what happens next. Not to say that their image gone below zero for me now.

Last edited by Malabolgia; 24/08/20 12:57 PM.
We must not promise what we ought not, lest we be called on to perform what we cannot.
Abraham Lincoln, 1856.