Dragon Age Gets Its Own Languages
Dragon Age Gets Its Own Languages
Game News - posted by Exitium on Tue 29 March 2005, 03:39:10
Tags: BioWare; Dragon Age: OriginsScienceDaily reports that BioWare's upcoming RPG, Dragon Age, has gotten three of its own unique languages thanks to the hard work of Canadian linguist Wolf Wikeley. Wikeley developed four 2,500-word languages for two of BioWare's upcoming releases, the last of which is for Jade Empire, which closely resembles Mongolian.
For the new game Dragon Age, Wikeley developed a 2,500-word language for each of three distinct languages and he laid the groundwork for a language spoken by non-human characters in the game.
As a starting point, Wikeley used lists of character and place names and the names of equipment and tools characters in the games would use.
"I was able to analyse those, and even if writers hadn’t been aware they had come up with a system I was able to abstract systems out of these words and incorporate them into the (new) language," said Wikeley.
"The design team decided that it would be a great idea to have their non-English speaking characters or even non-human characters have authentic sounding fantasy languages. My feeling is that gibberish instantly compromises the entertainment experience because it is fake. I say it as a gamer and a film viewer. And movies especially – the Star Trek franchise has worked hard to give languages a sense of authenticity. The Lord of Rings movies did the same thing with Elven.I can sense a million nerds quivering with the joy of being able to speak the languages of Dragon Age. I have to hand it to BioWare for their dedication to the title and the setting of the game.
The original news release can be found here.
For the new game Dragon Age, Wikeley developed a 2,500-word language for each of three distinct languages and he laid the groundwork for a language spoken by non-human characters in the game.
As a starting point, Wikeley used lists of character and place names and the names of equipment and tools characters in the games would use.
"I was able to analyse those, and even if writers hadn’t been aware they had come up with a system I was able to abstract systems out of these words and incorporate them into the (new) language," said Wikeley.
"The design team decided that it would be a great idea to have their non-English speaking characters or even non-human characters have authentic sounding fantasy languages. My feeling is that gibberish instantly compromises the entertainment experience because it is fake. I say it as a gamer and a film viewer. And movies especially – the Star Trek franchise has worked hard to give languages a sense of authenticity. The Lord of Rings movies did the same thing with Elven.
The original news release can be found here.
