Comments on: In Praise Of: Darklands.

By: Erik_Malkavian

Erik_Malkavian — Sat, 20 Dec 2014 01:10:45 +0000

This is a great post about a great game.

I am currently finishing Dragon Age 2 and I have Dwarf Fortress (Adventurer Mode) setup with Stonesense but I want to get sometime to play this because after watching some gameplay on YouTube, it looks AMAZING!

By: Jimmy

Jimmy — Mon, 06 Oct 2014 17:36:45 +0000

Forgive me, I jumped immediately to the comment field before finishing the article.

I discovered another discrepancy here. There is totally a plot in Darklands, it’s just a bit hard to find. Judging from your comment that the game only ends when you die or retire, you have missed out. I guess you better fire it up again!

By: Jimmy

Jimmy — Mon, 06 Oct 2014 17:19:11 +0000

Sorry to nitpick.. but stats can be altered throughout the game through various events.

By: ano

ano — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 10:54:13 +0000

There is a game that is a bit simiular to darklands, it’s called “mount and blade: warband”.
With some mods it turn pretty good. Soon Mount and Blade 2 will be out too.

By: innokenti

innokenti — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 08:54:02 +0000

Well, we manage to translate games fine into Russian, even improve on them. The issue here is that there is simply very little experience of translating material into English because it happens fairly rarely, rather than en-masse. You need a well-cultivated set of writers, translators and voice-actors working in Language A->Language B to do it well. But you can’t really then use many of them to go Language B -> Language A, you need an almost completely different set of people.

Metro 2033 the novel is… it’s not all that well written. It’s the more basic ground-level of literature, which happens to have a fairly interesting and entertaining premise and plot. It’s not really worth translating because at most you’re going to get a decent filler novel.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 20:44:39 +0000

TBH even getting it professionally translated probably wouldn’t have helped. I remember my bad experience with Metro 2033, which was an actual published novel that read like it had been written by an excitable 12 year old who had no technical familiarity with any of the stuff being talked about. I mean, maybe that’s what it reads like in the Russian too. I don’t know. But I don’t think so.

By: innokenti

innokenti — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 19:46:12 +0000

I think my favourite is the alien pizza competition in the second one where you have to find out what each of the judges like and then somehow deal with one of them through either bribes or by discrediting them.

There is also a really really really long one where you go and infiltrate an enemy base to retrieve something or other and it is a huge enormous dungeon-crawl thing.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 16:24:17 +0000

The translated versions are awful, even if I did like the one where I was managing a ski resort. In space.

By: innokenti

innokenti — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 15:35:44 +0000

Re: the quests. The only one I’ve seen done well recently are all the varied adventures in Space Rangers 1 and 2. They’re really good in Russian. Not so much in the poor translation unfortunately.

Anyway, if anybody makes anything similar I’d put bets on an adventurous Eastern European studio. But there are fewer of those popping up these days.

It is a sort of thing that does make me want to be involved with an Indie team…

By: aosher

aosher — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 11:31:01 +0000

Sometimes I wish I had the capability to make an indie game.