As many of you will imagine, Animal Crossing: New Horizons It has a great job of localization behind, since it has a lot of text, many characters and several languages available. Today we get details about it.
Through Twitter, Rob Heiret Nintendo has shared details on how they've located this project, including the importance of pranks, the English bass joke and more. We leave you with his words:
While locating Animal Crossing New Horizons, we repeatedly joked that we were creating the next 5 to 10 years of memes. We knew the game would be great, but obviously we couldn't have imagined the real world circumstances at launch.
We have never had a time like this where security and mutual responsibility keep us physically distant and digital tools have replaced face-to-face contact. But Zoom and Twitter and the other platforms are, by design, quite simple. Animal Crossing is different.
AC's aesthetic is pretty. I have seen people saying that even tarantulas are pretty. Even the CHAIRS are pretty. But it is more than tenderness, it is comfort. It is positivity. It is like a retreat.
If you have played the game, you will be tired of the bass joke. I get it. * I'm * tired of the bass joke and I wrote it myself… But I tell you a secret about this joke: Originally it was “I caught a sea bass! Well… maybe a C-bass »And when we were working on the fish jokes, someone pointed out that, as a joke, people would see her many, many times, generally disappointed, maybe something else would be better, maybe it would be better give it a positive spin. Let's change it to C + better.
From the standpoint of comedy mechanics, it's the same joke, relying on homophones "be" and "C" to change the way you perceive the animal's description (and, let's be honest, it would work better as a verbal joke than written).
Anyway, my point of view is that we were doing our best, down to the details that you may not have considered, to make this the most positive, comforting and fun game we could. And I know that the development team was doing the same. So it's been funny to see that this thing we're working on became so important to people, in part due to the strange accident of history that has occurred at this terrifying moment.
I wasn't * really * surprised when people started celebrating their birthday parties in the game (heck, mine is next week and I will). After all, the game has specific mechanisms for recognizing your birthday, making it a bit obvious. But today I saw a screenshot of someone who, unable to visit her royal mother's grave for Mother's Day, had created a place in the game to visit her. And that is very important.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is not only a safe, friendly and perpetually smiling space, it is a world of its own that the player can shape at will. Obviously, the real world seems very out of control right now, so I think this helps the game as well.
When Nintendo first showed off the public works options in the game, I saw lots of jokes about "the last game made you mayor, this one makes you GOD." But in the COVID19 era, we don't need to be gods, we just need action. We need a comfortable bed where we can accommodate the blankets the way we like. That seems like the most important part of the popularity of the game in my opinion.
Anyway, it is an honor to have been involved in a small way in this. We hope we don't need the next game in the franchise as much.
What do you think?
