Civ V style leader animations and native language a mistake in BE

[Idleray]

This may be SMAC nostalgia talking, but I feel that a big opportunity was lost in the decision of bringing back CIV's diplomacy screen with its animated Leaders speaking what is likely to be butchered versions of their native tongue(As a Chinese speaker, Daoming's lines sound like they're from a native speaker, but translated badly from English source material).

The dialogue of each leader in the diplomacy is rudimentary and uninteresting due to the fact that all of it has to be animated and half of it spoken in a non-English language.

This is a problem carried over from Civ V, but Civ V got away with it because each historical leader was interesting: they each had a distinct character that stemmed from a combination of their language, background & props(Genghis on a horse, Caesar on a throne) and unique music.

The dialogue in Civ V was functional, and that was OK because the leaders were so visually interesting and having them speak their native tongues complemented this feeling of interacting with an exotic foreign Civilization. In other words, the feeling of History was centrepiece in conveying the lore and immersing players in Civ V.

In BE, where the Future and Ideas are the centrepiece, I don't find it important to hear the Leaders speak their own language.

I want to hear their ideas and personalities shine through the dialogue. It doesn't need to all be voiced, it just has to convince me that this is a character that has their own motivations and they're speaking to me as a Leader to another Leader. SMAC did this superbly with its tailored dialogue for each Faction. There the leaders would respond directly to your Social Engineering choices, and they had specific epithets for all the other AI (for Lady Diedre it was something like "lets put an end to her dancing naked through the trees).

This is just one part of a larger series of presentation problems. No Wonder movies, stilted Lore, one person(Kavitha) reading every quote. It drains me of any interest in actually reading the lore behind the Techs and Wonders.

 

[MattZed]

I don't actually see an argument that Beyond Earth's leader screen is bad, here. There are many on this forum who think Beyond Earth could stand to be improved, but those improvements aren't going to happen if the criticism is as vague as "I want to hear their ideas and personalities shine through the dialogue."

We don't yet have a consensus that the leaders speak "likely to be butchered versions of their native tongue." The translations are either generally bad, or they generally are not, and it's not a fair criticism until we know which is actually the case.

The main issue here is 'immersion.' But 'immersion' is problematic to talk about. Asking the game to "convince me that this is a character that has their own motivations" is to give the game a virtually impossible task; Civ leaders aren't going pass the Turing test anytime soon. 'Immersion' is then this vague notion that a game feels 'real,' even though the player is aware they are playing a game. Allegedly, this feeling of 'realness' is something that's a property of the game, and an 'immersive' game creates such a feeling in its players. But feelings aren't so universal among all players, so saying whether or not a game is 'immersive' is really just code for saying whether or not a game agrees with their tastes.

To this end, the OP makes some statements of their tastes. These are tastes with which I respectfully disagree, and I don't think we should desire these to be the dominating tastes of Beyond Earth. In particular, I have disagreement with with:

In other words, the feeling of History was centrepiece in conveying the lore and immersing players in Civ V.

In BE, where the Future and Ideas are the centrepiece, I don't find it important to hear the Leaders speak their own language.

Language isn't a feature of being historical or futuristic. I'd argue the use of "native tongues" in Beyond Earth is even more important than it was in Civilization V. In CiV, I already know Washington is American, Wu Zetian is Chinese, Maria I is Portuguese, etc. Hearing their languages doesn't tell me anything I don't already know. But this is not the case in BE. When I hear Vadim Kozlov speak in Polish and Russian, I learn that the Slavic Federation is a syncretic culture including Polish and Russian elements. In other words, the use of non-English languages in Beyond Earth tells the player things that would not be accomplished using only English.

Overall, I think the leader screens in Beyond Earth leave something to be desired. However, the issue isn't that the leaders are animated or that some speak non-English languages; the issue is that they don't do enough. Too much of the leader screen involves reading text while the faction leader is mute. The OP spoke of civ-specific musical cues; I wouldn't mind having some faction-specific ones.

Also, for the record, the narrator isn't Kavitha, but an unnamed woman from the Kavithian Protectorate.

 

[Pietato]

The issue is the lack of character and soul, not the diplomacy screen itself. They need to flesh out the leaders and factions better.

 

[Paszczak]

For me the problem is not that the leaders are not interesting, it's that there is absolutely no point in interacting with them from gameplay perspective. In past Civ games there was an incentive to keep good relations with other civs because you could trade techs, maps, luxuries or just sell crap you didn't need for gold.

With all of that gone is BE, what do you have left? Research pacts and Declarations of Friendship are both meaningless as the AI will artificially backstab you if they sense you're getting close to victory. Favors are basically another currency worth X Energy each and Energy is so easy to come by you don't even feel like you've been missing something if you don't trade.

No amount of dialogue or personality will help the other leaders when they serve no purpose for gameplay and are basically talking city-states that ocasionally condemn the human player for arbitrary reasons.

 

[HandyVac]

One of the flaws of the diplomacy screen, I think, is it doesn't communicate enough information about how that faction will behave in-game. (I.e. which behaviour traits/flavors have a high score in that leader's AI personality definition).

In Civ V you often get visual clues about the personality of the faction from the background and props in their leaderscene. Even if you know nothing about history and have never read the civilopedia, the moment you see Askia standing in front of a burning city with a sword slung casually over his shoulder you know the Songhai are going to be agressive warmongers, and the moment you see Isabella clutching her giant jewelled crucifix you know Spain is going to spam misionaries to spread their religion everywhere.

SMAC was even more obvious about this by having the leaders explicitly tell you in dialogue what their gameplay style is, e.g. "Greetings! I am Academician Zackharov of the University, and I intend to persue peaceful scientific research on this planet. Do not attempt to stop me".

When you can predict what one AI is likely to do differently from all the other AI's you can adjust your own gameplay choices accordingly, and the game feels varied and deep, with the selection of civs in your game making a big difference. But in BE the diplomacy interactions are so vague and non-specific that the leader's motivations and tendancies are a mystery, I can't predict how factions are likely to act so playing against any of them feels pretty much the same.

 

[Makavcio]

This may be SMAC nostalgia talking, but I feel that a big opportunity was lost in the decision of bringing back CIV's diplomacy screen with its animated Leaders speaking what is likely to be butchered versions of their native tongue(As a Chinese speaker, Daoming's lines sound like they're from a native speaker, but translated badly from English source material).

Uh, I though I'll have some time to participate in this discussion but I gotta go so just a quick note.

Firaxis intended their leaders to speak jumbled up versions of contemporary languages. "Future Chinese" is intended to sound awkward to a modern Chinese speaker. The same is true for other languages where basic grammar from one language uses words from two other languages to serve us the dish we got.

Did they do a good job? Hardly. Every decent linguist would be able to come up with much better versions of language development, even within unrealistic boundaries specified by Firaxis (in other words, languages don't evolve in the way guys from Firaxis think they do). My point is that their work is not a mistake, but rather a poorly undertaken intentional enterprise.

It's as bad with with other leaders. My personal "favorite", the stereotypical russki in charge of Russian Federation, just borrows random words from other Slavic languages. It really doesn't work as intended but my point here, again, is that Firaxis had very good, ambitious and admirable intentions here, but they mucked up the work completely.

 

[Gort]

The main problems I've encountered with the leaders are:

1. Duplicated text between leaders - it would have been a trivial effort to write unique text strings for each of the leaders, and would have helped a lot to give them character.

2. Very small number of phrases per leader - you'll hear "No village was ever ruined by trade" over and over and over, for example.

3. Text that doesn't match the phrases the leaders speak - take the Kavithan Protectorate's intro phrase where the voice actress misses off two words from the end of the line, for example.

4. There isn't actually very much to talk about with these leaders. In the average game you'll trade a bit, maybe get asked to go to war, or might get a war declaration against you. And with luxury resources gone (not necessarily a bad thing, mind you) the trade discussions are significantly "thinner" than in Civ 5.

The thing that struck me as most disappointing about the leaders was that the Beyond Earth team produced quite a lot of material about each leader - they even did entire interviews with some (all?) of them! But when it comes to their ingame presences, they might as well just be clones of each other.

 

[Idleray]

The thing that struck me as most disappointing about the leaders was that the Beyond Earth team produced quite a lot of material about each leader - they even did entire interviews with some (all?) of them! But when it comes to their ingame presences, they might as well just be clones of each other.

That's so true.