NPCs talking in different idioms

The title. Raul Manzanos might be a spanish tourists that doesnt know english. Sasha might be an illegal immigrant from russia. Both dont know or know little how to speak in english, and theyll most likely try to communicate in their native idioms
We would need books, electric translators or ask a spanish/russian partner to get an idea of what they are trying to say. Maybe they are asking for help, for supplies, ammo, warning us from danger or telling us to shove a cactus up our asses
Skill-ish thing, maybe? New traits at the start of the game?

[size=5pt]PD: Apologies if my writting is shit today. I have no idea of why[/size]

you know how rare it is to encounter people from different places that are so bad at English that they can’t even tell you what they need in the apocalypse.

and i guess we assume that the cataclysm dda is set somewhere in America and it’s almost impossible to find people that were living in America and haven’t picked up some words or knowledge about English language while living there.

Its set in New england. And Im not talking about people who lived in the hood city or town for 10 years. Im talking about tourists, newcomers and people who suffer human traffic (Males or women that fall into the hands of mafias, brothels or heartless companies). People new to the idiom and the country

I don’t know how to speak hood, maybe that will be a trait? Being able to speak to the gang-bangers of the ruined world? Haha

it’s not like all tourists and newcomers are north koreans that hate English language and vomit on their ideoms , it’s the 21 century , most people who can afford tourism will at least know what yes or no means.

and the human traffic people are rare + the apocalypse and the chance of ever finding one is mega extremely low.

Theres people that runs from their contries to lands they never heard about. People who travel to countries with strange idioms just to work for their families. Also people in airports or train stations changing planes or trains. “north koreans that hate English language and vomit on their ideoms” that are just passin thru the country
Illegal brothels and mines are sometimes full of human traffic, but bribes and discreption keep the law off them

[quote=“Reservoir, post:6, topic:1942”]Theres people that runs from their contries to lands they never heard about. People who travel to countries with strange idioms just to work for their families. Also people in airports or train stations changing planes or trains. “north koreans that hate English language and vomit on their ideoms” that are just passin thru the country
Illegal brothels and mines are sometimes full of human traffic, but bribes and discreption keep the law off them[/quote]

Yeah, human trafficking is a Thing. :frowning: Not sure Cata is the best place to handle it, though.

If it is set in New England why are there US Weekly magazines around?

If it is set in New England why are there US Weekly magazines around?[/quote]

New England is a region in the northeastern corner of the United States consisting of the six states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. New England is bordered by New York state to the southwest, Quebec to the northwest, and New Brunswick and the Atlantic Ocean to the east.

Also, language is unlikely to be an issue. Statistically speaking, there aren’t going to be that many people in the New England area that don’t speak any english. Even if the area was more appropriate for that sort of thing, though, it doesn’t really seem like all that fun a mechanic, y’know? Social interaction already tends to be a weird clunky mechanic, there’s no need to make it harder by adding a random chance of ‘screw you, you can’t talk to this guy ever because you didn’t spend points on this niche skill that is useless everywhere else.’

I like the idea of non-native npc’s, they don’t need to be ‘I no speaka the England’, but it would be nice to have a game with a bit of diversity rather than everyone speaking perfect English.

The only problem is, this tends to be difficult to do without coming across as just racist stereotypes.

In terms of flavour, it’d be nice, sure… but realistically, the system just isn’t there to support it yet. Adding different accents or whatever means that each NPC type would need all their dialogue options individually redone. This early in the development cycle, when NPCs are still buggy and not fully implemented, you’re essentially building on quicksand. It doesn’t make much sense to go through and write up a half-dozen variations on the dialogue before all the options are solidified; you need to get the basics of what they’re saying down before you can start playing around with how there’s saying it.

Later, when NPCs are more stable, some kind of proper conversation tree system could be implemented, such that there’d be an actual point to chatting up and otherwise dealing with the NPCs. Modding capability is easy enough to include, if it’s made a priority at the time of implementation, so one the devs have an NPC conversation system in a workable state, then anyone could go through and write up whatever accents they like. Until then, anything of this sort that gets done would just have to be redone later… which isn’t really worth the effort for a flavour-type feature.