The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• The whole game now readable in Japanese
• Specializations you choose instead of the game guessing
• Nineteen house and decoration fixes proved
• Dying on purpose to prove death is free
• Two time machines arguing about the hour

Transcript

Good evening to thee, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British before thee, with word of what thy makers were about upon Monday last. The whole of our speech hath been set down anew in the Japanese tongue, and proven by a reader who went and read it. Thy specializations are writ plain upon thy character sheet at last, chosen at a trainer as a thing decided rather than a thing guessed at. Nineteen matters of hearth and home struck from the board, from a lighthouse gone dark to rain falling inside a keep. And one good soul spent the day dying on purpose, that thou need never fear it again. Forty and four things closed, and not a single line of new code written. We begin with a quarrel between two machines about the hour of the day.

Picture a town at midday. The sun is where the sun ought to be, the shadows are short, everybody is going about their business. Three seconds later it is dawn. A moment after that it is midday again. And on it goes, all afternoon.

The cause was two Kobold time machines placed in the same town, each set to a different hour, each entirely certain of itself, neither willing to yield. And my favorite part is that one of those machines had been picked up and put away in somebody's pack, and from inside the pack it was still driving the sky. A town settles on one machine now, and a machine you have put away keeps its opinions to itself. A tester confirmed that yesterday afternoon.

Now the large one. As of early yesterday morning, this game can be played in Japanese. All of it. Every conversation line in the world, item names and item descriptions, quest entries and objectives, loading tips, the skills, the interface. Sixty-six thousand seven hundred and ninety-two lines of dialogue, and the number of those we finished is also sixty-six thousand seven hundred and ninety-two. The only gap left is the in-game books, and those sit on their own separate track for every language we support.

What made this one hard is that Japanese was the first language we have ever added with nothing underneath it. Every language before it inherited a body of human translation we could mine, and you mine it for a glossary, so that a place is called the same thing every time anybody mentions it. Japanese had none. So the tooling wrote one instead: three thousand five hundred and ninety-one conversation keyword terms, and two thousand seven hundred and ten names of people, places and things, all settled up front, so the name on a signpost matches the name in the sentence that sends you there.

Then there was the question of which translation system to trust. We ran a blind comparison. Five hundred records, two candidate systems, a reviewer who was not told which was which, and the two candidates swapped left to right on half the records so that position could not tilt the result. One of them won by close to two to one. And its widest margin was in politeness level, which is the part of Japanese that reads as broken when you get it wrong.

And then the reviewer turned around and found a mistake in our own style rules, which I think is the best thing that happened all week. We had specified polite verb forms everywhere. Reasonable enough, until you remember that a quest objective is not a person speaking to you. It is a note you wrote to yourself. In polite form, your own journal starts addressing you like a superior officer. Kindly proceed to the mill. Kindly speak with the innkeeper. Your own diary, issuing you instructions. We rewrote the rules so that anything you read about yourself uses plain forms, and re-exported all three thousand seven hundred and ninety-one batches so every one of them carries the correction.

And then we checked the result rather than assuming it. An automated pass over a hundred and nineteen thousand four hundred and thirty-one lines flagged two hundred and forty-seven of them as untranslated, and every single one of those is something that should stay exactly as it is. The invented words of power you speak when casting. The Latin carved into certain walls. A handful of internal codes. The last language we filled in before this one flagged about seven times as many.

One more thing came out of that work, and it is the sort of discovery that only happens because you are elbow deep in something adjacent. The Japanese typeface defaulted to its thinnest weight, and the game had no way to ask it for a heavier one, so every character came out hairline. We now ship the normal weight. And while sorting that, somebody noticed the exact same thing had been true of Chinese since the day we added it. Chinese text has been drawing at roughly half the ink it should for months. About three hundred and twenty ink pixels per character where the correct weight gives six hundred and sixty. Nobody wrote in about it. They may simply have assumed we like it faint.

The work itself went in over the summer. What happened yesterday is that somebody switched the game into Japanese, read it, and signed it off, and the whole plan came off the board at about four in the morning. That is the biggest thing this project has closed in weeks.

Second. Specializations. A specialization is one of the largest commitments you make in this game. Two schools out of twenty-one, and that choice shapes what you are good at for a very long time.

Here is the part I find remarkable. Until recently, the game did not write down which two you had picked. It worked it out fresh, every time it needed to know, by looking at whether you happened to have a mastery skill set to train. And it worked it out in four separate places, each place with its own copy of the reasoning, and nothing anywhere compared the four answers. Four opinions, no referee.

Which meant a character could end up counted as specialized in three schools at once, with all three paying out. There was a tidy-up pass meant to catch exactly that, and it only ever ran when you used a skill, so it never ran at login. And when it did fire, it decided which two schools to keep based on whatever order the skill list happened to be in at that moment. Which is less a decision than an accident with good timing.

And the only way to find out which schools you were specialized in was to walk every skill tree, one at a time, looking at the little arrows. Thirty-seven school sigils, and no summary anywhere in the game.

All of that is over. Your two schools are written on your character sheet. There is a line under the Skills window tabs that stays put whether you are in the tree view or the list view. There is a Specializations section on the Stats tab. And right-clicking a Specialization skill row, which used to open nothing whatsoever, now opens something.

Choosing is its own deliberate step, taken at a skill trainer or at an Oracle Confirmatory, and so is giving one up. When both of your slots are full, you choose which school to set down. The game used to choose for you, and it chose the one at the lowest level, which is exactly backwards from how people actually feel about their own characters. And swapping costs you no experience at all. The school you set down keeps every point and every level it ever earned. It simply stops counting toward what you are, until you take it up again.

Also, and this had been quietly annoying people for years, training a Specialization skill no longer claims a slot. Those two used to be the same control. You could not raise the skill without taking the whole school on, and you could not stop training it without giving the school up. Set all twenty-one to train now if you feel like it. Your specializations will not budge.

A tester went through the lot of it and signed it off just after two in the morning, which tells you something about the hours our volunteers keep.

Third. Nineteen of yesterday's forty-three proofs were about houses and the things you put inside them, and I want to read a few of them out because taken together they are quite a picture.

Rain was falling inside a two story keep. Indoors. Under the roof. Which is, I would argue, the entire commercial proposition of a roof. The beacon at the top of a founder's lighthouse had been switched off, so the tower waved a faint sweep of light rays around and lit absolutely nothing. It is a lighthouse. There is one item on the job description. The multicolor holiday lights were drawing their red bulbs as white, so the strand you bought for being multicolored read as white, green and blue, which is fewer colors than advertised and a sadder party than promised.

A round palapa in your garden was painting itself onto your window glass instead of sitting behind it, so looking out of your own window showed you the palapa on the glass rather than out in the yard. In one four story greenhouse home, stepping into the floor opening beside the ladder would stop you partway down until you moved, because that ladder carried two invisible click volumes several times larger than the ones every other row house uses, and the top of the lower one formed a ledge inside the hole you were trying to drop through.

A buoy rope refused to be placed at its largest size. While you hold an item for placement the game floats it slightly above whatever is underneath, and that gap stayed the same no matter how large the item got, so art that dips below its own base pushed straight through the floor as soon as you scaled it up. The gap now grows with the item.

And then the ordinary indignities. Window sills in a gothic mansion that would not take a decoration. The landing between the stairs in a chateau that would not take one either. Rugs hovering above an entryway floor. A set of books that would not sit flush against each other on a shelf. Wall decorations that would not hang on the wooden walls you crafted yourself. A row house window you could not see through. A water home whose front door was standing open on the day you moved in.

And the virtue banners, whose symbols disappeared the moment the light came from behind them. A virtue that is only visible when the light is favorable. I am going to set that one down gently and walk away from it.

Now the one I want to sit with for a moment. On the third of August we switched off skill decay on death. Dying no longer takes experience off any skill, at any level, in any scene. That was the announcement. Yesterday it became a proven fact, because a tester went to the test shard and died. And then died again. And kept on dying, at different levels, in different places, in different ways, checking a number after each one.

I want to be clear about why that mattered enough to spend a Monday on. For years, death in this world charged you a fee, and the fee came out of the thing you had been building for months. What that does to a person is quiet and lasting. You stop trying things, you decline the fight you are unsure about, and you give the unscouted room a miss. The experience was always the smaller half of the price. The larger half was every fight people talked themselves out of.

And switching a rule like that off is a tiny edit. Being certain it is off everywhere is not, because a rule that old gets consulted from a great many places, and the only honest way to know is for somebody to die over and over while watching a number that must not move.

So spare a thought for the shape of that job. Somewhere out there is a person who spent a good portion of their Monday arranging their own death, repeatedly, deliberately, and then filling in a form about it afterward. Whoever you are, the number held. Go and have a lie down.

A handful of smaller things now, and I will group them by what they mean to you rather than by where they live in the code.

Things your hands do. Right-click mouse-look now keeps hold of the pointer for the whole turn instead of losing it partway. The walk keybind works on the overworld map, where previously it did nothing at all and the typed commands were your only way to change pace. Reading several items one after another no longer freezes your character in place. And you can perform a combat roll while over-encumbered, as long as you have the focus to spend on it.

Things the game finally admits to you. An item you picked up off the ground now says on its tooltip that no merchant will buy it, which has always been true of it and was never once mentioned. The stats command reports your real crafting and gathering levels rather than a polite fiction. Nameplate text is readable again. Slow and root tooltips now say up to, because the length of those effects depends on what you are pointing them at, and a flat number was a promise we could not keep. An overworld preview lists the resource types you will find down there. And mounts in the shop open a proper three dimensional preview, which matters a great deal when you are about to spend real money on something you can otherwise only see from one angle.

People and animals. Town folk now stop following you once a conversation ends, rather than adopting you and coming along. The conversation window closes when you step into a crafting station, so you are not talking to a fishmonger through a forge. A child in Castle Atos has a child's voice, which he did not have before, and I would rather not discuss what he sounded like previously. Pet food is no longer eaten when you have no pet out. And the guard emote no longer puts a raised sword between the camera and your own face.

Two for the crafters. A batch craft now stops safely when your mold wears out and your spare happens to be locked, instead of doing something a good deal worse. And crafting table bonuses are steady from one table to the next, so the table you happen to be standing at is no longer a hidden variable in your results.

The lightning round. The three dimensional dungeon map in The Rise is confirmed working, and the player marker on the Valhold town map now sits where the player is actually standing, which is a marker's whole reason for existing. A star spell speaks its words of power out loud. And our reporting oracle can find reports that already exist, which sounds like faint praise and is in fact the entire job.

Overnight the forum sweep put three more things on the board. A balance idea about shock weapons, requested by Barugon. A report that wall decorations on an airship are being counted as outdoor placements when they are plainly indoors. And a note that pets set to follow you will take a strange detour around one particular spot in the Obsidian Wolf Cave out at Deep Ravenswood, which I can only assume is where something unpleasant once happened to a dog.

That is the whole board. Forty-four items closed, forty-three of them verifications, four commits, and not one of those four touched the game. This is the fifth day running that the shape of our week has been proving rather than typing. On Saturday I said the code would move again on Monday. It did not. I was wrong, and I find I do not mind very much, because a fix nobody has checked is a rumor with a commit attached to it.

What I am looking forward to is somebody logging in and playing this world in Japanese for an entire evening, and then telling us what reads strangely. That is the next real test, and no automated pass on earth can do it for us.

And before I go. Those two Kobold time machines, arguing all month about what hour it was. I asked the team how long it took to get the pair of them to agree. They said it was only a matter of time. Good night from New Britannia.