German Beta Report
have not had much time to write today, and I actually did not know what to write about. I was just wondering how I could write something understandable about teleportation in RuneScape, and how it combines with Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. But thanks to Alien, I do not have to write about that, as he suggested an article about the German version of RuneScape. As I did not have much time to check the beta out and write this article, it will be a little bit shorter than usual, I apologize for that.
Today, the 7th of March 2007, the German beta has opened to the public. The worlds are not really full, but that might be because it is already quite late here in Europe. I have been walking around for a little bit in the Al Kharid and Lumbridge area, examined a few things, and talked to a few NPCs. Sorry, but this article only contains a small report of my experiences through a world which is familiar, but also different...
When I logged in, Alien already appeared to be online, and we started a very funny conversation in German. When chatting a little bit while walking from the mine to downtown Al Kharid, I noticed that the chat is not fully optimalized for German conversations. When I tried to type könnst it appeared as k"onnst, luckily you can also replace the umlaut (points on the o) by an e behind it, but I think this is quite a big error.
Also, there were the names, names for items have of course been translated, but the names of the NPCs are pretty much the same. Except the titles have changed. For example: Duke Horacio now has the name Herzog Horacio. Next, I decided to go to Varrock (yes, just Varrock, no change in the name), the Varrock teleport is just called "Varrock-Teleport", that sounds very familiar!
In Varrock, I went straight to the castle to check out on King Roald. According to the announcement of the closed beta, King Roald (König Roald) had some troubles learning German. It seems it is all fixed now, or I should start some specific quest, or it is just my very small knowledge of the German Language which makes it seem all right...
However, if you are trying to speak in English on the German servers (if you don’t know German or you are messaging English friends on other servers), the censor system has been changed. It now censors German swearing, but due to RuneScape’s infamous censor algorithm, random English words will also be censored. This was a known problem when players spoke other languages than English on the standard servers, and Jagex has obviously not tried to speak much English on the German servers. Problems will arise when someone on the standard server sends you a message in English, and you only see censored words, while everything is shown correctly for the player who sends the message. Hopefully, Jagex will patch the system and fix the most common words, but it might still be very annoying to ask users on the English server to write a sentence in another way, especially if it’s not censored on their screen.
Overall, I can say RuneScape is very nice in German. It is interesting that everyone, even the king, talks to you in the formal sie form, instead of saying du (both can be translated as you, but you speak to important people with sie, which is more polite, and to good friends and children you say du). Again, I am sorry that this is such a short article, but I do not have much time to write more. I hope this will do until I am able to write a review of the German beta.
Feel free to comment this article and share your experience and thoughts about the German version of RuneScape in this topic. This version is now open to everyone, but has not been announced in the English RuneScape news.
