Back at the end of April, Mars: War Logs was released on PC to mediocre reviews. Critics praised the action RPG’s setting, ideas, and the ambition of developer Spiders, but also panned the game for a poor translation and story issues.
In an unusual move, Spiders and publisher Focus Home Interactive took the criticism to heart, and today announced that a new translation of the game has been created. The publisher states that the game was originally written in French, and that the English version of the game “strayed too far” from what the original story and character motivations were.
To fix it, the release of Mars: War Logs on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 has been delayed until sometime in September. The game was originally scheduled to come out on consoles sometime in May. The English localization of the game has been completely redone, with voice actors called in to re-record dialogue. The new translation can now be patched into the PC version of War Logs and will be included in the console versions at launch.
“Mars contains a vast amount of dialog, even by RPG standards,” said Luc Heninger, director of production at Focus. “The plot has numerous strands and the dialog often has many variants to mirror the hero’s changes in reputation. The tight deadlines between the game release dates meant that the initial English translation lacked depth and contained a number of errors; it was then sent to the recording studio, making the job of the actors extremely difficult. The actual game was thoroughly tested and released with very few bugs on PC, but unfortunately the procedures for the audio and text QA failed and allowed many English localization issues to slip through. We realized the extent of the problem after seeing the first feedback from the press and gamers. The result was so far removed from what we usually produce that we took the decision to halt the submission process for the console version, which was due for release only weeks after the PC title. We have re-written the game text and dialog and, of course, recorded the actors again, replacing the sections that weren’t true to the characters in Mars. All these problems will therefore be fixed in the console version. An update is now available for players with the PC game, and we have also incorporated the new audio in the PC versions on the various download sites.”
In addition to pointing out that War Logs is 33% off today on Steam, Focus has released a new video featuring the re-localized first seven minutes of the game. The voice acting in the game has gotten a noticeable quality boost since it’s release on PC.
