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what happened to the multilingualism...?
niche point that I doubt many will care about, but I've seen other posts about lore and world design on here comparing Catalyst with the original, so I thought I'd add something else into the mix:
one of the things I liked about the city design of the first game was the multiple languages that were present throughout. of course it was all one and the same language you heard, depending on the localisation you played, but it was the various languages you saw across the different levels that gave me the impression you were in a truly internationalised city. I can recall a metro sign in French, an advert in Russian, and several signs and boxes with Chinese characters on. it made it hard to pin down exactly where the place was located, what its backstory was, and in some ways it felt futuristic to have a city that had assimilated such a diverse combination of languages (think Blade Runner, for example).
while Catalyst is undoubtedly more futuristic, and the world and its backstory is far more developed, there's no presence of foreign languages - spoken or written - that I can recall, and it makes me wonder whether this was a conscious choice or something that just got left along the wayside. I can imagine we're far enough into the future that other languages have become 'extinct', or perhaps other nations like OmniStat and Sabaeus use completely different languages (we never hear the spy in Elysium 'speak', for example).
in any case, with its 'global corporation' vibe, and the presence of characters from diverse backgrounds, I'm somewhat surprised Cascadia isn't a bit more multilingual. it was just a nice feature from the first game that helped bring the city to life a bit more for me, and it's curious that it hasn't featured at all in Catalyst.
one of the things I liked about the city design of the first game was the multiple languages that were present throughout. of course it was all one and the same language you heard, depending on the localisation you played, but it was the various languages you saw across the different levels that gave me the impression you were in a truly internationalised city. I can recall a metro sign in French, an advert in Russian, and several signs and boxes with Chinese characters on. it made it hard to pin down exactly where the place was located, what its backstory was, and in some ways it felt futuristic to have a city that had assimilated such a diverse combination of languages (think Blade Runner, for example).
while Catalyst is undoubtedly more futuristic, and the world and its backstory is far more developed, there's no presence of foreign languages - spoken or written - that I can recall, and it makes me wonder whether this was a conscious choice or something that just got left along the wayside. I can imagine we're far enough into the future that other languages have become 'extinct', or perhaps other nations like OmniStat and Sabaeus use completely different languages (we never hear the spy in Elysium 'speak', for example).
in any case, with its 'global corporation' vibe, and the presence of characters from diverse backgrounds, I'm somewhat surprised Cascadia isn't a bit more multilingual. it was just a nice feature from the first game that helped bring the city to life a bit more for me, and it's curious that it hasn't featured at all in Catalyst.
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