How did we achieve diversity? Why does War Hospital only speaks English?
In War Hospital, the player manages a British field hospital during World War I on the French front. In order to be able to show the diversity of people fighting and saving lives on the British side of the conflict, we decided on a rather special approach that resulted in War Hospital being available only in the English spoken language version. We invite you to read this story!
When we started building characters who would be the player's advisors in War Hospital, the first thing we did was quite obvious, which was to divide these characters by their specialties. Therefore, we decided that these characters would be: The head of the nurses' service, the chief engineer, the hospital defense commander, and the leader of reconnaissance units. This is quite an obvious division, characteristic for tycoon like games, which allows players to understand the rules and mechanics of the game. However, when we made this choice, we wanted it to (apart from the game mechanics) also build immersion with the authenticity of the world presented in the game. Our goal was to show the diversity of people who fought on the side of the United Kingdom. Therefore, like Winston Churchill, we used the English language to fight.
We decided that our heroes would represent various nations that were part of the British Empire at that time. And with this key we assumed that the chief of engineers was Indian and the messengers were Australians (here, the single-player campaign in Battlefield 1 "The Runner" was a huge inspiration) and the commander of the hospital defense was a Scot. With this decision, we began work aimed at ensuring that for the player these characters do not differ only in their portrait or name. That's why we decided to record the voices of these characters, each of whom speaks differently due to the accent and way of pronunciation typical of their region of the world. We achieved an effect that exceeded our expectations - the characters speak to the player in English, but at the same time he can feel the difference in the way they speak.
This nuance would be extremely difficult to reproduce in other languages, so after many discussions we decided to leave this immersion-building element, limiting the number of spoken languages only to the diversified English language. We hope that this aproach will be appreciated by players.
The War Hospital Team
War Hospital is coming on Steam on January 11, 2024.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1553000/War_Hospital/
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