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Basilisk Games has released its second weekly Q&A update featuring answers to one or two questions from forum members about the upcoming Eschalon: Book II, the next title in the company's old school RPG series. This time readers learn about support for languages other than English and the potential for players to add their own modules to the game.

Question #2:
[RezoApio] One question about translation: will B2 be available in other languages ? or will you offer fans the possibility to translate? This also leads to the question of moding B2 btw.
There is definitely more thought being put into translatability this time around. For Book I, much of the game's text was stashed away in proprietary files which made it very hard to give to others for translations. For Book II, we are keeping nearly all of the text in common format files outside the the game where translation will be much easier to do. What we have to work on now is a way to substitute the game's default fonts if the translated text contains Cyrillic characters. I don't believe this will be much of an issue, but it is something that we'll need to experiment with as the framework reaches a more finalized stage.

To more specifically answer your question: Basilisk Games will not handle non-English versions ourselves, but I expect that alternate language packs would probably start appearing a few weeks after release.

As for modifications, Book II is being designed to handle add-on modules correctly (as many people know, Book I was supposed to have an add-on but we could never get it to work properly). As for how easy it may be for players to create their own modules, again it is a little too early to make promises. We realize the benefit that can be gained by having an active mod community, but there are a lot of issues that need to be addressed before we can just release our production tools to the community and let everyone do want they want. It has always been then plan that Book III would be the game that is fully modifiable. Book II's framework will get us closer to that goal and may even allow for minor modifications (such as language packs mentioned above) but I cannot promise that you will be able to design your own adventures (then again, ingenious fans may find a way on their own! )

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