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The way languages work is kinda… Odd.

As a new player trying to learn one will take A LOT of time, it will stop you from unlocking more mechanical things and so on, it's a significant investment of resoures in a time where they can feel most precious. And as a result, it feels like very few people within first few months learn another language unless it's via say skillsoft.

On the other end down the line learning all 8 is more like "yeah, why not" and becomes more of a footnote that, by that time, almost everyone speaks to them all, if they don't, it's an RP choice.

It does not feel right? I think it would be way better if learning one extra language would be -much- les of an investment, but also maybe less of a footnote towards the end, making it still a meaningful investment you can make early on, without devaluing the languages as a whole. And maybe it would lead to more people using anything besides english hah.

By Aida 0
Languages are the gateway to a variety of social circles and can be very powerful even for a new PC. You can also come out of the gate with a language if your intelligence is high-enough.

As for a lot of people becoming Polyglots, I find it largely situational on the PC. Some PCs have very legitimate reasons to speak a variety of languages. Some don't and simply don't.

By ReeferMadness 0
Platinum language skillsofts used to cost 100,000c before the skillsoft rework (I may have been one of the only players to ever buy them hah) which is why the skill investment is so out of whack versus the current skillsoft options.

It also used to be much less clear that you could leave chargen with a second full fluency (I thought for years it could only be one of three ranks), and for players who want to incorporate languages into their roleplay they should really go that route if possible.

By 0x1mm 0
Last part got cut off sorry.

The silver lining of language learning being skewed towards longer played characters is that languages are kind of a mess, in terms of their lore (the absurd nationalist fantasy that is Tagalog supplanting Sinitic languages get real, the unending misconceptions of Euro being a continental lingua franca instead of a vernacular street language, the mistaken idea that the coded languages are the only languages to exist in Withmore) and in terms of implementation because they're a very cool concept that never really got extended or deeply integrated into the gameplay that much so a lot of gameplay systems are English only.

So they are cool and have roleplaying potential but too many fresh character trying to do a lot of stuff with them is probable to cause more difficulties (for them and everyone else) than it might seem.

By 0x1mm 0
In case it is not well know, how long it takes to learn a language is directly proportional to your INT stat. Low int, takes longer. Higher int, learn faster.
By Slither 0
I also see this pattern a lot. Reluctance to learn a language until the character is nearly maxed out. Then learning them all. I am unsure if any of the points brought up, while useful information, has addressed this at all.

Is this pattern as prevalent as it seems or have a couple of us players just happened to see a pattern that isn't widespread?

If it is a fairly common pattern, is it a desired one? I for one would love to see it change - if it is real.

Are there any ideas on how one might adjust things to break this patters without having to rework the whole system?

Those are some of the things I find myself wondering after reading all of the responses so far at least. :)

By Grey0 0
Learning languages early is fun. I've posted before and I'll post again, though, that I think the Max number of languages you can learn should be based on your base INT stat with a minimum of two. Make the max ue guys buy skillsofts too if they're dummies.
By Plebe 0
By Plebe at Feb 26, 2025 4:59 PM

Learning languages early is fun. I've posted before and I'll post again, though, that I think the Max number of languages you can learn should be based on your base INT stat with a minimum of two. Make the max ue guys buy skillsofts too if they're dummies.

I've kind of toyed with that idea in my head a bit as well, but often just fall back on remembering that this is a game. While it may be unrealistic for everyone to know every language in existence, there is enough exposure to the various cultures across the board that it does actually make a bit of sense to be speaking a number of different languages.

Takeshi Kovacs probably isn't the best example, as he was highly trained for assimilation and operations in hostile territory, but Altered Carbon Season 1 Episode 1 where he trades words with Jaeger in three different languages over the course of a very simple conversation was pretty cool.

By Quotient 0
I kind of like the idea because it's a game. It could be one of the mechanical disadvantages of using INT as a dump stat. Having a hard time deciding how strongly I feel about it though.

By Grey0 0
I would maybe like putting languages on a curve, where learning 2nd one is going to be brazenly fast (so anyone few days down in dome can decide to learn it for pick-language-flavor), say 5 days' worth of EU on below average int fast. Then another language you learn will take more like 8 days' worth, and subsequent ones go: 16, 30, 50 and so on.

This would make learning all 8 a major time sink even for near-cap players, and thus increase value of translator chip, skillsofts etc across the board, while letting more languages fly, without making them feel like "everyone knows them all anyway".

By Aida 0
Hmm. I've looked at the analytics on players with over 2500 UE who have learned more than 3 languages, and who have also logged in over the past 3 months and there is a decent amount of them.

I think this is a product of not counting language UE toward the cap, so people who get close, will just learn all languages. We allowed learning languages to not count against the UE cap because we didn't want people to completely forgo learning languages.

That being said, everyone eventually knowing every language is no different than everyone only knowing English. I like the idea of limiting the # of languages that can be learned behind intelligence, thus preventing all but the highest INT characters from learning all languages. We could still allow even the lowest INT character to learn 2 languages.

Thoughts?

(Edited by Slither at 6:27 am on 2/27/2025)

By Slither 0
I love that too as a solution!

But also would not hate faster learning on curve to go with it, encourage the newbies to get into that, I think it's a great flavor.

By Aida 0
BGBB Note: This post title is lacking clarity. Something like: A discussion on improving languages or 'Problems with languages in 2025' or 'How can we improve languges in 2025' or based on the original post 'It takes too long to learn languages' would have been better. I've been going back through old posts and it's really difficult when they are one word titles.
By Slither 0
Would it be difficult to get language representation for characters coming from the continent of Africa? Since it's the Collective Nation of Africa, maybe allowing a prevalent dominant language for the majority would be applicable?
By Napoleon 0
I second Napoleon's idea. Maybe even a language like Swahili. As a trade language, it is already blend of Bantu and Arabic so it fits in with the kind of cultural hotpot of Withmore other languages like mash.
By RatchetEffect 0
I really like the idea of an African language. The sheer number of cultures, languages, and the nature of African Diaspora is really complex but if we're handwaving Tagalog for all of Southeast Asia - I think it's fair to have an equivalent there.
By ReeferMadness 0
As long as we avoid the 'each non-white continent speaks one language and is one country now' trope the rest of the timeline is plagued with. It's horribly ignorant!

Really the timeline and ethnicity selector and language histories are a disaster of very very badly informed geography and history and dated prejudices, but I suppose that's getting away from the point. If we were overhauling everything from scratch I'd say there should be at least four super regional African languages (plus French or Portuguese as lingua francas) but Swahili would at least be a start!

By 0x1mm 0
I agree the language and overall sentiment there is problematic, but is it really where coding hours should be spent? Probably not.

The underlying goal was always for the focus to be Withmore with the world as a faint backdrop of megasprawls and awfulness. It also originated with a very small players of ten who had no ill-will towards representation but rather feeding the cyberpunk tropes which are very informed by the Cold War rhetoric and Hollywood media of the 80's plus a few homages to a PC or two @history which was then defined in the timeline.

Beyond that tangent, I really think it's best not to overthink it but rather make positive gains in cultural representation and overall storytelling when we can.

By ReeferMadness 0
Reefer I love you, but y'all had the Fourth Reich conquer Europe. There was a little bit of sketchy wills from some involved.

Realistically there will be zero additions or changes to languages because, at least as far as I remember, Johnny thinks there's already too many and they don't get used enough to justify more work (which I would say is accurate in purely gameplay) but even so it's a topic worth discussing in my view, if only to get away from the player perceptions that the coded languages are the only ones that exist in the world, something that is fairly common to hear from players IC and OOC and something that really limits roleplaying.

I've lost track of how many characters have helpfully informed me that all Europeans speak Euro now.

By 0x1mm 0
If that's what the wypipo said happened in this alternate timeline, who am I to fight The Man and tell him what languages would be still prominent in his grand vision of how things panned out? But in all seriousness, the help file does say that there's way more languages recognized than there is coded support for. It's the first line.

I have said that my character does speak a dialect of a country and use a few words to flavor here and there, but I always feel bad for trying to say things since there's no coded support.

By Napoleon 0
If that's what the wypipo said happened in this alternate timeline, who am I to fight The Man and tell him what languages would be still prominent in his grand vision of how things panned out? But in all seriousness, the help file does say that there's way more languages recognized than there is coded support for. It's the first line.

I have said that my character does speak a dialect of a country and use a few words to flavor here and there, but I always feel bad for trying to say things since there's no coded support.

By Napoleon 0
Hey I just love that this conversation is happening at all and love hearing your input on the topic Napoleon, but yes it's fair to say the documentation on languages is good, I really don't know what drives a lot of the misconceptions about them.

I think coded languages are cool in giving language support to players who don't know those languages a way to rep speaking them with characters who do, I'm a little bit less enamored with how much the game cracks down on language use outside of the coded system when it's so limited in scope.

I don't really have solutions to offer overall but I'm just happy there is interest among players in having more and better global representation!

By 0x1mm 0
I'm not sure what a good solution to that would be either. I have thought about taking up a coded language that's as close to the geographic location of a concept as possible, then saying that their specific little hamlet used a dialect of it like Euro being the street language of a region, but they spoke a bastardization French-Italian and using more slang or words like that to give it a little color.
By Napoleon 0
That's such a good concept. Blended languages are super cool and a lot of people don't even know they exist in almost every country.

I personally really love seeing underrepresented or regional minority languages getting roleplayed, shout out to whoever it was using really good lowland Scots years ago! I know it can be a challenge and suspect some staff don't like non-English use but whenever language becomes part of the story, like how Haitian Creole is a major game touchstone, it really makes everything feel deeper and authentic to me personally.

By 0x1mm 0
I'm super inspired by this discussion, I want to make some more African language representation. I have a whole book on Akan ethnography that I haven't had time to read and I'm going to start reading it tonight. Coded support is nice but really it can start with players, so I guess I should be the change I want to see.
By 0x1mm 0
We'll start a revolution, ox1mm.
By Napoleon 0
That 4th Reich comment phased me but you're not wrong. I'm always wary of anybody who rolls a Prussian…

As for developing and introducing new slang, I agree that's the move 100000%. I love incorporating NadSat into my characters when appropriate and other little quips tend to shine through as well. The 1st time you 'hear' something it's always a little weird, but when people embrace it is *chef kiss*.

I recommend encompassing your slang into a small post, sharing it on the bgbb, adding it to the @slang suggestions, and using it until it becomes the new 'baka'.

By ReeferMadness 0
Aww, saying "y'all" was painting with too broad a brush even if it was just teasing Reefer! I wouldn't mean to disparage anything you'd contributed or proximate to contributing. You're a positive creative wellspring and, as far as I'm concerned, a pillar of the game's entire identity.
By 0x1mm 0
Would I have made all the same choices when it comes to the timeline? Nope. But I think it's important to remember that they, to the best of my knowledge, were trying to create a hellhole dystopia. A world where, "You've never had the urge to kill yourself until now."

I'm sure there are exceptions but I try to not assume that every writer who writes of bad things is secretly a terrible person who loves those things.

By Grey0 0
Agreed on the slang front. There is a long running thread in Theme for slang. Pretty sure it isn't locked and is open for new suggestions.

Best way to get slang into the game is to just start saying it. Work it into your conversations often. If people like it, they will start using it.

By Slither 0
To be honest, I love the different languages in this game and have always tried to find ways to incorporate them into my roleplay and @history if possible. I also think all of my characters (there havent been that many) have tried to bring some kind of local dialect into their everyday speech in some way just to try to represent the breadth of the world even if our official language selection is minimal. I love when I am greeted in a foreign language, it adds flavor and some deeper understanding of the character that greeted me. I've never seen people over-do "other" languages either. Once maybe, a long time ago, but it was called out right away. More official languages would be great, too, especially if it represented an underrepresented part of the globe. Too many might get a little balance-crazy though.
By Plebe 0
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