Probably the large majority of people who will play on Selene and Oceanus are people who have learned English as a second language. Also on the NA-servers there will be many people who struggle with English. A lot of the players will only have knowledge of basic everyday vocabulary.
Conversation with fellow players won't be the big problem, because one can ask if he/she didn't understand. But how about interacting with NPCs?
Most commonly we will be born into a NPC family. So our first player experience depends on understanding the information our parents give us and to carry out the tasks they ask us to do. Let's assume we want to be good sons and daughters and do what we were asked to do make our parents happy with us.
But what, if we don't understand? Just immagine the following situation:
NPC-father to player-child: "Remember, every morning your first duty is to lipwap the masraks, but make sure to keep them separate from the hopseks. Then you have to..." And the NPC keeps on talking about daily tasks.
Can you see the question marks above the player's head? This is discouraging. But how could the poor player be helped?
What do we usually do, if we read something hard to comprehend? We read it again and look up words.
So my suggestion is that there should be a way
to make NPCs repeat what they have just said, to give players a chance to read or listen again and
to interrupt a NPC's speach, to give players time to look up unfamiliar vocabulary.
As there won't be the same quests for all players, we can't ask other players what this or that NPC ususlly tells people to do. That's why understanding what NPCs say, will be much more important for every individual player in CoE then in any other game. And there should be ways to help that. What do you think?
