English Errors in Tutorials

As a strategic gamer who loves nonviolent competition, I appreciate OTC. As a copy editor and as someone who adores reading, I feel pain when I encounter so many errors in the otherwise-brilliant introduction to the game. I deeply want this game to succeed, and since it's in Early Access figured it was worth a shot at pointing out how much of an issue this is:

It starts with the tooltip you get hovering over the missions in Learn to Play: "Seneca Development will show how to profiting from the life support needs of the nearby Earth Colony," where it means "profit."

The intro has a couple of problems, but the really prominent one is "They require water to drink, food to eat, and oxygen to breath." The word here should be "breathe."

Then there are multiple its/it's errors, which I know really bother a lot of people. "The oxygen is rapidly cooled and stored in it's liquid form."

There are a bunch of pluralization problems, too, like "You can see how important the extraction of resources are" where it should be "is."

In some cases it's just the wrong word form being used. "You are now certified to plan and executive a successful business from Seneca Development." (I think they mean "by Seneca Development," too.)

 

Personally, wading through jarring breaks in the charismatic dialogue made it much, much harder to just enjoy the game. In addition to the above, there were general comma usage problems and a couple other odd disjointed bits. I heard you're in the middle of writing a new campaign, so hopefully you already have someone ready to do this kind of copy editing check. If not, though, let me know, and maybe we can work out something where I do a quick sweep through all the content.

8,230 views 5 replies
Reply #2 Top

All the text is in "text-*.xml" in the Documents\My Games\Offworld\Mods\Hidden\Reference\Data directory. If you make the relevant changes and then submit a diff file, I'm sure they would appreciate it.

Reply #3 Top

I'm not completely sure that's what they'd want if the whole campaign system is being re-done anyway, so I'd rather not go through the tedium of replacing everything without hearing that they're interested.

Reply #4 Top

Also, in the preface to the 'Win as Scientific' tutorial there is a sentence that could use correction:

"Scientific buildings have the unique ability of being supplied by the resource deposits it is constructed on."

I think 'it is' should be 'they are'.

Reply #5 Top

If you have a list you can always send them in to support and we'll make sure they get to the team.

https://esupport.stardock.com/index.php?/Tickets/Submit