Making Assassin's Creed Mirage culturally and linguistically relevant

gamesindustry.biz:

Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox

Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Mirage is one of the few AAA video games to feature Arabic audio and text. It's also in a smaller crowd of titles to feature classical Arabic, the language that would be prominent for the golden age of Baghdad, where the game's lead, Bassim, embarks on his adventure.

Ubisoft localization manager and cultural consultant Mohammed Alemam tells GamesIndustry.biz that the goal of localization is to capture the language's intent while staying culturally relevant.

He and art director Jean-Luc Sala explain that including classical Arabic in Assassin's Creed Mirage was a part of Ubisoft's developmental focus for the game.

Sala explains, "Our philosophy usually with localization is for the player to experience it and enjoy it and not notice that it was actually translated from the source language.

"The game is fully voiced in Arabic as the launch proposition. It's a part of the game. We [paid] special attention [to the fact] that people love to play Ghost of Tsushima in Japanese, for example. Honestly, it would have been a shame to miss that opportunity to return to the Middle East with Assassin's Creed and not [include] a language that is still here," he says. "It feels more accurate to play in Arabic, even if you're not Arabic."

The duo explains that the implementation of the language began at the start of Mirage's development. While the linguistic and cultural relevance required a lot of hard work, the basic translation was easy as classical Arabic is readily available and actively spoken.

Alemam says, "Classical Arabic is still taught at schools today. So, people grow up in the Arabic region, learning [the language]. It's