Mars War Logs gets an auditory overhaul

Developer Spiders Studio and publisher Focus Home Interactive have seriously given the vocals (and text) in their RPG about war on the Red Planet a fresh coat of paint.

Take a look at the first 7 minutes of Mars War Logs and see the difference a little more polish can make (Warning: This is seriously NSFW):

Big difference right there. We reviewed Mars War Logs on the PC not too long ago and gave it solid marks even with the audio deficiencies. Now that the game’s been better localized from the original French into English, consider it that much better.

As to just what happened with the original translation, Focus Home Interactive’s head of Production Luc Heninger explains:

“Mars contains a vast amount of dialog, even by RPG standards. The plot has numerous strands and the dialog often has many variants to mirror the hero’s changes in reputation. The tight deadlines between the game release dates meant that the initial English translation lacked depth and contained a number of errors; it was then sent to the recording studio, making the job of the actors extremely difficult. The actual game was thoroughly tested and released with very few bugs on PC, but unfortunately the procedures for the audio and text QA failed and allowed many English localization issues to slip through. We realized the extent of the problem after seeing the first feedback from the press and gamers. The result was so far removed from what we usually produce that we took the decision to halt the submission process for the console version, which was due for release only weeks after the PC title. We have re-written the game text and dialog and, of course, recorded the actors again, replacing the sections that weren’t true to the characters in Mars. All these problems will therefore be fixed in the console version. An update is now available for players with the PC game, and we have also incorporated the new audio in the PC versions on the various download sites.”

So there’s some good news about the impending Xbox 360 and PS3 releases as well, as Focus Home and Spiders Studio continue to work on and improve the game. And that’s something that’s always nice to see from any publisher or developer.

Mars War Logs is available now on the PC via Steam and is 33% off at the moment. Console owners who want to visit Mars don’t have too much longer to wait either as the game will arrive on the Xbox 360 and PS3 this September.