Probably not a very common issue among English native speakers and maybe not that common among GOG games either, but this is actually my pet peeve. I've said it before, but I'm still baffled how many games just seem to take it for granted what language I'd want to play them in, without even asking me (because apparantly my operating system is the one to ask, not me, the player), and worse still if they don't offer me an option to correct their choice afterwards. It's either lazy/sloppy/cheap design or outright patronizing, and I don't know which is worse.

And I have to admit that this really ruins the games for me, in some cases. I've bought games and hardly ever played them afterwards just because I was so pissed off about not being able to play them in their original language but being forced to endure unpleasant combos of original voiceovers but German in-game text or even inferior German voiceovers instead. So even though it's not quite GOG related I thought it could be useful to have a thread that warns about games that do this, so that others know before buying and can make an informed decision.

Off the top of my head, these games I recently tried are all guilty of forcing your OS language on you:

- Castle of Illusion (no way to change language apart from messing with your OS settings)
- Ghostbusters: The Video Game (apparantly no way to change language apart from messing with your OS settings)
- Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Content Under Pressure (it's nice to have the voiceovers by German rapper Afrob, but I'd still prefer to also get access to the original voiceovers by Talib Kweli, thank you very much)
- Back To The Future - The Game (no way to change language apart from messing with your OS settings)
- The Wolf Among Us (at least the GOG version, apparantly, reported by thomas001)
- Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet (in this one the language can be changed by a workaround, but I don't remember how, in any case no in-game or installation options for language)
- FATE (can be tricked into a language change in a very roundabout way, by overwriting all the files in your OS languages with files from the folders of your preferred language)
- Dust: An Elysian Tale (fix: if you rename your language folder, so that the game doesn't find it anymore, it defaults to English; apparantly there's no easy fix for playing in other languages than English or your OS language though)
- Tengami (the DRM-free version from Humble; the Steam version actually pays attention to Steam's language settings, unlike the other games above)
- Spore (only partially fixed by copying the files from the us-en subdirectory into the subdirectory for your local language; reported by Wishbone)
- Mushroom Men: Truffle Trouble (defaults to OS language without giving you the option to change it; even worse, at least the German translation is terrible, Google Translate quality, with no regard for grammar and making sense)
- Batman: The Telltale series (GOG, reported by Telika)
- Reservoir Dogs: Bloody Days (apparently removed from stores, reported by Telika)
- Haimrik (GOG, reported by MarkoH01)

I'm sure there were more that I don't remember right now. Can you add to the list?

Huh, I'm blind to this, because unless the game makes it easy to see the other langauges, they don't exist to me.

I often play games a second time in Spanish or French to try to keep my vocabularies growing a bit. It certainly seems sane for the game to *start up* in your OS locale language, but pretty dumb if it won't let you switch.

Apparently The Wolf Among Us does this too. See here:

http://www.gog.com/forum/general/twau_how_to_switch_subtitle_language_to_english

And don't even get me started about console games. Four out of five titles don't support ingame settings for language options, but force you to change your system language instead. Some even install the language pack before starting up the game, so every time you switch to another system language, the old language pack gets deinstalled and the new one installed. I am so sick and tired of this BS.

Does anyone still remember the good old times, when your were PROMPTED which language you want to install it in?

No bloody hard to search hidden menu or whatsoever, no right away YOUR choice?

*dreaming of the old times*

Nowadays geo-lock. OS-lock and so on.....

I'm pretty sure I remember someone saying that was the case for Dust: An Elysian Tail.

Thanks, I added it to the list. Fortunately, it's easily tricked into using English (but not any other languages you might be interested in, see above). Hm, I only have the Steam version and that one doesn't support any other languages than English, so I didn't know about it. That sucks. I meant to buy the retail version for a friend, and someone told me you can completely set it to English, but now I'm having doubts, if the GOG version acts like that and doesn't offer in-game solutions ... Thanks! I make sure to add a mental note to my "Reasons Why I Don't Like Telltale (despite loving TWAU)" list. ;)

Spore did this. The only way to get it to use English was to copy the files from the us-en subdirectory into the subdirectory for your local language. Even then it wasn't perfect. There were still localized bits and bobs around the game.

Just one observation: if your OS language is somewhat obscure (e.g. Greek) the aforementioned games are in English -at least that was the case with Dust,TWAU and Tengami. However, there are other games that are screwed up when you have such an obscure language setting : I haven't managed to properly play Time Gentlemen please -the game didn't let me save properly because as its subforum mentioned the game didn't like any OS language other than English. It may not default to another language but it still treats people with non-English OSes like inferior citizens, so I thought I'd let you know about that anyways...

A lot of those problems (saving etc) also comes from the ´fact´ that Windows still doesn´t fully support non-standard characters (i.e. é,ä, Cyrillic, Greek etc...)

So if your profile contains any of those characters you are most likely being doomed ;)
EDIT:

Reason: a lot of stuff is under %/user/XYZ

So if XYZ contains anything like that....... :(

So you're saying that the fault for the saving problem in Time Gentlemen was that my user profile might have Greek characters? Well, now that you're mentioning it, the pc in which I tried that game initially had its user profile named after my RL name -greek characters and all. However, I recently changed pcs and I now have a refurbished one, which thus bears in the user profile the name of the store from which I bought the pc in latin characters. If that was the only problem for that game, and not the fact that I have Greek Windows, then I should probably try again in my newer pc and see if the problem persists or not.
Thanks for trying to help anyways!

The Windows version of Dungeon Keeper did this and there was even a version of Jagged Alliance 2 Gold with just the Dutch language.

You arrrrrrrre welcome.

Recently we rediscovered this problem on Galaxy ;)

In my opinion this is not a windows problem. The problem is the software which doesn`t support the non-standard characters. If it would be a windows problem all games or software must have problems.

Assuming the game actually supports the language that one would prefer to use and is defaulting to the system language with no obvious way to change it, here are some ideas:

- Look for an INI file or other config file in the game's installation directory. Be sure to look in subdirectories of that also and try to find something that appears to configure language settings.

- This might work on Windows, not sure - but if you're using Linux, modify the game shortcut launcher you're using to change the language using environment variables in the line that invokes the game executable.

Example: Launching "/usr/bin/goggame/mega8bitblasterdeluxe"

becomes..

Launching "export LANG=en_US /usr/bin/goggame/mega8bitblasterdeluxe"

(replace en_US with the appropriate locale/language code you need if it differs from English US)

You may need to doctor around with that a bit to get it set up right depending on the desktop software you're using etc. Another option is to write a small bash shell script to change the language before launching the game and have the shortcut execute that.

As I said, this same trick may or may not work in Windows, I've just never investigated it on Windows but I expect something like this is available. Chances are that games that have this problem are simply reading the OS environment to get the system language, or invoking OS APIs to do the same and overriding it just within the executable's environment should isolate it to that executable.

For example:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows8_1-security/non-latin-characters-in-username-should-be-avoided/25131f90-ebfe-4086-897f-d0f7522d87dc?auth=1

Yes it is. WHY is Windows using your name as the folder-name? Too make it easier for hackers?

Look for example at FF:

Your username (if you choose one, even default) has nothing to do with the folder name where the information is being stored.

That is, how it shall be handled. Otherwise, if somebody hacks your PC, they get directly all user-names, doesn´t make sense, or?

Not even talking about remote connection problems or similar. All OS-based. What if the remote doesn´t have the language installed? You just see garbage. Why do you think the web originally ONLY used latin-characters?

Because it is a bloody nightmare!

PS: No I don´t want to shout you down ;)