A recent post by Double Fine’s community manager James Spafford on the official forum reveals that the studio doesn’t have the time or budget required to add more languages to the game. Many fans and industry people have been critical of this post, which of course – resulted in a heated debate on the matter on Twitter.
The post reads,”We would love to add more languages to Psychonauts 2, and we are investigating to see if that could be possible at some future time. Script wise this is the largest game we’ve ever made and adding even one extra language would take a lot of work and a lot of extra budget that we currently do not have. To add languages that use entirely different alphabets and have other considerations is an even bigger job still. We may get that chance, and we really really hope we do, but we can’t make any promises, and we also would not be able to do so in time for launch.”
The recent launch of Psychonauts 2 was received extremely well by critics and fans, with many pointing out the litanny of accessibility options Double Fine included in the game – most notably an assist mode. Coupling this with the fact that Double Fine now has the financial backing of Microsoft, many fans including Jez Corden from Windows Central have criticized the game for lacking on this front.
Another fan was quick to point out that a budget would have been announced prior to release, which probably prohibited multi-language support. Of course, it remains to be seen how this pans out post-launch but it’d certainly be great if these fan-requested features get added in a future update.