Work on English localisation for Steam hit Tale of Immortal begins in April, its developer has announced.
The news comes as sales of the game hit 1.8m after just a month in early access.
Eurogamer news cast: all about the Nintendo Switch Pro.
Tale of Immortal is an open-world role-playing game developed by Chinese indie team GuiGu Studio. It’s part of a new breed of cultivation sims, where you grow to become immortal, defeating monsters from the Classic of Mountains and Seas (a Chinese classic text and compilation of mythic geography and beasts).
The game launched on Steam late January 2021 and soon hit an all-time peak of 183,985 concurrent players with a “very positive” user review rating. At one point it was ahead of Grand Theft Auto 5, Apex Legends and Rust in Steam’s most-played list.
Tale of Immortal is only available in Simplified Chinese, but that hasn’t stopped westerners from trying it out. The video below from YouTube channel Tech Tales provides a decent look at gameplay:
“We’ve got tons of fantastic feedback and suggestions from you all, we deeply value all your thoughts, and we are super happy to see how engaged our community is during the game’s development,” GuiGu Studio said in an update on Steam.
“However at the same time, we regret for not having localised versions of the game sooner, which we now know some of our non-Chinese speaking users had difficult times experiencing the game. (Like having to use translation apps :))”
So, English localisation is now on the cards, which will hopefully make the game a lot easier to play for westerners.
It’s no surprise to see a Chinese-made game blow up on Steam. As Chris Tapsell wrote in his superb investigative report, Video games in China: beyond the great firewall, the western version of Steam is popular in China because it provides access to games either blocked or awaiting approval for official release from the authorities. Gamers from China account for over a quarter of Steam users today, according to analyst Daniel Ahmad.
