14 DAY TRIAL // When games decide to venture outside the safety zone of the developers and branch out into far-off lands, the chances that something will get mixed up are pretty high. As long as it's a big-budget production, the necessary money needed to make the right adjustment will be properly secured, and things will go pretty smoothly, but, with games with medium to small funds, things like cultural details will be considered as something that can be approximated. However, as soon as the title is released, and the reviews and most of the sales are over, even big-budget games abandon their attention to details.
Recently, Modern Warfare 2 got a new multiplayer map that was supposed to be a part of the city of Karachi, in Pakistan. Things, however, aren't exactly native. One of Kotaku's readers, Saad, lives in the city of Karachi and, according to him, it looks like the map is way off. "I, being a Pakistani, was so excited at seeing a Karachi map and then immediately so disappointed when I played the map," Saad said. "The map has Arabic written all over, even though that isn't the country's language."
"Infinity Ward probably thought, 'Oh hey its a Muslim country so Arabic is the language,'" he added. And he's probably right and, since both Arabic and Urdu, the language that is spoken in Pakistan alongside English, use the same alphabet, it's pretty weird that it could get someone to design the map with Arabic signs, but couldn't take the time to check the languages spoken in Pakistan.
"To someone who doesn't know urdu won't be able to tell the difference," Saad explained. "It's like Spanish and English, I guess. Some letters are [the] same, some are different but the words are completely different." This isn't by far the biggest cultural issue that MW2 contains and, since this will most likely be ignored by the developers and the map will never be updated, it's a bit sad to see the lack of interest. If Infinity Ward is going to just play things by ear, it should discard the whole "realism" thing and give the world fictitious names. If not, it makes it look like the country is under foreign occupation.