The gaming community has once again noticed the involvement of Russians in major projects. Russian names appeared in the credits of the new game Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, which is being developed by the Czech studio Warhorse Studios and published by the Austrian company Deep Silver. According to the credits, the Russian studio Owlcat Games was involved in the project. Additionally, Russian managers from the company Riotloc were mentioned in the context of the Ukrainian localization.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is an open-world role-playing game set during the civil war in 15th-century Bohemia, which was part of the Holy Roman Empire. Players take on the role of Heinrich (or Indřich), the son of a blacksmith, who seeks vengeance.
The game was released on February 4th and has already been reviewed by critics, receiving a score of 88 on Metacritic. It has also gained positive feedback from players, with nearly 9,700 reviews on Steam, 91% of which are positive. The hype surrounding the release was immense, with over 1 million copies sold in just one day. However, it has now come to light that the credits mention the Russian studio Owlcat Games, which is currently based in Cyprus. The credits list 7 programmers and 2 managers, who were likely hired as outsourcing support to help with the game’s development.
The Lithuanian studio Riotloc was responsible for the game’s translation into Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian. The Ukrainian version was worked on by the localization group “Shlyakbitraf.” However, players noticed that Russian managers were also mentioned in the credits for the Ukrainian localization. As a result, the team at dev.ua decided to reach out to “Shlyakbitraf” to understand how this situation arose.
“Riotloc is a Lithuanian company with an international staff, as the company specializes in providing bulk translation services, including into Russian, so the presence of Russian employees is understandable,” says Shlyakbitraf. “Furthermore, Riotloc has openly supported Ukraine since the start of the large-scale invasion and continues to do so. Before beginning our collaboration with them, all these points and nuances were discussed in meetings with the management. As for the mentioned localization managers, they were only involved in the technical side of organizing the process at Riotloc, which mainly consisted of working with the publisher and handling the technical aspects of the localization files. Therefore, these individuals did not influence the translators’ decisions in any way.”
They emphasized that the translation was carried out exclusively by the Shlyakbitraf team and the Ukrainian team at Riotloc, and that the Ukrainian localization is 100% authentic, as only native Ukrainian speakers were involved in the translation.
“The work of the Ukrainian translation team was overseen by Ukrainian editors,” the union added. “We want to emphasize that in terms of organizing the work, Riotloc took all possible steps to ensure comfort and quality during the process. The Ukrainian team had all the necessary tools for translation, including the ability to consult directly with the developers and reference translation solutions from the previous installment. All localization decisions were based on the original (Czech text and Czech voice acting), which also ensured authenticity.”
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