Elder Scrolls – Betrayal of the Second Era

Frosted Games · 2025

Translation, English to German

The absolutely epic conversion of Bethesda’s persistent-world MMORPG to a physical campaign-based adventure game/dungeon crawler. Chip Theory Games did an amazing job in applying the mechanics of their (then) flagship title Too Many Bones to the new IP and then layered it with their customary deluxified component quality. Despite its massive content, the game very cleverly breaks down into manageable sessions, each of which is one part of a 3-step campaign. The separate steps focus on a single mission (yeah, okay, quest) for one of the guilds in the game setting’s world Tamriel. These steps then divide into between 2 and 4 chapters, with an epic boss confrontation at the end of step 3. Along the way, there’s great ARPG-style character progression with skill trees and loot and merchants for upgrading your equipment. Because you only get to see a tiny part of all the available content per campaign, you’re never locked into a multiple-month struggle to finish a storyline and replayability is huge. To call this project ambitious would be an understatement. For me, it was 2025’s Big Cahoona Burger. A (very) rough estimate put the scope at around 100,000 words of sprawling scenario texts, all machine-pretranslated (oh boy). I reviewed and edited the flavour texts in the game’s gazeteers – which are the individual scenario booklets for the 6 regions of the game world – translated all the scenario rules text plus most of the game’s cards, and reorganized text flow and rules descriptions to more closely mirror the sequences players would actually be following. Also, me and the editor at Frosted Games introduced a more comprehensive use of iconography and text formatting in the rules texts to improve legibility and enhance the signalling quality, which in turn benefits familiarisation and memorisation. There was a huge amount of back-and-forth, rewording, reformatting and a million tiny edits that kept the project going on for forever. Despite starting out using a CAT tool (memoQ), I ended up doing all the work in InDesign and really started getting to know the software properly. The craziest part of the job was probably creating an Elder Scrolls account and playing the video game, just to research terminology!