Intergalactic's strange language in the trailer is a conlang! Here is what it says

[Legend]

You can see the language at the start and end of the trailer of course, but it is also on the robot. I did a complex and highly detailed analysis to discover its secrets.

First, this is definitely not a direct English cipher. It has too many glyphs but just to be safe I ran a brute force search on a server farm. Only words that could even slightly fit were gibberish with archaic spelling like "bad lock, unmodish, modish loaden..."

With that ruled out, it sure seems likely to be an alphabet based conscript. Fun!

~30 glyphs depending on how you count diacritics. Hard to tell with a script like this if similar glyphs are are same with modifications or if they are fully independent, like how in English m builds off n but it's a separate character.

Most of my study went into finding patterns within the micro corpus. Most interesting is "TSW." This prefix appears in three different places but specifically we have "TSWJK6S2" on the robot's leg and "JK6S2" on the robot's shoulder.


So what does this all translate to? It's a bit speculative but the robot's leg text is a name. Probably of the bad guy organization, not of this robot specifically. The shoulder is the organization's moto. And it's only a rough translation but I believe the long text says "The suffering of generations must be endured to achieve our divine end."

[the-pi-guy]

Intergalactic's strange language in the trailer is a conlang

I assumed so and thought you'd be more excited about it.

[kitler53]

glad to see you are finally hyped for this game.   

[nnodley]

haha NERD!

[Legend]

I assumed so and thought you'd be more excited about it.

It's actually incredibly rare. In fact I can only think of one other game that made a true conlang just for the sake of immersion.

First few times I watched the trailer I just assumed it was just a strange English font and they reworded the translation to hide it. Even still I wouldn't be surprised if it's English and they just got funky with it.

glad to see you are finally hyped for this game. 

The game still looks bland 

ND is by far my favorite developer so I never lacked faith that the final game would be great. Finding a conlang that is used by the evil cult doesn't alter my opinions on the rest of the trailer.

But I am more hyped to see the next trailer now...

[Horizon]

I thought it was Thai

[Legend]

I thought it was Thai

I speak a few words of thai, nope.

Does have a south east asia feel to it though.

[Legend]

I've found two other people who tried to translate this, and it's funny that both translated "TSW" as holy/divine just because the one word might be "prophet." Neither noticed the writing on the leg so they're unaware that "TSWJ" is actually the root. 🤓

[Legend]

Naughty Dog has posted its holiday 2024 card. pic.twitter.com/YjzGSWn2tH

— Geoff Keighley (@geoffkeighley) December 23, 2024

Give me a sec...

edt: the second word is the same as the word in the trailer quote, except it is missing two glyphs. This is very useful!