Can changing the text of a game make it more fun?

Can taking an already existing game and changing around the text make the game more fun?

That's what Perfect World Entertainment is hoping, with their upcoming game Kung Foo.

Kung Foo has been heavily promoted as a new upcoming parody MMO from Perfect World Entertainment. They have published lines such as "a fun MMO that parodies everything from Kung-Fu movies to game shows" and "needy and ungrateful NPCs by the truck load".

All in all it looked like this new MMO coming out being made to be a parody of existing MMOs in this Kung Foo world. It sounded pretty cool. I like parody games, I was one of the few paying customers still playing the parody game Dungeon Runners.

Within my first few minutes of playing, I had massive deja-vu. Then it hit me. I've played this game before, in English too.

This game is Q-World with different text. It's not like Q-World, it's not a Q-World clone, it IS Q-World.

Q-World is a game published by Cubinet in English (Other versions of it were called Wulin, before it was translated I believe). You can sign up and play it right now. Though I admit that the service of Cubizone can sometimes leave a little to be desired, and the English translation wasn't that great (maybe it's gotten better over the years, back when I played it looked like it was ran through an auto translator and left like that. A lot of games in Southeast Asia that are supposedly in English are just ran through auto translators and make absolutely no sense to native English speakers, but that's another matter).

Q-World already is listed as International, so will Perfect World Entertainment be able to somehow pull in more players just by taking this existing game and changing the text to be "funny" or "pun like"?

The game isn't based around being funny in itself, so the only thing that is going to be poking fun of MMO's is the text, not the gameplay. Maybe they will alter more of the game before it's released, but the Closed Beta is so far exactly the same as the other versions of the game just with different text.

Nobody previewing the game seems to be mentioning that the game is just Wulin/Q-World with different text. It looks like most of them just don't know and they think it's a new game. It's hardly going to be a secret tho, as anybody who has played Q-World will log in and immediately notice that it's the same game.

By the way, one of their quotes is "100% rat reduction in lowbie zones".  True, but it's still filled with bunnies, squirrels, racoons that meow, etc.

Maybe they'll make more changes by the time it's released. They did change Ether Saga to fit the Western market more by the time the game was officially released anyway. It was mostly tweaks to make less grinding in quests and things tho.

So far they are just taking an existing game, changing the text, and making out like they are releasing this new pun filled parody game.

While it certainly does make a difference having a good English translation, this isn't a real English translation, but a joke one. The gameplay is still exactly the same as it always has been in the original versions. It's not a game made from the ground up to be this parody, it's simply changed text in an existing game. So does changing the text somehow make the game more fun? Perfect World Entertainment seems to be hoping that it will. Only time will tell.