So I've been a very critical and an unthankful member as of late.
But today, it's gonna be different.
And I shall start the day with a nice post to express my thankfullness and gratitude for something Sony seems to finally have got right with the PS4.
One of my biggest complaints during my PS3 ownership has been the localization of digital content and how Sony made it extremely difficult to solve. To explain; I live in Switzerland, the german speaking part (we have 4 official languages here, none of them english), and so, creating a correct PSN account forces me into a German-set PSN with the majority being German synched games. Doesn't matter what language I've set my PlayStation to, I don't even get a choice to decide which language I want the store to be displayed in. Even worse; There's a lot of content that is single language only, possibly to reduce install sizes. One of the prime examples are the Call of Duty games, which have been german synched (no english) - or Final Fantasy games that have english speach, but had forced german subtitles. For someone like me with an English speaking background and who likes to consume media in the original language this has been a huge setback. At the beginning of my PS3 ownership, I used to solve this issue by cheating my way through with a 'faked' US-PSN account so that I could get the native english content. After about a year, Sony closed that window by disabling foreign creditcards that don't correspond with the PSN-account country.
As a result, I was foced to import my games through retail copies from the UK - thank you Amazon! - which also had the benefit of being much cheaper than actually buying games at retail stores here.
Anyway - that was the problem during the PS3 days. Now on PS4 and despite my earlier skeptism, I am happy to admit that Sony seems to have been able to solve this issue. In every game so far (which I have purchased and downloaded exclusively from PSN, so DD all the way), the games seem to be split up in a modular kind of way, where the language specific stuff seems to be packaged seperately. As a result, despite still having to view and browse a German PSN store, the content I am downloading is actually, as per my PS4 language settings - English! Nice!
I've noticed in a couple of games so far (like the TLoU:Remaster) that switching the language from English to say German will result in the game in having to download and install additional files (probably the German language files). This may be a special case, since Sony games even during the PS3 days were better at solving the localization issues. I've also downloaded Call of Duty: Advanced ... and Ghosts and I'm happy to note that both games also are native english, despite the purchase in the German PSN store. Not sure if all games handle the localization the same way, but if it is indeed in a more modular way by completely seperating the language specific stuff into a seperate package, it's a good way and it seems to work great so far. This way would also ensure that download sizes are kept to a minumum and only increase if you want to make use of multiple language tracks.
My bet though is that it isn't exclusive to all the games. I.e. Diablo 3 (or just the latest one anyway) seemed to offer 2 different complete installs (all +10GB if I'm not mistaken), one for German and one for English. For some odd reason, after purchasing it, it downloaded both versions - but I was able to delete one and the other (the English one) still worked.
Main thing is; it seems to be working and I can at last enjoy PSN the legitimate way with a real account without having to worry about synched language tracks I don't want. Nice!