* I wasn't sure if this was the right place to post this. Like, I'm sorry I don't mean to be coming off as to be spitting in the face of the audio team; it's just that UI how-to guides are posted in the UI forum, so I figured I'd post an audio how-to in the Audio Feedback forum. :P If this actually bugs staff, feel free to move the thread to GD.

UPDATE:
The downside to this is that you might end up having to redownload your native voiceovers every patch, since the client will assume they've been modified and rewrite them.
For some, this might also result in a broken patcher - so do this modification, as with any mod, at your own risk!

AFTER YOU DO IT THE FIRST TIME THOUGH, IT ONLY TAKES 5 MINUTES TOPS - and as you recall it's totally worth it.
Just be careful. Thanks, jay!


I’ve been in the position a lot of you are: “I like League of Legends and the voiceacting is great, but I’m curious and I want to listen to the game’s VO in another language”
And then some of you are replied to by That Guy who says “hey, change your locale.cfg and you’ll change the VO language and ingame text”
http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/....php?t=1423112
and you’re like “no if I wanted that I would have done that in the first place”

Or perhaps you’re in the boat of many players who are getting a local server, but absolutely cannot stand what they’ve done in terms of localization – as in, you can’t stand your native language’s voiceacting and would rather just keep the American VO.
http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/....php?t=2344330
http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/....php?t=2356362

Or maybe you want to be a complete jerk and blow your friend’s mind by changing his ingame text to Polish while making the VOs Korean.

Well let me tell you – the wait is over! After breaking my client twice and having to fully uninstall BOTH times, I managed to find a method that won’t do that! It’s actually safer than many mods in that if you mess up, you just throw the backups into the old folder!
Quite honestly, this was just so awesome, that I couldn't keep it to myself. ;P

I’m gonna throw two tutorials in here: one for changing the ingame VO and the PVP.NET VO…starting with the PVP.NET one.

* For the sake of the tutorial, I’ll say my install language is English and my target language is Korean. Sub “Korean” out with the language you want in this scenario.

[CENTER] __________________________________________________ _
CHANGING THE PVP.NET (CHARACTER SELECT) VOICEOVERS

WHAT YOU NEED:
Windows Explorer
(I’m not kidding, really that’s all you need)
__________________________________________________ _[/CENTER]


First, make sure League of Legends is closed.
Open up your League of Legends directory.
Navigate to:

RADS/projects/lol_air_client/assets/sounds

Now you’ll notice folders such as en_US, pt_BR, and fr_FR. These are foreign voiceovers in each supported language that ship with the client. Many of the folder titles are straightforward and the one your client uses will probably be obvious.

[CENTER]en_US: English
es_ES: Spanish
fr_FR: French
de_DE: German
it_IT: Italian
pl_PL: Polish
ko_KR: Korean
ro_RO: Romanian
el_GR: Greek
pt_BR: Brazilian Portugese[/CENTER]

Make a backup of your native language’s voiceovers and the ones you want to change it to.
Then, just swap the filenames of the original folders.
You’re done. It’s that simple.

But you’re probably not reading this guide for that reason. This is only a quarter of the fun you’re going to have, yes sir. Now here comes the REAL guide.

[CENTER] __________________________________________________ _
CHANGING YOUR INGAME VOICEOVERS

WHAT YOU’LL NEED:
Windows Explorer
A code-editing application that isn’t MS Notepad (My personal choice is Notepad++, it’s free)
A backup of the .fev and .fsb you want to replace and want to replace with (we’ll cover this)
__________________________________________________ _[/CENTER]

First, let’s open up our League of Legends install folder.
Navigate to

/RADS/system/

and find locale.cfg.

Now you’ve probably seen this before – if not, it’s a simple file with one line that has the language you’re currently running. Change it to the language you want.

[CENTER]en_US: English
es_ES: Spanish
fr_FR: French
de_DE: German
it_IT: Italian
pl_PL: Polish
ko_KR: Korean
ro_RO: Romanian
el_GR: Greek
pt_BR: Brazilian Portugese[/CENTER]

Change it to what you’d like, then close the file and open League of Legends. You’ll get an error that claims to have failed loading your choice on startup, but that’s ok – the game will check your install and automatically download it for you!
This also comes with the ingame text, but we won’t need that. So, instead of hitting Play and continuing, close your PVP.NET client. Re-open locale.cfg and change it back to your native language.

Now, back up in your folders to the top of your League of Legends install. Navigate now to:

/RADS/projects/

And you’ll see folders such as “game_client_[region_code]”. You’ll see one for your native install and your newly downloaded localization. Open up your new localization (in my case, game_client_ko_KR) and then the “/managedfiles” folder. Look in each folder’s “/data” folder until you find one that says “Sounds” (hint: work from the newest version BACKWARDS). Once you do, go to

managedfiles/[your_latest_version]/Sounds/FMOD/

and you’ll see (in my case)

[CENTER]LOL_Audio_ko_KR.fev
VOBank_ko_KR.fsb[/CENTER]

These files look scary, but they’re not. They have multiple purposes.
The *.fev file is a sort of “address book” that tells the game where to look in the *.fsb. The *.fsb is the actual sound bank, and it also contains its own file structure. I’ll get to that later. For now, copy these two files to your clipboard and go back to the “/projects” folder.
From here, go to your native language’s folder (in my case, game_client_en_US), and find the folder with the matching *.fev and *.fsb.
In my case, I believe it was /managedfiles/0.0.187/Data/Sounds/FMOD

and paste your new VO besides your native ones. Take the time now to make a backup of both in case you screw it up.
Once you’ve done that, here’s where the real fun starts:
- Put your native language’s *.fev and *.fsb in a new folder.
- Rename the new language files to your native language ones (in my case, one file I am renaming “LOL_Audio_ko_KR.fev” to “LOL_Audio_en_US.fev”)
- Open the *.fev file in whatever code editor you have. You’ll see, of course a ton of gibberish and it may take a while to load.
- Find at the top where it says “LOL_Audio” in the new language and change it so it matches the filename. You’ve effectively told it to check within itself for the addresses.
- Scroll down a bit and you’ll see TONS of filepaths for character sounds, starting with Akali.
- All of these are prefaced with [in my case] “VOBank_ko_KR”. Simply open your “Find and Replace” function and rename all instances of that to your native language.
We basically just told our client to look in the VOBank_en_US at the directories stated to the right of it. HEADS UP: Don’t attempt to do this by hand, there are literally about 6,000 entries!
- Save and close.
- Open up League. Pop into a custom game, and wait. If the announcer welcomes you to Summoner’s Rift in a different language, it worked! If it’s silent, check your work; you probably made a typo.

And that’s it, you’re done. I’m really glad to have figured this out.
I would have put pictures in this guide, but it would have just been boring and full of folders in Windows Explorer. :/

If you're still having trouble with getting this to work, check this post which should elaborate and clear things up a bit.
Honestly, if you're still having issues, just add me on League and I don't mind walking you through it.

Oh, and one more thing: if you’re like me, you probably sprung for the Tencent localization (mainland Chinese). I can safely say that this method works for the Chinese VO – I personally have the Chinese VOs working in my client – but be warned as they are always two champions behind (and one publicly), so this method will result in Diana being silent ingame. But all characters pre-Varus have Chinese voiceovers, whereas Varus onward will have English VOs so keep this in mind as well.



But uh, yeah – glad to have been of help! If it helped, let me know; if there’s issues, let me know; if this tutorial ruined your marriage, let me know.

And give me some time to beg to a red here:
By all means, DO NOT patch this out if you can help it. Many players have wanted to do this in the past and now they finally have the chance to do so. I personally have been searching for a way to do this since I hit level 30 nine months ago. And as tacky as it sounds, my search is complete. I couldn't be any happier than I am right now posting this guide.

This does not impact the gameplay in any way nor does it give anyone the upper hand. If anything, many players would prefer there be a separate choice between Game Text and Voice Language select, giving players who may prefer foreign VOs to the American ones. It would actually save players a lot of time when downloading files.

Quite honestly, I can actually see a few Rioters using this guide as well. I know Praeco plays with the German client just for the voices, but now you can have the best of both worlds

inb4 morello flies in to note that this is being fixed next patch as rammus' korean voice is extremely op

Word of warning: changing files in the patcher as suggestedabove can have unintended results, such as having to redownload your base language with each patch or even a broken patcher.

Thanks for noting this in you post Kosheh, I just wanted to reiterate since it was in the middle and might be easy to miss.

who would have thought that the first post would have been a red post o.o

But yeah, the downside is that you'll probably have to redownload your base language every time if you choose to do this. Which isn't really that bad, but a broken patcher is no laughing matter

I moved it to the top of the post and made it not allcaps - good suggestion, jay. Thanks, man :J

I was just curious. Would it be real difficult to add this to the sound options? A selection that chooses the language that is voiced over. I would love to play an angry german Maoki sometime. Another thought is can you add some video / audio settings to the launcher area. That way there we don't need to be in game to adjust things to where they go. It's not really much of an issue, but sometimes you need to relog to take effect, and it can be frustrating when you are loaded into a game already.

Instead of having to completely redownload in case of patch, couldn't you just do the same steps with the locales reversed? Or.. just replace the backup, right?

So what would be the inptu for the Chinese?

ch_zh ?

whoops, how'd i miss these posts?

...I read this a few times and it's still not making sense for some reason. <_<

You could but you'd still have to download the text updates for your native language's client.
Ideally yes you'd be replacing your backup; your old backup's going to be missing sounds though. So you'd want to replace both - but changing the locale to update and updating the archive surprisingly doesn't take that long.

Also, the new .fev that ships with each update shouldn't take as long to redo either :P

It's zh_CN.

They don't ship by default with the Riot client and can't be downloaded via changing the locale, so it uh, being vague here

"requires a little bit of creativity" - it's a little more work getting ahold of the Tencent client in that you'll literally have to redownload another client for a region you can't play :/

Well I did just post mine yesterday... xD

But yes, thanks for the quick response, and I am pleased to say that for the most part I've got Chinese voices in game working except for any champs not yet released there, and for some reason double kill, triple kill,etc.

Thank you for the guide, much appreciated. ^^

Hey, KOSHEH, was this patched? I just tried it

EDIT: Nevermind, got it to work! Thanks so much for this <3 Now I got SC2 and LoL in Korean!

Hope Reds don't patch it :[

Oh, that's awesome. I was meaning to retry the method - I reverted my changes to avoid problems with the last patch and never undid them. x_x

Thanks for filling me in that it still works, though :J