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Dear developers: Learn how to do subtitles, because you obviously have no clue!

diaspora

Member
Dragon Age: Inquisition has horrible subtitles. It doesn't subtitle conversations between party members on the field and, when they do appear, the captions are tiny at the top of the screen. If I was deaf, I would be furious that a huge chunk of story content was unavailable to me when it very easily could have been. I miss the content anyway because there's no way I'm playing such a repetitive game without listening to a podcast, but I can at least turn the podcast off when I see the dialogue icon.

Two things:
Character portraits have a speech bubble indicating who is speaking during banter.
Second, you can increase the font of the subtitles.
 

hesido

Member
I remember that The Order's subtitles looked like 8pixels high or something. God dayum, they could have probably filled that black bar with subtitles without impacting the performance.
 

jwk94

Member
The problem is figuring out how to make them big enough so they don't interrupt the hud or anything else that would be useful to the user.
 
I like larger subtitles.

But Tomb Raider reboot takes the prize for most fucked up approach. I don't know what idiot choose to implement subtitles like that.

Kari Hattner of Crystal Dynamics chose to implement subtitles like that, and she is absolutely not an idiot, she is very talented. The presentation rules are from very well established principles from other media. They are based on the BBC's subtitling standards for TV, and have had huge praise from deaf gamers.

The problem is that there are different use cases for subtitles. Some people completely rely on them and need them to be as prominent and clearly presented as possible, with indication of who is speaking, full description of background sounds, etc.

And then at other end of the scale are people who just glance at the subtitles occasionally, so want them to be as out of the way and unobtrusive and undistracting as possible.

So the answer is simply to offer a few options of how to present then, e.g. 'clear', 'unobtrusive', and 'custom'. Allowing people to customise how subtitles are displayed is the standard approach taken in other media, including Youtube and Netflix. It would be pretty easy to implement in games too. That way, everyone wins.
 
there needs to be a subtitle API that can be used in every game

There is, on iOS, Android, and the XBox One. But game devs don't know about them / havent' ever used them. They allow preferences (on/off, letterboxing, size, colour etc) to be stored at a system level, and then read in as the default on game load.

Another useful angle is game engines. Unreal has built in subtitling functionality, so if that functionality already out of the box has the right sizes, line width etc and already automatically tied in with those platform specific APIs, huge numbers of games would just instantly have better subtitles by default, even if they have never even thought about how they should be designed.
 
The problem is figuring out how to make them big enough so they don't interrupt the hud or anything else that would be useful to the user.

The answer is easy enough - stop using long lines. Subs should only be 38 characters per line. Stick to that, and the overlapping problems are greatly reduced.
 

Daingurse

Member
Dragon Age: Inquisition suffers not only from tiny subtitles, but the baffling decision to stick them at the TOP of the screen.
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Why? Just... why?!

They also had some dark vignetting on the screen. Subtitles in that game distracted me, was very annoying.
 
Dragon Age: Inquisition suffers not only from tiny subtitles, but the baffling decision to stick them at the TOP of the screen.
QtxyfxSEKdTSW-1MjAsJCQ7lNET8gXP0TCRoH2OkpeuW-H0YZyg_MaoCo9DO3mW5H3S5tRYkM9nJo6SJYBRg=w426-h240-n


Why? Just... why?!

presumably it's because the conversation choices appear at the bottom. There's a simple solution though - have your subtitles at the bottom, then when conversation choices need to be displayed, just push the subtitles up a bit temporarily.

Pretty standard stuff outside of gaming. To see it in effect, watch a video on youtube, turn captions on, then go full screen and watch what happens to the position of them as the playback bar appears and disappears when you move the mouse over it.
 

Creamium

shut uuuuuuuuuuuuuuup
I remember that The Order's subtitles looked like 8pixels high or something. God dayum, they could have probably filled that black bar with subtitles without impacting the performance.

The Order's subtitles are just ridiculously small, it's insane. I was playing the game with friends and one went to sit closer to the screen to be able to read them (and the on screen prompts even).

This is a good thread that I hope a lot of developers see. A lot of people like subtitles, do right by them please.
 

jett

D-Member
With the help of a few friends I've written up a piece on best practices for subtitle/caption design, quoting a number of posts from this thread as part of it:

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/IanH...subtitles_well__basics_and_good_practices.php

It has had a quite staggering amount of interest on social media, from the smallest indies through to one of the biggest AAAs, so with any luck we might see to see some better practices start creeping in over the next year or so.

Does this mean I am famous now? :O

Seriously though, it's nice that someone has brought attention upon this issue. Great piece.

Personally, as someone that lives in a Spanish-speaking country, I have never seen some of those good practices implemented in TV or movies. I definitely don't want colored subtitles in my games (or in my movies), nor do I care for a big ol' opaque box underneath them. Subtitles need to be readable but unobtrusive as well. I suppose some of the practices are better suited for SDH close captioning. Customization is indeed the best route, though.

I think the most depressing thing about subtitles in video games is when I see a foreign-language developer make a complete mess of them in an English-speaking game. CDPR is the most recent case. These Polish mofos should be more than familiar with watching subtitled movies, they should know that what they have in The Witcher 3 is not acceptable.
 

Morrigan Stark

Arrogant Smirk
Sherlock Holmes: Awakened had terrible subtitles. If a character had a few lines in a row, they just threw the whole text in one screen, like so:

sherlock-holmes-the-awakened-15.jpg


Text frequently got longer than this example, too. Fortunately the more recent Sherlock Holmes games seem to have fixed it and used proper pacing.
 
Was just talking about this with someone yesterday. Just font size and readability in general too. Stuff like Order 1886 and then Witcher 3 had me wondering if my vision had completely deteriorated, and moving all close to the TV. I remember this happening as far back as Puzzle Quest on PS2, though, when I first thought "why is this so small and fuzzy?"
 
I always remember listening to an old metal gear podcast (before MGS4) and Ryan Payton was saying how they have to do subtitles very carefully.

for example. you don't want a plot twist appearing before they say it.

FFX was pretty bad at this.

example.
Audio: There's something i have to tell you......... *long gap* i'm your father.

Then the subtitles are all.
There's something I have to tell you. I'm your father. *5 seconds later....*i'm your father" lol
 

Chao

Member
By the way, white subtitles are shit. There are lots of times where they blend with the background and you can't read anything. Yellow subtitles,always.
 

KHlover

Banned
By the way, white subtitles are shit. There are lots of times where they blend with the background and you can't read anything. Yellow subtitles,always.

post-7619-white-text-1cjie.png

Looks better than yellow. Doesn't give off that $1 chinese bootleg VHS vibe.
 
The worst I've seen is Final Fantasy XIV's dialogue text. It's tiny, and the higher the resolution of your screen, the smaller the text is. Everything else in the game can be scaled bigger or use larger fonts, but not the subtitles. I have a 40" 4k TV, and if I want to read the subtitles (and often non-voiced cutscenes), I have to lower the resolution to 1080p.

yfxZo7u.jpg

BTW, this has not been fixed in the new Heavensward expansion; you still cannot resize the NPC/story text bubble or the text inside. Everything else is scalable a certain amount, but not that.
 

Wensih

Member
Destiny's annoy me because they're yellow.

I mean a lot of films have yellow subtitles, especially foreign. I think yellow is definitely a good subtitle color choice because they won't be hidden if certain areas or cut scenes have white environments or a character is wearing white.
 
Agreed with you, OP.

Also, the fact that sometimes, games spoil what the character is about to say by bringing up the subtitles prematurely annoys me.

Oh yeah, and when the subtitle is inaccurate or when they forget to put the subtitles in when the character says something.

Also, for gods sake, make the font look nice or at least suit the aesthetic style of the game.

That yellow font in Destiny is ugly as hell.
 
I usually turn off subtitles because I find trying to read them just gets annoying. But there are times when you are forced to read because of the spoken language being translated such as AC3 when they spoke in Kanienkeha.

Nothing like tiny white on white text.

atxLhwQ.jpg
 
Best example of this bad practice I can think of is Banjo Kazooie Nuts and Bolts:


SO much screen to cover, and the text is ant-sized. It wasn't the worst thing about the game tho.

Even Banjo and Kazooie are looking at them disgusted.

I usually turn off subtitles because I find trying to read them just gets annoying. But there are times when you are forced to read because of the spoken language being translated such as AC3 when they spoke in Kanienkeha.

Nothing like tiny white on white text.

atxLhwQ.jpg

White text with a black outline or drop shadow is best for me. There isn't enough of a drop shadow here.
 

Fehyd

Banned
my biggest complaint is honorifics in translations.

There's a reason that they're removed in proper translations.
 
Dragon Age: Inquisition suffers not only from tiny subtitles, but the baffling decision to stick them at the TOP of the screen.
QtxyfxSEKdTSW-1MjAsJCQ7lNET8gXP0TCRoH2OkpeuW-H0YZyg_MaoCo9DO3mW5H3S5tRYkM9nJo6SJYBRg=w426-h240-n


Why? Just... why?!

I thought it was weird at first. I ended up liking it a lot, as weird as it sounds. Generally important things tend to converge towards the top of the screen in cutscenes so it helped reduce the eye travel. That's my theory at least.
 

Skux

Member
Just played Halo 4 recently and they were terrible. Just pasted the whole script on the screen in tiny yellow text so it even spoiled a lot of the upcoming dialogue.
 

MaKTaiL

Member
The odd place of the small subtitles on Dragon Age is what drove me to stop playing it. They ruined the experience for me.
 

Futurematic

Member
Size: small, medium, large
Colour: white, yellow, alternating
Black box underneath subtitles to improve legibility: on/off
Reading speed, should subtitles summarize as appropriate?: yes/no (add brief reading speed test here)
Dialogue Subtitles or full CC?

That seems to be the bare minimum of choices we should have. Though I only include the second last one because I read fast and subtitles skipping stuff bugs me.

Yes there a billion things to do when developing a game (and I'd never blame tiny indie studios for doing only basic options, but would hope they consider it strongly), but movie/tv (aside from some ongoing problems like Netflix) have had this--broadly speaking--down for a couple decades. Any game that rolls into million dollar and up budgets should have this. Especially considering how Sony and some 3rd parties bust their ass on quality translations and good voice actors even for tiny markets when say the Spanish localization budget would get you good subtitles in every language.

(Position should not be an option though, subtitles are at the bottom full stop. We have decades of movie/tv conditioning on that one.)
 

monocromo

Member
As someone who is used to watch movies and play games with subs on this thread touches my hearth. So good job OP.

Leaving the size and font color issues aside (only because this has already been discussed - white text black outline medium size please) developers should be careful when reviewing the subs work. I understand it is mostly outsourced but it should be checked before they ship. Even when I use subs I can understand english, and sometimes the translations are beyond stupid.

As an example of this in Uncharted 3 (cant remember if 3 or 2 to be honest) in a conversation Drake is talking about "his notebook" and they fucking translated it as "his computer" ...
 

jett

D-Member
As someone who is used to watch movies and play games with subs on this thread touches my hearth. So good job OP.

Leaving the size and font color issues aside (only because this has already been discussed - white text black outline medium size please) developers should be careful when reviewing the subs work. I understand it is mostly outsourced but it should be checked before they ship. Even when I use subs I can understand english, and sometimes the translations are beyond stupid.

As an example of this in Uncharted 3 (cant remember if 3 or 2 to be honest) in a conversation Drake is talking about "his notebook" and they fucking translated it as "his computer" ...

i lol'd
 

hesido

Member
I have just the game for you!

Font... so... tiny....

"-I saw it."

"-Saw what?"

Certainly not the tiny ass subtitles.

Yes, the Order's text size is ridiculous. It's as if they didn't want to obscure the graphics with anything else, yet they have a lot of empty space where they could put gigantic subtitles.
 

MattKeil

BIGTIME TV MOGUL #2
Blows my mind that people want subtitles when a game/movie is in a language they understand. I get that shit off the screen ASAP.

That said, the examples in the OP are pretty horrendous. I mean I get not wanting to cover up too much screen real estate with the words but come on. If someone turns the subs on clearly they're okay with the tradeoff. Make it readable.
 

Einchy

semen stains the mountaintops
Blows my mind that people want subtitles when a game/movie is in a language they understand. I get that shit off the screen ASAP.

How come? A lot of times audio mixing is really poorly done in games and it's hard to understand some lines. I always put subs on if the game lets me and they aren't too badly done.
 

PixelPeZ

Member
Size is one thing, but the Halo series and a couple of others do anoying thing, where they don't subtitle ingame dialogs and radio transmissions and whatnot. I usually have subtitles on and sound almost off, and living where I do, have grown up to rely on subtitles for most of the time and when someone talks mid-level, and I can't hear over the gunplay and whatnot, then, well, I guess now I just move to the next marker or whatever, I hope there wasn't any important information in what you just said.
 

MattKeil

BIGTIME TV MOGUL #2
How come? A lot of times audio mixing is really poorly done in games and it's hard to understand some lines. I always put subs on if the game lets me and they aren't too badly done.

I've never had trouble understanding lines in any game of the last 10-15 years, and I've played a lot of them, sometimes not on the best audio setups, too. Occasionally I turn the music down a bit in the options if I think it's fighting with the dialogue, but that's very rare. I have never felt the need to have subtitles on in a game with English dialogue, ever. It would simply never occur to me to turn the subs on.
 
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