I'd actually like it if a middleware provider made a good plug-in for both Subtitles and Credits for developers to use in UE and other popular engines. (These engines often have rudimentary tools for it but it's clearly not a priority area of development ... partly because it's relatively easy to do simplistically, but seeing as how often subtitles are done badly, there's call for a specialist.) There's very good need to address this problem with better technology.
A good implementation of Subtitles would include user-adjustable size/fonts/color/borders (even if a pre-set style is great if a developer does it right, sometimes that may make it hard to read on a set or for people with visual impairments / colorblind issues.) It would also be nice to have awareness of the screen width for size choice. And it should have choices for hearing-impaired (games don't broadcast subtitles over the traditional TV overlay signal in addition to the in-game subs, correct?) where utilized. It should also have complete mechanisms for subtitling over FMV, in-game cutscenes, and game dialog (too often, the cutscenes are subbed but then when the companion is yelling, "turn left, I've got a shortcut" or something like that and you fail the mission because you missed audio cues, the subs are not doing their jobs.) It would also be lovely if these subtitles were stored in a file that could be fairly edited by partner publishers (or hackers/patchers, eventually) for localization across territories. (That seems easy, but Japanese releases are still using old engines and graphic-based subs, for some reasons that make sense but mostly because they're doing it wrong.) And all of this should be wrapped up in typography and display choices (comic book-style overlays? color gradients/effects? zooming/fading? screen placement/rotation?) that allow powerful use of text in game without having to render anything down to hard-set graphics. There might even be call for a console pre-set (it would be incredibly handy, plus a nice service for the handicapped, to set on your PS or Xbox with options like "Always Show Subtitles" or "Subtitle Size: S/M/L" or "Subtitle Color Preference: White/Black-Border/Yellow", stuff like that.)
As a few of us said in a previous NeoGAF thread about
Game Credits, there's reasons good for the developers, good for the publishers, and good for the gamers in taking a better approach to this often-ignored aspect of game development.