Support NeoGAF

[Metalstrike]

Always, every time.

 

[jaypah]

I've watched TV with subtitles since the 90s and as soon as video games started offering it as a standard option I've used it there too. I like reading but I also feel like I retain more if I'm reading. I can follow along just fine so the comprehension aspect might just be a psychological thing but it makes me more comfortable so that's how I roll.

 

[Zaki2407]

Me..me.. (raise hand) ^_^

 

[Ally of Justice]

I do, mostly because English it's not my mother language, so sometimes I miss something or if there's a lot of noise around, I can get confused.

 

[charlequin]

If I had my druthers, console companies would make an absolute licensing requirement that games must offer subtitles, and must default to having them on. (Forcing them to offer the option to change them before you start a game would be nice too.) Anyone who doesn't like them of course can turn them off, but when subtitles default to off, far too many companies treat them as an afterthought. If they defaulted to on, you'd see a lot fewer games ship with poor subtitle functionality.

How would you do it? I'm curious

Amazon Prime streaming is a pretty good example: they offer four or five color schemes, several fonts, and multiple sizes of text, so the user can tweak them until they fit their needs.

I won't play a game without subtitles.

I made the mistake of playing the original Assassin's Creed even though

Who here watches movies in their native language with subtitles on? No one.

A surprisingly large number of people, actually. There are a ton of people with partial hearing loss, enough to make following dialogue difficult without actually being unable to hear. There are also people with cognitive language disorders, which, again, often mean it's hard to follow lots of spoken dialogue without necessarily making conversation impossible in person. There's a reason that Netflix got in hot water over their lacking captions a few years ago, and it wasn't just because of profoundly deaf people.

When you have kids / babies, it's a must. They seem to be loud at the most inconvenient moments.

Also an excellent point!

 

[Swhalen]

It's strange, I absolutely always have them turned on, yet it annoys me that I can't help but read them when I can perfectly understand what is being said just by listening.

 

[Silraru]

I like having subtitles on. I tend to leave voice acting in Japanese and I don't understand Japanese so really need subtitles.

 

[Unknown Soldier]

I always keep them on, it's nice to be able to read what people are saying when there are explosions going off all around you.

 

[Condom]

Always! I would imagine that even native speakers like to have subtitles sometimes.

 

[Kqh]

English is not my native language. Therefore I always make sure the option is on when starting a game. Really helps me getting all the details, plus, as mentioned several time above, this is sometimes just impossible to understand a conversation with ambiant noises and chatters.
And in the best case scenario, you can hope to use them as a hack/cheat. I'm currently playing Alien Isolation. When a Joe is on my tail and too far to hear its 'hunting' quotes, they're still displayed as subtitles. I can easily know if they gave up or not yet. HA !

 

[Cheeseman Battitude]

I always play with subtitles on. The only game I think I would pass is LA Noire because of the lip sync thing. But it's not my type of game so I haven't got it.

 

[JinjoUnchained]

Yeah, but not in the way you meant. If the game lets me, I like to set the audio to English, but the subtitles to French. It's actually a really good way to pick up the particular syntax and expressions of different languages. They way another language will rearrange different parts of speech, or shorten some phrases in certain circumstances. You should try it sometime if you can.

 

[DuffDry]

I always turn them off if given the choice. Subtitles completely distract me from the rest that's going on. If I see text I can't help but read it.

 

[BaraSailey]

I always have them on if I'm given the option. It's nice to have the text in case you miss something that's said.

 

[NekoFever]

Seriously, why do multmillion dollar movies have music and sound effects that drown out voices? It seems like the first thing you would learn in a video editing class. Actually, it seems more like common sense and something that wouldn't even need to be taught.

Most movies are usually pretty well mixed. It's just people don't have their sound calibrated properly, or are listening to something mixed for 5.1/7.1 with a dedicated dialogue channel through stereo speakers.

Or in theatres they've got the bass cranked ridiculously high to make it sound impressive even though it would give the movie's sound engineers an aneurysm to hear how they were butchering their work.

Games are harder because the audio is mixed by the hardware in real-time, but there are ways around it if they bothered. Ducking sound effects when someone's talking, for instance.

 

[Markitron]

It depends on the sound mix for me. If the dialogue is too low, and turning up the centre speaker doesn't help, I will use subtitles. Had this problem most recently with Bloodborne

 

[Duffman]

Always, English isn't my native language so having subtitles on significantly helps understanding what's going on on the screen.

 

[Black Republican]

all the time, god damned american accents!

 

[Westraid]

Always. English isn't my first language, so if English is spoken with an accent I may sometimes be unable to understand some words. Subtitles are a great help with that.
In addition, when I encounter a new word, I know how it's written correctly as well.

In cases of a character speaking for a very long time, it helps me to keep focused. Without subtitles, during a part that isn't very interesting to me, I may let my attention slip.

 

[saturnine]

Always on. I'm not a native english speaker, and sadly most games are pretty bad when it comes to voice mixing.

Games are harder because the audio is mixed by the hardware in real-time, but there are ways around it if they bothered. Ducking sound effects when someone's talking, for instance.

That's an idea, but it's not very subtle.

I think the main problem is that voices are used on a 3D plane, which leads to voice drowning very quickly when you are far away from the source.

Maybe they could try simply having the voices on a 2D plane (left-right, up-down, fixed depth). That would aleviate the issues most of the time.

 

[SinSilla]

This is a tough one, my native tongue is not always getting a full voice over. (GTA Franchise for example), but subtitles are way to distracting for me. So i tend to just try my best and listen closely to what is being said. Not that easy with all that Ghetto talk going on there.

 

[WITHE1982]

I always pop them on if the option is available. I've noticed a few games recently use the subtitles to translate foreign languages in English speaking games. The Order 1886 did this as I found out during 2 play-throughs. It translates the spoken Indian language to English, which it doesn't otherwise.

 

[yog-sothot]

I do

Mostly because I like playing my games in their original language but am not a native english speaker

 

[MAX PAYMENT]

I always do. Nothing more frustrating than a character talking to you that is walking away, or you're facing the wrong direction so he isn't as loud.

 

[N30RYU]

I always play with subtitles off... 'cause I hate finding myself reading the subtitles faster than the dub and ending skipping the voices...
So I decided to play with subs off.

 

[SuomiDude]

Always on when it's an option (some games for some reason or another don't have it as an option). I use them, so that I can play games with volume down if needed and because English isn't my first language, so I can't honestly catch every word they say unless it's written in plain sight (of course I don't understand every English word there is, but yeah).

 

[Weltall Zero]

I do, but then again I'm not a native English speaker so depending on circumstances (strong accents, lax pronounciation, low voice volume, loud background noise, etc) I can have trouble understanding speech otherwise.

 

[FLAguy954]

I often play without any sound, so they are very important to me in most games.

Beyond non-gameplay reasons that some people may have legitimately everyone is different. Not only do I not find sound aiding that aspect for me, there are a lot of video game specific things from bad voice acting, repetitive sound effects, ost's that do nothing for me, and licensed music that outright annoys me that a lot of the time for me sound is immersion breaking.

lmao almost

 

[Shuggananas]

My mother tongue is french, and I play games in english (to avoid crappy translations), so yeah I put them on

 

[RoadHazard]

I do, always. I understand spoken English perfectly well, but I absolutely hate missing even a single word in a line of dialogue, and that can easily happen if all you have is audio. Being a Swede I've also grown up on subtitles (we don't dub anything beyond kids' shows here), so reading them is a natural and effortless thing for me.

 

[Cleve]

I grew up on reading books and text in my games at my own pace and if a game has slow dialogue delivery (they almost all do) I turn on subtitles and skip dialog to read at my own pace. I hate it when games don't let you advance individual lines and force you to listen to a drawn out dialogue scene.

 

[BTA]

I pretty much always have subtitles on in games if I can. It helps clarify lines I might have misheard or possibly misunderstood otherwise, and being able to have screenshots for sharing a good line are always nice. I also use captions for TV shows a decent amount of the time, though that's usually more for accents or wanting to focus more. Might also be partially thanks to being so used to having them up thanks to anime and toku, honestly.

 

[Ramenman]

Me too, always.

It's a must. Then you realise they are 5px big

Always on. Really sucks how they are always tiny though.

Sadly yes. It's most of the time very true for all HUD text this gen too...

The award for most unreadable still goes to The Order, but even though other games have them bigger, they're rarely "big enough".

Big props to Dontnod for making subtitles in Life Is Strange actually readable from a distance, that's the only recent game I can think of.

 

[Chri_stoph]

I used to always have them on, but they often distracted me, because I always had to read them even when I understood everything that was being said. So now I usually turn them off.

 

[revolverjgw]

One of the first things I do before I start a game is check to see if subtitles are enabled, it's an automatic reflex.

 

[Hyperzephyrian]

I almost always turn subtitles off. When they're on, I always end up reflexively reading the line and then waiting for the voiceover to catch up. It encourages me to skip through the dialogue as fast as possible, which ends up making it all feel like a time-waster. But with subtitles turned off, dialogue is much more natural and satisfying, because I'm actually listening to the voices, and processing the spoken words; it's closer to how you listen to people in real life.