So, on April 24, 2017 Jeff Kaplan said āthe team is very passionateā to add subtitle support. Itās been a year and a half (soon 2 years) andā¦ nothing is being said or done about it.
Is anything even in the works?
Itās a complex issue, since adding footsteps as a tip, etc, would be gamebreaking, but I have been wondering for a long time now, why canāt I at least know when MY TEAM is ulting? When our Zarya does her grav or our Sombra hacks enemy team, it wouldnāt be gamebreaking if I, as a hard of hearing player, knew that it is happening at this exact moment?
Other people suggested already to have either a subtitles choice or a sounds choice to not make it gamebreaking and I wouldnāt mind, but at this point I donāt even know if I ever will even have the choice in the first place.
It could be continuously generated subtitles somewhere in the middle and at the bottom of the screen, with phrases changing each other, so that it could repeat the audio āspamā just when sound cues are incoming, therefore, it would be possible to miss it visually too. That is if we could get subtitles that cover enemy ult voicelines.
But I still dont get why I cannot be aware when my team ultsā¦ through icon flash or subtitle option, at this point Iād take ANYTHING.
Hope Jeff or anybody else from dev team responds to it, it would be nice to know current subtitle status, thank you.
From now on when someone assigns me a task, Iāll just be like āIām very passionate about completing this taskā and get back t them when TES:VI releases.
Laugh all you want, but if you turned off the sound and played many matches like this, you would miss it pretty soon xD
Same goes to the ābeer! beer!ā guy above
Donāt get me wrong ā I 100% support subtitles being implemented because as far as Iām concerned it brings nothing but positives in having the game be more accessible and those who donāt need it can just leave the setting disabled. I was just trying to make a Bad Joke.
Iād probably play with subtitles enabled tbh because I am one of those weird people who find voiceline spammers funny rather than annoying.
Sorry for bumping the topic, but I hope more people acknowledge the problem and help me and folks like me to gain an insight from dev team.
Itās been almost three years from the launch date, itās frustrating to be left in the unknown
Peace! ^^
I know the feeling, after waiting a few years to get colorblind options that actually help colorblind people, and there are still a few major bugs with those.
I think the devs are just generally hesitant (somewhat understandably) to implement accessibility features in a way that can benefit people who donāt directly need them. For example, many people who arenāt colorblind use the colorblind features anyway, just because there are brighter and clearer colors than red/blue to highlight things. Similarly, subtitles can notify players of in-game events that may have otherwise gone unnoticed by sound alone, which makes them advantageous to enable, even for those who have perfect hearing.
In any case, hopefully youāll hear more about it soon.
I understand these concerns. I have been thinking about this for a while and already thought that maybe they could enable the feature only to those who provided medical papers stating their condition? So it wouldnāt be gamebreaking then, but useful for people in need.
Surely there are not THAT many deaf people to overburden GMs with too much extra work?
Congrats on new colourblind options, btw. I heard that the new version is much better than the originally implemented one.
Unaware about bugs, though, which ones do you mean?
My hearing is quite bad (birth defect), and because of it do I always enable subtitles in all my games. Unfortunately is this not possible in Overwatch.
Just something like ultimate announcements in chat would be great.
I donāt think it could ever be conditional in such a way. Aside from adding work for support representatives, thereās too much grey area. We could end up with OWL players who have good enough hearing to get by normally but are disabled enough in certain audio ranges to use the accessibility features, which would lead to potentially unfair advantages. It kind of has to be all or nothing.
It is definitely much better. I felt like I was playing a whole new game when the update arrived.
The biggest bug is a rare issue where the team colors randomly switch (specifically, my own team displays as enemy colors, so I end up shooting at the wrong people). Thereās also one where different members of the enemy team can be different colors, and sometimes spawned objects like Wrecking Ballās mines arenāt the right color. Iāve definitely walked face-first into some of those without seeing them.
Iād like subtitles simply because Iāve become so use to them at home.
Every film, television show, cartoon, and video games, I have them on. Maybe Iāve always been that way since anime subtitles Iāve grown up with in the 90s? Or watching too many English crime dramaās/mysteries where I canāt understand what the hell they are saying so I like having words?
Either way, itās a nice alternative to have for seeing Ults fired and hearing the voice lines spoken in-game since they muffled big time over other sounds.
Yeah Iād really like an update on this too. For people with auditory impairments the game has a much higher spike in difficulty that could be resolved pretty easily
Yeah, you are right about it. Itās not a simple and one-sided problem, however, I suppose that implementation of 50% of solution (i.e., icons/subtitles only for own team ulting would be already a blessing xD
Oh wowā¦ I remember visuals from Torbās gunfire confused me at times, but what you describe sounds much worse. Guess as a solution to this you could memorise player names, to be aware of player in front of you, although itās so much harder and absolutely downdragging when it comes to teamfights. Iām really happy they updated the colourblind support! Hope they introduce a fix towards those rare bugs too, to improve it.
![:slight_smile:](https://d74zh8edaijub.cloudfront.net/en/overwatch/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=6" ":slight_smile:")