Why Do Video Game Subtitles Suck?

Subtitles are lines of text on a screen that depict what is being said. These are incredibly useful for allowing a lot of people to better engage with media. Subtitles aren’t just for people who are hard of hearing, they’re also used by people who struggle with auditory information, who want to watch with the sound turned off, or who just like having subtitles on screen.

Every TV station and movie publisher has their own standard for subtitles, but generally they boil down to:

• Each line should have roughly 42 characters per line.
• There should be a maximum of 2 lines per subtitle cell (on screen).
• Subtitles should be accurate, clear, and consistent.
• Subtitles should be readable.
  (Best Practices for Captioning)

So why the heck don’t video games subtitles follow these rules?! Why do they suck so bad?!

 

Lines are Too Long

Reading short and sweet lines,
that are naturally broken down,

are a lot easier than reading ridiculously long lines of text. And when you add in multiples sentences, all containing important information, displaying on screen in one long word vomit, it becomes an illegible nightmare.

It takes time for your eyes to move across the screen, and if there isn’t enough time for you to take in all the information then you’re going to miss stuff. Which is why TV subtitles limit themselves to a maximum of 42 characters per line, not 120 characters.

The subtitles in Batman: Arkham City are incredibly inconsistent with some during cutscenes being aggressively long with ugly line breaks, while in-game subtitles feature tighter dialogue boxes with lots of information.

This sentence hadn’t even finished and they cut it off!

Way too many lines on screen at once. Which brings me to my next point…

 

Too Many Lines on Screen

I don’t want to have to read an essay when I should be engaging with an important in-game event. Reading walls of text makes it more difficult to remember information. Players might get bored and want to stop reading altogether, resulting in skipping dialogue.

Furthermore, many people read faster than they hear, so displaying all the text on-screen means players will often read ahead and skip to the next dialogue box before a character is done talking. Or they’ll get frustrated if they can’t skip.

It’s better to drip feed the information than shove it all in the player’s face at once.

 

Bad Line Breaking

The number of games with terrible line breaking is too darn high. It’s one of my pet peeves that always distracts me from the game. Line breaking is deciding where to jump to the next line when formatting subtitles.

Terrible line breaks include:

• Orphan words (leaving one poor little lonely words on a line all alone)
• Bottom-heavy subtitles (the bottom line is longer than the top)
• Inconsistent subtitles (subtitles within the same scene with vastly different lengths)
• Manual line breaking mixed with auto-line breaking (auto line breaking often results in the aforementioned problems, making it stand out in a negative way)

Game developers (specifically writers and localization managers working with the UI lead) should establish clear line breaking style guides so the subtitles are consistent throughout the game and in all languages.

 

Itsy Bitsy Font Size

Games are developed on PC, which means the team is normally sitting close to the screen when they’re making and testing the game. No one tests console games on a wide-screen TV several feet from a chair. If they did, maybe they would notice how teeny tiny the subtitles are!

Often when the subtitles are too small there isn’t an option to increase the font size. Or if there is an option, it doesn’t make that much difference.

Developers should test their subtitles for all platforms, what works on a computer monitor or a television across the room might not work on a six-inch Switch screen. Adding deeper accessibility options is a great first step in addressing these issues, but it’s a band-aid for the larger problem.

Baldur’s Gate 3 might be a fantastic game, but unless you’re playing on PC, the subtitles are tiny and difficult to read.

What is this, subtitles for ant?! And what’s with this orphan word?!

 

The Font is Hard to Read

As a general rule Sans Serif fonts are easier to read on low pixel density screens than Serif fonts. But some games decide that they need to have extra fancy fonts to match the style of their game, which can be incredibly difficult for people to read. (Especially dyslexics like myself!)

The Spyro the Dragon remakes were great, apart from the fact they forgot to put subtitles in. And when they did add them, they were difficult to read! Despite the large text with the black background, the font and text color made the subtitles illegible to a lot of players.

 

The Subtitles Are Hard to See

You wouldn’t write white text on a grey/white background, so why have that as an option in games? White font with a black border is the default color choice for many games, but even still, when viewed in some in-game environments, it’s kind of a mess.

Square Enix’s Forspoken had this issue in a few places, but it’s not as bad as Black Myth: Wukong‘s subtitles which are tiny and impossible to read on a white snowy background.

These subtitles aren’t only unreadable because they’re white on white, they’re unreadable because they’re so small!

Having the option to add a black or opaque background to the subtitles can really help improve readability.

 

There’s No Speaker Displayed

If you couldn’t hear the audio, how would you know who was saying what? The best game subtitles include an option to display the speaker’s name alongside their speech.

But sometimes if you have a speaker name displayed, it’s on the same line as the subtitles, which can throw off the balance of the lines. While extra accessibility options like this are important to make sure your audience enjoys your game, they all need to be properly tested!

 

Missing Subtitles for Background Characters and Enemies

I’m going to pick on Square Enix for this one again. In Final Fantasy VII Remake There were several segments of story when background characters were talking about important events that just happened, but there were no subtitles for them!

This was particularly bad for gamers who chose to play the game with Japanese audio and translated subtitles. Unless they understood Japanese, they missed out on a lot of the world building.

Generic enemies that have spoken lines don’t always have subtitles either. This can be a major problem when certain attacks are signaled by voice triggers.

Saying that, Final Fantasy XVI improved a lot adding subtitles for background characters to the sides of the screen as you walk past them.

NPC background conversations popup on the left of the screen when you’re within proximity to them to trigger the conversation.

 

Other Languages Are Not Taken Into Consideration

This isn’t just an issue in English. Developers often overlook how the subtitles will look in other languages and implement fonts without checking with a native speaker.

This causes issues because certain fonts might be hard to read or might look silly in other languages. It would be like a foreign developer using Comic Sans for the English font! It makes an impact, but perhaps not the one they want!

Chinese, for example, often needs a very thin font to make the characters legible. If the font is too fat then characters with lots of radicals can turn into illegible blobs. If only the subtitles were larger with less characters displayed at a single time…

Either way, test your multi-lingual fonts in-engine and send a sample of them to your localization team for feedback before you implement them all. Make sure this is done early enough in development so you can fix any issues before translation starts.

 

All of the above points combine to make the text on screen increasingly difficult to read. And can even make games completely inaccessible to some players.

 

So Why are Video Game Subtitles So Bad?

To put it simply, subtitles are not a high priority for some developers.

Games (especially AAA games) can be in development for three to six years (and increasingly even longer!), and even then face tight deadlines and last-minute crunch. Subtitle implementation, which is just a small part of the UI of the game, can often get forgotten about or bumped down the priority list.

Unless there are people on the development team who are aware of the rules and limitations of subtitles, the text will often be added without any consideration for readability.

 

Learn From the Best!

I don’t want to be all doom and gloom, so here are some games with great subtitles!

Final Fantasy VII Remake and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth didn’t subtitle their background characters, but the subtitles they did have were really good.

• Speaker names above the subtitles
• Size options for font
• Background options for subtitles
• Easy to read font

 

The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part II are, of course, amazing examples of accessibility on all levels, including subtitles!

• Speaker names (with different colour options)
• Subtitles for NPCs and enemy characters (and speaker direction indicator!)
• Background options for subtitles
• Subtitle colour settings
• Subtitle size options
• Easy to read font

 

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown won Innovation in Accessibility at The Game Awards in 2024, and rightfully so! The game was fantastic to play with subtitles turned on.

• Speaker names
• Default subtitles are large
• Size options for font
• Background options for subtitles
• Easy to read font
• Dyslexic font options
• Dialogue doesn’t auto-progress (apart from in cutscenes and background dialogue)
• Background voices are subtitled

 

Subtitles are an Important Part of Games

Subtitles can have a major impact on a player’s experience with a game. Difficult to read subtitles make a game less enjoyable, and sometimes even completely unplayable. Bad subtitles can easily sour a player’s experience.

UI specialists, writers, and localization managers should work together to established a style guide for subtitles early in development so subtitles don’t become low-priority issue that gets forgotten about.

 

Further Reading on Subtitles in Games

How to do subtitles well – basics and good practices

Rules for how to line-break captions

Subtitles Are Changing, Don’t Be Left Behind (GDC Talk)

How To Line-Break Subtitles (IGDA)

The Best Video Games with Large and Clear Subtitles

 

Player Catalogues List Of Games That Still Have Poorly Implemented Subtitles

What Game Subtitling Got Wrong in 2017

 

Articles on Game Localization for Devs