About two months ago, we downloaded a demo of Mystery of the Druids and discovered that there were no subtitles in the cut scenes. So we asked House of Tales a few questions. Tobias Schachte, games designer and Managing Director of House of Tales gave us these answers:

Have House of Tales considered deaf people’s communications needs when they are developing their games?

Of course. During the development we took into consideration people who might not be able to enjoy the voices in the game. In this case, you can activate subtitles in the game, which are displayed simultaneously to the spoken text. Furthermore, we achieved almost perfect lip synchronisation through phonetic speech analysis, which conveys a feeling for the characters even without the text display.

Why aren't there any subtitles in the cut scenes?

The cut scenes contain the dramatic build-up of the game.
We feel that subtitles - since they aren’t applicable due to the full screen video structure - would disrupt the dramatisation very much. But we do offer the cut scene dialogues - only 3 of them contain an actual dialogue - as a text file.

I would also like to ask who does the subtitles for you and what determines the style and font that is used?

The dialogue lines are written only once, and then automatically used for all production processes. The subtitles are generated directly from the source files that are also used for the recording scripts.

For the subtitle font selection, readability was most decisive. We tried some fonts that looked somewhat more interesting - but some of them were very hard to read. So we used a clear font with a black frame, which is legible on every kind of background. The inner colour of the font changes from character to character, so it’s always obvious who is currently speaking.

Our Comments:

Lip synchronisation is probably very important to some people but to us at Deaf Gamers, it is not a necessity. Especially when we consider that the very location of the subtitles means that deaf people will not have their line of vision upon people's faces but at the top of the screen! This could easily have been rectified by better positioning. Subtitles can become involved in what is happening on screen simply by placing them alongside the character who is speaking, thereby enabling the deaf person to keep their eyes on the action rather than at the top of the screen.
There was also a part in the demo where a gun was put to your character's head - the back of your head (a cut scene) and although there was dialogue, nothing appeared on screen. And of course, you can't see his mouth moving to let us know that something is going on! All we could see was the back of someone's head. Very entertaining.

Cut scenes and subtitling do not seem to go hand in hand with game designers, do they? LucasArts on the other hand, have learnt by experience, normally renowned for their subtitling expertise, they did not include subtitled cut scenes in Grim Fandango. This was a mistake. Gamers demanded that LucasArts correct this problem immediately, which they did. As for dramatic effect being spoilt because of subtitles appearing in a cut scene, our enjoyment of a game is spoilt when you can't follow what is going on. Why couldn't House of Tales have given people the choice to use subtitles in cut scenes or not?
Their argument says that deaf people can print off or read the text file included with the game. How about that for spoiling the dramatical effect, we are supposed to be poised with our print out awaiting a cut scene and then try and figure out if there is or isn't speech in this cut scene, have a quick read of the file, have a quick look at the screen to see if it matches, etc., etc. Yeah, real drama there... or rather a pain in the neck from our point of view!

To be fair though, there are subtitles in the majority of the game, which are optional. We don't know yet if these are on by default (as with the LucasArts games) but they are colour coded, which should help identify the characters that are speaking. Not if they have their heads turned away from you though! Overall, we must remember that this company has thought about deaf people's communication needs to a certain point and that is great, and as more and more deaf people make their demands, the games industry will have to listen.

Many thanks go to Tobias for answering our questions.