This is a) an accessibility issue and b) something that was already written so should not be hard to implement.
Because the game is still in development.
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notice this is in “feedback and suggestions” it’s more of a rhetorical question. But thanks for the answer?
First and foremost, welcome to the LE forum!
Localisation and subtitles (and possibly even voice overs) are things EHG wants to focus on close to or with 1.0.
Because there are still parts of the story that get changed/overhauled and they don’t want to spend ressources on things that possibly get touched again before 1.0.
It is just a matter of efficiency.
While feedback is always good, so EHG knows what people want to see.
This is a still a EA/Beta game and accessability features are things that are just not priority for most devs due to making a fundamentally good game is way more important during the early stages of development.
I think EHG spoke very positively about all kinds of accesability features like subtitles, colourblind mode etc. But it will come at a later point.
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Perhaps you shouldn’t phrase your feedback in the form of a question if you don’t want a response to it in the form of an answer to that question.
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Would you mind me asking whether you’re 100% sure about that?
I only ask because your post, which is perfectly reasonable in a vacuum, is slightly concerning due to just how often I seem to encounter this in response to feedback;
The list of things being reserved for such a small fraction of the game’s pre-release patches appears to be unending - and, in my view, this is one of the worst items among them.
While many aspects of the game can change frequently as the designers iterate on their ideas, this is notably not true of voice acting - where any unrecorded lines the devs wish to add require paying the voice actor again & getting them into a recording studio again.
While VA isn’t impossible to add to or change, it happens comparatively infrequently, and so in my opinion the argument WRT efficiency doesn’t really hold water. It therefore appears to be missing out of simple indifference / laziness on the part of the devs, which doesn’t suggest it’s likely to be there before or at 1.0, and certainly is unfortunate for those to whom the accessibility feature would be beneficial.
(Not trying to specifically have a go at you, @Heavy, sorry if it seems like I am.)
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Cool. Thanks for the feedback. Definitely helpful.
I’m assuming that’s why they have lettered updates as well.
Lots of games live in Early Access forever…I’m just trying to get something in their sights at least.
Glad to see Colorblind Mode as a mention as well.
But all that aside, thanks for your additional questions…I definitely feel like they should be answered as well
Probably because it’s a fairly common response from us directly. We’re planning for a long life cycle for Last Epoch, so whenever a question is asked of “could ‘x’ happen”, the answer is almost always “maybe”, the future is a very long time. Accessibility such as subtitles is certainly something we want, but subtitles don’t help if the game doesn’t even work. While we certainly understand and appreciate different people’s priority for different items, there are currently higher priority items such as ensuring the core game works. Items like accessibility are “on the list” because they’ll be scheduled in once the people who would be able to complete them aren’t working on something higher priority.
The story can iterate quite considerably in Beta - and while some lines are more final than others, it’s the same reason we’ve held off on as much voice acting - so we don’t have to do all the VA only to re-do it with changes later (VA is surprisingly expensive). Most VA is in chapter 9 our most recent and up to standards chapter, with little bits before them.
The last thing I would say is that subtitles are not so simple a task. There isn’t a checkbox for “put dialog as subtitles”. We have to create a subtitle system, ensure it has correct timings, ensure it doesn’t have any bugs, make sure its versatile for all lengths of text, make sure it supports localization as that’s another one of our list items, ensure it doesn’t cause any interaction issues since a number of cutscenes are in-game, and things I’m not even thinking of yet. There’s also not currently a lot of a dialog or cinematics aside from chapter 9 to have subtitles for - mainly just the quick opening character cutscene, and “Fools, FOOLS!” - though this will likely change as we continue to update chapters to our current standards.
We absolutely want accessibility options in the game, however for us it’s currently not higher priority than some other items such as ensuring players can enter monoliths reliably in multiplayer. I most certainly understand that different people have different priorities, and I apologize that this is higher priority for you and we’re not able to get to it yet. At the very least, I can say “yes, it’s on our list”.
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Well, that’s a poor response.
In my post I asked someone whether they were certain subtitles would be in the game when it left Early Access, and expressed skepticism that they would be.
I don’t expect them to be in the game in time for version 1.0 because of how significant a shift going from an offline-with-caveats game to a live service will be for EHG. It simply doesn’t make sense from a production standpoint, if they are intended to be there for launch, to save the entirety of the workload for when the team is attempting to manage a live service and finish development of an Early Access title at the same time.
tl;dr: Heavy insinuated subtitles would be included in v1.0. I said I doubt they would be. You decided to join the discussion, but not weigh in on what we were talking about. Though you did somehow twice refer to priorities I never even expressed…
I’ll refrain from responding directly to what you said regarding the workload of adding subtitles to a Unity game out of fear you’ll reply again, but ignore everything else I’ve said.
Reality does have a tendency to be disappointing.
There’s an infinite number of numbers inbetween any two given numbers, just because 0.9.0 is the next patch & 1.0 is launch doesn’t mean that there has to be a “small fraction” of the pre-1.0 patches between the two, they can continue to count up that final digit (0.9.9 → 0.9.10 → 0.9.11, etc) for as long as necessary in order to get everything they want to be in before 1.0 in before 1.0.
Also, they’ve said before that they have a lot of their resources currently working on MP so once that’s in & working reasonably well those resources can be shifted off MP & on to everything else.
To be fair, Kain did spend a lot of the post commenting on your view that adding subtitles is easy, even if he didn’t break down your post & answer every point.
Tbf I was the one who implied ease of implementation.
But, yeah, as I said prior…this was more of a ‘let me make sure it’s on the roadmap’ rather than a ‘do this now’ post
Yeah, I was actually thinking of the “voice acting doesn’t change” comment rather than “subtitles are eezee peezee”…
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Could you quote the part of my post Kain responded to where I either explicitly stated, or implicitly implied, that it is easy? I’ve re-read that post and not been able to find it.
My post can be summarised as “if it was going to be in for 1.0, it would almost certainly be further along than what it is now.” I stand by that 100%.
Ah ok that makes sense.
I take it you didn’t read my second post…
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