Throughout my gaming journey, I've encountered numerous instances where subtitles, an essential feature for understanding game narratives, have been poorly
For instance, Assassin’s Creed Origins had subtitles turned off by default and 60% of players turned them on. And in games that had subtitles turned on by default, only 10% turned them off.
It’s not often that I can devote 100% of my attention to a game enough to play with the volume at cinematic levels and hear everything the way the devs intended
100% THIS. I would love to be able to play that way but reality means it doesn't happen all the time, and subtitles don't really have a downside to just leave on.
I’ve only ever actively noticed terrible audio balance. Combine that with a shitty rear facing built in tv speaker, the air conditioner because it’s 90° in fall, and me trying not to shake down the walls with sudden explosions, I’ll never hear whateverthefuck is being said. And so often that voice stuff is important, since signposting in AAA games isn’t always perfect,
I never play with subtitles because I end up just reading them instead of looking at the animation. Obviously it's important to have good subtitles available for accessibility though.
The mixing in many games often makes me miss a specific word, and it's distracting trying to catch everything said without a helpful subtitle bridge to do the lifting for me.
I've tried without and the audio balancing isn't always great, on FF16 Clive is hard to hear because his pitch is so deep I miss nuances or words completely.
Also growing up with games before voices were normalized. Habits die hard
Most of the time i play jrpg's and i want it to be japanese dubbed. But my japaneses isn't good enough yet, so i turn subtitles on of course...But i have the feeling you are talking about something different.
I find it hard to ignore the text as my eyes always seem to want to gravitate towards it, so prefer to turn it off so I'm more focused on the scene itself. So yeah, I usually turn em off.