Please consider uncensoring captions?

[karliahs]

I noticed that subtitles in Wintermute censor swear words in the subtitles when they are not censored in the spoken dialogue - e.g. in episode 4, Mathis says "fucking" out loud but the caption reads "****ing."

The purpose of captions should be to mirror the experience of listening to the audio as closely as possible, so there is no need to censor subtitles. People who rely on subtitles are not more delicate than people who don't, which is what censoring subtitles risks implying. 

Discussions about this issue in the Deaf community online are numerous, and I have always seen them reach the conclusion that censoring subtitles is unnecessary and negatively affects the experience.

I hope Hinterland will consider revising their subtitles to accurately reflect the dialogue. I will say that otherwise I have been impressed with the quality of the subtitles and how closely they match the dialogue, as well as grateful for the option to increase their size (and have them actually be nice and large when you do this! In lots of games the options are tiny or slightly less tiny).

ETA: I note the game has a mature language filter option, which was not turned on in my game - I'm not sure if the subtitles being censored but the dialogue being uncensored is a bug caused by the implementation of this feature, or if that is the intended experience, but either way they shouldn't be mismatched.

Edited December 20, 2023 by karliahs
Added a paragraph

[xanna]

Yes, 100%

[odizzido]

Censoring your own story by choice.....that's....interesting.

[cuttlefish]

Subtitles in Survival mode are really bad though, some phrases will show incomplete or changed subtitles, and sometimes they won't even appear.

[hozz1235]

The only reason I could think why subtitles would be censored and audio not is:  perhaps HL is considering people who play TLD on consoles or project their PC to their TV, wear headphones, but have kids around who can see the language but not hear it?

[Semple Fi]

How about they just get rid of the cussing?

 If I’m going to be censored on this forum, just keep right on going and apply it to the game the forum is for.  
 

👍🏼