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
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 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.
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
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