Over the weekend, I managed to find time to play through the latest Hitman 3 content update. The new bonus mission reuses the game’s existing Dartmoor map changed up to host a lavish garden show. It’s complete with special horticultural showcases and grandiose assassination opportunities, as all garden shows go. However, there remains a major accessibility issue within the mission itself.
Basically, the mission is missing a lot of subtitles. I mean, a lot. If you take a look at my tweet below, which includes roughly 90 seconds of running through the mission, you’ll already notice about half a dozen lines that aren’t subtitled.
A MAJOR ACCESSIBILITY ISSUE
The recent Hitman games have had trouble with subtitles. Some lines are uncaptioned, most notably ones where you toss a coin to distract an NPC or bump into them to get them to yell at you. Considering how much information is communicated to you via speech, it’s a big oversight to not have this dialogue subtitled. Ideally, Hitman 3 would have all this speech included as captions.
Meanwhile, a lot of other dialogue involved with mission stories or scripted dialogue is subtitled. Hitman actually has a very generous text size slider, allowing you to adjust the size of captions to huge proportions. But in the new Dartmoor Garden Show, it appears that a lot of this dialogue is also not subtitled.

This presents a problem for deaf/hard-of-hearing players who wish to play this mission, who now miss out on an important part due to lack of subtitles. I’m not deaf myself, but even I find them useful for learning things about the map or timing my actions correctly. Simply put, this feature benefits everyone.
Accessibility-focused website Can I Play That? has an entire section on designing games for deaf/hard-of-hearing users, including how best to add subtitles to a game. Hitman 3 does a good job of including some of these, its lack of subtitles for specific dialogue presents a major problem.
We also reached out to IO Interactive for comment. Hopefully the problem can be resolved soon.
Don’t forget you can find great games and more on the GameByte Shop! We’ve stocked our store up with the latest games, merch and accessories. We might even have a new-gen console or two! Sign up to our newsletter to be notified of our console drops, deals and more. Please note the GameByte Shop is available for UK customers only.
Featured Image Credit: IO Interactive