Hi, is it possible to enable subtitles in this release? I believe SCUMM has implemented support for subtitles recently, but they do not seem to be shipped OOTB.

It is. All you have to do is drop the subtitles file from the ScummVM games page (link should be at the bottom of the page) into the installation folder. Just drag and drop, no messing with settings needed.

As for GOG including the file, they really should do so, because it's so easy.


Edit: Actually you might (not quite sure since I've had the original non-GOG release installed prior to this) need to run the scummVM.exe in the GOG folder and choose Edit Game, and then enable the subtitles file you drag&dropped earlier. But honestly, it's a great program, and shouldn't give you any problems, bugs, etc.

So there is no easy way to enable subs for GOG version? (macOS ideally)

The fan made subtitles are available at the ScummVM site, Games section, as a zip file.
You can just extract the SUBTITLES.MIX from that zip into the folder where Blade Runner was installed for you.

The GOG version should support them and you'll have subtitles the next time you launch the game.
Note that only English and French subtitles are available for the moment for the English and French versions respectively.
The rest of the localized versions will display English subtitles until the fan community provides specific subtitles for those.

The GOG release does not come with the subtitles probably because it could be complicated to bundle fan made subtitles with a commercial release.

https://www.scummvm.org/frs/extras/Blade%20Runner/Blade_Runner_Subtitles-v5.zip

edit:

or

Indirect Link:

https://www.scummvm.org/games/#bladerunner

Just a note on the above link, "v5" is the current revision for the subtitles, and no doubt there will be updates if more languages are added and reported bugs about the transcript or translations are fixed. So that specific link could become outdated in the future.

True; this indirect link may last longer:

https://www.scummvm.org/games/#bladerunner

Also on macOS the game data folder is hidden inside the Blade Runner application bundle, and this is where you need to copy the SUBTITLES.MIX file. To do it do a right mouse button click on Blade Runner.app, and select Show Package Contents. Then navigate to Contents > Resources > game > game. Finally extract the SUBTITLE.MIX file in that folder.

Is there a way to change the language of the subtitles or are they english only?

Edit:
Nevermind, I should've read the readme.
For now english and french

The new version (v6) of subtitles that is uploaded in the ScummVM site (games section) now includes Spanish subtitles for the Spanish version of the game (credits to Geek Ob and Víctor González Fraile (aka IlDucci)). Also improvements were made to the English (by me) and French subtitles (by Kwama57).

https://www.scummvm.org/games/#bladerunner

Thanks, that's awesome!

You're very welcome.

If anyone's wondering or is willing to help out, to my knowledge we haven't had anyone who reached out to us (ScummVM) about the German and Italian subtitles.

You can find us on the ScummVM discord server where we're quite often active. I (my nickname there is "Praetorian" or "antoniou79") can help with the technical stuff, as I don't know German nor Italian that well to do a transcript.

Hey everyone,

I think it's best if I posted the news in this thread as well.

The new version (version 7) of the subtitles for the classic version of the game is now up and available from the ScummVM site: https://www.scummvm.org/games/#addons-bladerunner

This new version includes the Italian and German subtitles courtesy of Nightdive Studios, with minor edits (...).
It also has many improvements to the French transcript, which Kwama57 has worked tirelessly on during the last week.
And a few fixes to the English and Spanish transcript which were done since the last release of version 6 back in 2020.

The full credits for this release are as follows -- also included in the bundled readme.txt file:
English subtitles arranged by Athanasios Antoniou (Praetorian) & Thomas Fach-Pedersen (madmoose)
French subtitles arranged by Xavier Mohedano (Kwama57)
Spanish subtitles arranged by Sergio Carmona & Víctor González Fraile
German and Italian subtitles courtesy of Nightdive Studio

The subtitles should work with any ScummVM version starting from 2.1.0 and greater.
Testing with a release candidate daily build of ScummVM 2.6.0 or a 2.7.0git (development build) is highly recommended.
When ScummVM 2.6.0 is properly released (soon-ish), it's probably for the best to use that to run Blade Runner classic version anyway.

As always, let us know of any errors that you've spotted, comments, and suggestions for improvements.

Really interesting trivia. I didn't know that. It's cool that they've brought back voice actors from the movie!

Yes, it works perfect. I'll check back in these threads here for further feedback.
I've also opened a ticket on the ScummVM bug tracker to gather all comments in one place and track their resolution.
https://bugs.scummvm.org/ticket/13664#ticket

In a related note, ScummVM 2.6.0 and greater now include a checkbox (available in the ScummVM launcher from "Game Options..." for the Blade Runner entry/entries, which is called "Show subtitles during text crawl". This checkbox controls whether subtitles will be displayed during those intro videos where the text is also shown on-screen as part of the video itself -- this is mainly the text crawl that describes the backstory, and introduces Replicants, Blade Runners and the Retirement concept, but also includes the Westwood logo video and the Blade Runner logo one.