How Playground Created Forza Horizon 5’s Groundbreaking Sign Language Support

Now, on March 1, Akitt’s suggestion is being realized at last. Forza Horizon 5 will get an in-game update that adds ASL and BSL language support for all cutscenes. Actors from the hard of hearing and deaf communities will also be available to sign the scenes.

Speaking to IGN alongside Akitt, Forza Horizon creative director Mike Brown says that their conversations with Akitt “turned on a light” for Playground. “As an English first language user, I’d always just assumed that subtitles were the solution to that problem,” he says. “And it was only from speaking to Cameron that I learned that subtitles were a solution, but were not the best solution.”

So Brown agreed. He greenlit the feature “very early on” in Forza Horizon 5’s development, originally thinking the team would include it at launch as a language option like any other. Brown didn’t expect the task of getting the feature implemented to be so complex.

It wasn’t that the actual tech of implementing a person signing over a game cutscene was challenging, Brown explains. It was actually much simpler than he had thought. Playground was not the only one to have to face the many obstacles to implement this feature. It is the first and most prominent video game developer to attempt such an integration at this scale.

Because no one’s done it before, there weren’t processes, people, or pipelines in place already as there are with other language options. Everything Playground did – finding actors, hiring consultants, interpreting English scripts into ASL and BSL, and so forth – involved building every system and connection from the ground up.

“If, for example, we wanted to add an additional spoken voiceover language to the game – let’s say we wanted to add Hungarian as a voiceover language – companies exist in order to provide that service,” Brown says. “There will be people who are willing to pay me a certain amount, translate my dialogue, and send it back to me. That’ll be it.

“Nobody is providing that service to offer sign language for video games. We had to build all those relationships. We had to find those interpreters… we had to make all those relationships, make all those contacts, find people that could provide us with a sign language actor or sign language interpreter and build it out. I think we were the first people to do that.”

This was only one problem. Another was that translating English into ASL and BSL isn’t a direct, 1:1 translation by any stretch. Akitt explains that ASL, BSL have their very own grammatical structures. They are influenced both by facial expressions and lip patterns as well as body language. This is similar to how spoken words are affected by tone of voice. All of this must be considered when reading a script.

And that’s made even more difficult in video games, where scripts written for spoken language dialogue might not necessarily translate effectively into ASL or BSL. There were a number of lines, Brown says, where what the game was asking the player to do wasn’t immediately obvious in the written English script, meaning the intent needed to be explained to a sign language interpreter so they could then translate effectively. Akitt also said that this was complicated due to certain terms and concepts specific to video games.

Forza Horizon 5 ASL/BSl On-Screen Interpretation Screenshots

“With oral languages, the vocabulary already exists that if you’re translating from English to French, French will have an equivalent word or an equivalent idiom that expresses this concept,” Akitt says. “In sign, in video games so much of the vocabulary is new, that you have to think about how you’re going to express something. It is important to create signs, to agree on the signs, to check in with other members of the community to see what they are signing, and to reach a consensus.

“When Overwatch came out, me and my deaf friends loved it, but we had to agree on signs for the maps, for the characters, for the ultimate abilities, for the Overwatch league teams and everything. We are now physically able to agree on a BSL lexicon that has never existed. And that takes time.”

And then – yes, there was more! – there’s the added complication of Forza Horizon 5 being set in Mexico, with Mexican terms and phrases interspersed in the spoken and written scripts. “How do you sign the Mexican vocabulary in English?” Akitt asks. “Do you sign the English sign of the Mexican word or do you translate it directly? There’s so many nuances.”

One notable choice I asked Akitt and Brown about was keeping sign language implementation to cutscenes – you’re not going to see an interpreter on-screen signing the radio dialogue while you’re driving. Brown admits there are technical limitations influencing that, but he and Akitt both agree that even if it was something they could reasonably add, it wouldn’t actually be that useful to players, who might accidentally crash a car into something while trying to watch an interpreter.

But Brown says that’s okay. The dialogue delivered during regular gameplay is written to be inconsequential in the first place – just in case a player, regardless of their language choice, is driving off a cliff when it happens.

“I already have philosophical views about the type of messaging given to players at different scenarios,” Brown says. “So when you are actually driving the car, I already keep the scripts down to things like, ‘Great job. You’re doing great!’… and not, ‘Hey, you need this specific thing right now,’ because when you’re in control and you’re actually trying to play the game, even as an English user who can hear that dialogue normally, it’s still a challenge.”

Brown mentions that a key reason this feature was possible for Playground in the first place was because accessibility has been one of the core pillars of Forza Horizon 5’s development since the start. It might not have been possible if sign language interpretation was something that was added on as an afterthought, or something that was suggested at the last minute. Playground asked these questions early in the process, so it was able to collect resources, talk with many consultants, and dedicate energy, time and budget to it along with other important accessibility features.

“When something is a pillar of the game, that is, as the word suggests, a supportive structure of this game that we can’t cut,” Brown says, “we can’t get to a point where it got a little bit too expensive and we can’t do it anymore. Those are things the leadership team has identified as critical to the game. Therefore, the team must get behind them.

“Our new campaign features include our expeditions. These are some of the most memorable and enjoyable experiences that you will have when playing the game. This is a crucial initiative for the game. And when you put accessibility next to that and say, ‘These are two things that are of equal importance to the game: the main, cool new thing that we have in our campaign, and accessibility. They are of equal importance.’ Then it sets the tone for the team and it sets the expectation of what we mean.

“This isn’t a thing that we’re doing because it sounds a bit nice and it’s a little bit of a good news story. We believe that it is a good thing and it’s important for the game. And that is the way that I tell my team to think about it.”

With so many challenges overcome and the feature on its way tomorrow, Brown is very optimistic that the next time his team or anyone else wants to do something like this, it won’t be nearly so difficult, because Playground has already laid the foundation. He says that with a network of connections in place, it’s already been much easier to talk to the right people and ensure that sign language continues to be included as a part of future updates. And while he can’t confirm plans for future games either at Playground or more widely at Xbox, he encourages any developer or publisher who wants to do something similar in their own games to call him up.

“We’ve broken ground here and we’ve made a lot of these connections and we are available to assist any developer that needs help with this as well,” he says. “I think we will pick up the phone and we will provide all of the information that we’ve learned. This is not something that we would want to keep a Playground Games secret. We want to be in as many of the games as possible. And we will assist in any way that we can.”

Akitt tells me he’s looking forward to seeing what feedback other deaf and hard-of-hearing gamers give on the feature, and what the community makes of it. “I think that’ll be really useful feedback either for Playground or any studio that looks into the future and thinks, ‘We’d like to do something like this. Who can we talk to from the community and what feedback do they have?’ It’s like any design, it’s a process of iteration, and it can only ever get better.”

Brown adds that, over the course of development, he found that his own perspective on Forza Horizon 5’s sign language interpretation has shifted. He said that he initially treated it as any other language option. He now sees it as an inclusion feature.

“It allows people who use sign as their first language to feel like they’re represented in the game in the same way that people of different ethnicities are represented in the game, [or] people with prosthetic limbs can represent themselves in the game,” he says. “People who speak sign as a first language are feeling as though the game is for them. They are part of this game, and they are represented within the game. And that’s the thing that I’ve actually found to be very powerful.”

Rebekah is a news journalist for IGN. You can find Rebekah Valentine on Twitter @duckvalentine.