I play with them on.

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

Few reasons why I turn on subtitles:

• sometimes the dialogue is kind of boring and I just want to read and hit "next line"

• sometimes it gives clues I wouldn't hear like "hunter growling" or "witch sobbing" in left 4 dead.

I’ve only ever actively noticed terrible audio balance. Combine that with a shitty rear facing built in tv speaker, the air conditioner because it’s 90° in fall, and me trying not to shake down the walls with sudden explosions, I’ll never hear whateverthefuck is being said. And so often that voice stuff is important, since signposting in AAA games isn’t always perfect,

I'm deaf, so if I cannot skip cut scenes, I'd prefer them on.

I prefer them on, always.

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.

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

I’ve played with subtitles on ever since Left 4 Dead, where you would get audio cues that would be too quiet to hear sometimes.

Most of the time i play jrpg's and i want it to be japanese dubbed. But my japaneses isn't good enough yet, so i turn subtitles on of course...But i have the feeling you are talking about something different.