This guide shows you how to change the color of the Subtitles in conversations and cutscenes in SWTOR. The feature is available with the release of Patch 7.1!
Stories, narrative, personal experience. For so many years these have been the main pilars that BioWare’s SWTOR stands on. And with the release of SWTOR Update 7.1 on August 2nd, 2022, the developers released a small, but very neat and helpful quality of life feature that allows you to customize your story experience in the game even further.
You can now change the text color and background color of the subtitles in dialogues and cutscenes. Provided you do prefer to have subtitles out, of course.
How to enable Subtitles in SWTOR
To enable subtitles in cutscenes and conversations in SWTOR, open the main menu (ESC) and click on “Preferences”. Find the “Display Subtitles for Conversations” in the “Conversations” section and put a check in the box.
Subtitles will always display if the NPC you are talking to is conversing with you in an alien language that is different than the Basic Standard one.
Tip: If you read fast and want to save some time while talking to an NPC, who doesn’t speak Basic, you can SpaceBar through their lines.
How to change Subtitles Color and Background
In SWTOR you can create your own custom User Interface. This has been an option for many years now. Although it never got to a state that I would call polished, the custom UI features are there and can serve a great purpose.
One of the new options as of SWTOR Update 7.1 is the possibility to change the color of the subtitles text and background.
To do that, open the Interface Editor. One way to do that is through the main menu (ESC). Alternatively, you can click on the small “plus” symbol next to your main toolbar.
I have a stand-alone guide to the SWTOR Interface Editor and even offer you two custom Interface files if you would like to play the game as I do. For now, let’s focus only on the Subtitles.
If you can’t see the “Conversation Subtitles” panel (green one), select “Conversations” from the drop-down menu.
Scroll to the bottom to find the two new options allowing you to change Subtitle Color and Background Color. You can set any color you wish for these.
Click on the small square to open up the Color picker window. In here you can select a custom color from the color wheel or define the color by its RGB values.
I encountered a bug at the time of writing this guide. The Subtitle Color and Background Color do not save with the preset for me and instead remain active until I click on the “Default” button at the bottom. Then I get my custom UI without the latest changes I may have made to the Subtitles Colors. Not sure if this is a common bug. Please, add your feedback in the comments below if you encounter it or any others.
The Subtitle Color and Background Color should be part of the Interface preset that you are currently editing.
Here are a few demonstrations of what you can do with the Subtitles Colors and Background Colors:
Unfortunately, with the release of SWTOR 7.1, this new tool is lacking a few important features. You can’t select a color by its HEX value. This is strange because you can do that when you change the Combat Styles Colors.
And the “response wheel” does not allow you to customize the text and background colors as of this moment.
You can still only change the scale and transparency for this one:
If you have any questions or want to share your personal custom colorful subtitles, please feel free to do that in the comments below.
If you are looking for more SWTOR 7.1 Content, check out the collection of news articles and guides under that tag.
