Sony and Microsoft have been rivals in gaming for decades, but one positive that has come out of that recently has been a renewed focus on accessibility, pushing both companies to push the boundaries of how games can be played and by whom. It’s like God of War: Ragnarök is arguably the most accessible title yet, and that’s saying something.
I’m not saying that Microsoft is lagging behind – the hardware options for gamers with physical disabilities are remarkable. But Sony’s in-house and exclusive developers have set a new standard for accessibility options that make their games the most flexible in the industry.
Ragnarök is no exception. Its predecessor, the reboot of this venerable franchise in 2018, was a blockbuster and fairly accessible in its own right, but new options have since appeared in game-changing titles like Ratchet & Clank and The Last of Us: Part Two.
Some of these are features that are helpful to people with certain specific disabilities, such as a visual or hearing impairment. But others are just ways to make the game better suited to your specific play style.
For example, there are now tons of options for customizing the subtitles and audio descriptions – both what is subtitled and what it looks like. Choose your text size, background, etc. to be readable from across the room, and change the colors to make speakers, dialogs, and captions for actions and descriptions look different.
Image Credits: Santa Monica Studio
There are also more captions to choose from:
We’ve added captions to both the movie and gameplay to help get a good understanding of the world’s soundscape. You can also enable captions for essential gameplay information to help with puzzles and story understanding.
If you’re curious, you can watch a version of the game’s trailer with audio description here:
This is very useful for situations where (like in the first game) you pull a lever and hear a door creak open behind you. But if you can’t hear that, there’s no indication the lever did anything! So a caption like “Door opens” is helpful whether you’re hard of hearing or just playing with the volume down so you don’t wake the kids. And a direction indicator tells you which direction the sound came from – everything can be switched independently as you may have good hearing but only in one ear, so dialogue is fine but stereo cues don’t work.
Here it is in action:
You can also change the size of the UI, menu, and even the little icons that appear when you can use something. Plus interactive prompts now make unique sounds, so if you can’t quickly tell which icon that is, you have extra data to work with.
One feature I want to take full advantage of is “Navigation Assist,” which lets you press a button to point the camera in the general direction of the next target. I’ve got a pretty good sense of space, but after playing with Ghost of Tsushima’s genius wind mechanism (stroke the touchpad and the wind blows to your target) I’m more comfortable using these handy, subtle reminders.
Then there are options for visually impaired people, for example replacing detailed textures with color maps – you have one color, allies are another, enemies are a third and so on. This is something I encountered in Genshin Impact in a way, where chests all glow with a very specific shade of orange – nothing else is that color, and for good reason. A bit of that in God of War, where the treasure is often easy to miss, could be really helpful for those (unlike me) who don’t want to scour every corner at close range looking for goodies.
Of course, it takes a lot of work to provide these options, and the God of War series is even among top-tier AAA titles and developers, so no one is saying it’s easy. But hopefully, such features will trickle down to smaller games so they’re just as easily accessible as the big ones.
#God #War #Ragnarok #accessibility #settings #Playstation #TechCrunch
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