Santa Monica Studio has today taken to the PlayStation Blog to mark Global Accessibility Awareness Day by sharing an early glimpse at more than 60 accessibility options that will ship with God of War Ragnarok. These include brand new features designed to make the title more accessible as well as ones the developer implemented with the PC version of God of War. To show a few of them off, some very short but very new clips of the game have been released.
Carried over from the PC version of the 2018 title will be the ability to auto sprint, an always-on reticle to reduce motion sickness, and toggles for aiming and blocking. New additions include greatly expanded subtitle and caption options, which increase the minimum text size, improve the readability of captions, and allow character names and bodies of texts to be in different colours. You can see what that looks like in the very short video below.
Subtitles themselves can also be adjusted, making them much larger and easier to read. The clip below demonstrates this, featuring a few new pieces of dialogue we haven't seen before.
Other accessibility options in God of War Ragnarok include adjusting the sizes of icons, button remapping, and a high contrast mode — you may remember something similar in The Last of Us: Part II. "When active, this will apply a color layer to characters that will make them more visible against the background. You can optionally desaturate the background to further increase the contrast. Traversal paint, loot items, and special effects can also be made more visible in this mode."
Another neat accessibility option is audio cues, demonstrated in the short video below. This feature links sounds to specific interactive prompts, like moving objects or pushing open doors. "Audio cues extend to additional combat cues like unblockable attack rings, targeting aim cues, and weapon swap cues. The volume of audio cues can be adjusted separately from other volume sliders, so you can adjust for your own comfort."
To learn about even more accessibility options in God of War Ragnarok, click the link. "We are committed to improving accessibility and customization for everyone. We can’t wait to tell you details about our other categories of accessibility features like combat/aim assists, puzzle/minigame assists, HUD adjustments, camera tuning, auto pick up, and much more," said lead UX designer Mila Pavlin. "We can’t wait to share more with you as we get closer to launch."
To learn more about Sony's commitment to "promoting awareness and inclusivity" in celebration of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, click this link. Will you benefit from these accessibility features? Let us know in the comments below.
[source blog.playstation.com]
Comments 20
Wooooooo!!! Five seconds of new footage! =D
In all seriousness, these are wonderful additions, especially for someone with bad eyesight like me.
This is so dope. I really don't need any of these features but it warms my heart to see that gaming is becoming more and more inclusive
It’s nice to see for sure. Sony have definitely been a frontrunner in pushing this level of sophistication with accessibility options.
Sony's attitude towards accessibility of their games is awesome and it's really nice that even more people can enjoy their games.
Wow... this game does exist. I thought it had turned into vaporware.
Removed - unconstructive; user is banned
Still a shame that they went with cross gen. Game will look very nice but very similar to the first one before.
As ps5 only they could have made a real visual banger here.
@Bismarck it’s one of the main hype titles for the PlayStation platform and a release to other platforms is not their intention currently. Furthermore this has nothing to do with accessibility options.
A pc release soll follow later, I guess in 1-2 years.
Lol I totally forgot about how small the font size was at launch. Hilarious oversight for such a polished game. Pretty sure I remember the reasoning being that all the playtesting was done on computer monitors people are sitting a foot away from. Glad to see they learned from it and gone above and beyond I'm sure.
About time I'll be able to read in game text without having to sit on the floor near my telly 😂
In all seriousness, I think it was Naughty Dog who set a very high bar for accessibility options with TLOU2 and its great to see this becoming more common
Another masterpiece coming .god of war will be amazing.word up son
Nice. Maybe MS and Sony should agree to let the Xbox Adaptive Controller work on both systems as well.
We need Awareness Day Awareness Day so we can keep track of all the randomly invented Awareness Days that nobody other than industry groups is aware of the existence of.
Not a knock on the accessibility features, I genuinely like the trend, and honestly, we're mostly a bunch of 80's and 90's gamers around these parts so it's only a matter of time before the visual or audio impairment (or both!) accessibility options apply to us! Just a knock on the silliness of the hundreds of special recognition days that are non-existent to pretty much anyone not involved in the related field.
Definitely confirms the game is on track. Too bad for fud
God the amount of times I had to ps+square to zoom in on the bloody text on the first one. I'm sat about 6' away I should be able to read them. Stuff like this (and last of us 2 which despite the controversy, did accessibility VERY well from what I've seen) is very cool and should be the absolute norm.
@Bismarck oh yeah can't wait to play starfield on my playstation 5..... "accessibility"
All the text options the game needs:
boy
BOY
BOY
@rjejr Indeed.
Amazing. This definitely confirms it is releasing this year. I honestly don't think they would be revealing these details if it wasn't near going gold.
Further announcements / events are imminent!
@RBMango Same here! I've had to wear prescription glasses since 2nd grade, though my mom swears I was in 4th grade.
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