Accessibility in Gaming

[Ashley]

Admin note: originally in response to this post in The Plucky Spire but separated out 

 

 

I know they're not the first to do it by any means but I do like this increasing trend of allowing players to customise their play experience to meet either their needs or preferences. Hopefully we're slowly moving away from the obnoxious git gud mentality. 

[nekunando]

On 9/13/2024 at 9:24 PM, Ashley said:

I know they're not the first to do it by any means but I do like this increasing trend of allowing players to customise their play experience to meet either their needs or preferences. Hopefully we're slowly moving away from the obnoxious git gud mentality. 

That sounds like something someone who needs to git gud would say!

[Julius]

On 9/13/2024 at 9:24 PM, Ashley said:

I know they're not the first to do it by any means but I do like this increasing trend of allowing players to customise their play experience to meet either their needs or preferences.

Yep, it's always great to see when a game provides this many options. Definitely need to see more of this at the top of the AAA space, feels like massive strides have been made in the last 5 years or so. The fact that this game has so many options shows that someone over there has their priorities straight, I was actually just thinking the other day that this game has had A LOT of trailers for such a relatively small game in the space, and they've all been handled excellently. 

Who could've known that prioritising good communication with trailers which consistently deliver new information was so important? Feels like they've shown up games with budgets several times bigger on that front. 

On 9/13/2024 at 9:24 PM, Ashley said:

Hopefully we're slowly moving away from the obnoxious git gud mentality. 

Eh, personally, I think I'd rather it be taken on a game-by-game basis. To me, it's much more important that games are made in a way that they are physically accessible to more people, or in a way which is more physically comfortable to be experienced (motion blur, depth of field, controller feedback, repetitive puzzle skipping, all that), rather than necessarily facilitating that every game can be tweaked endlessly. 

I think it's really suitable for a game like this, for instance, or some games which try to cast much, much wider nets when it comes to their audience (for all of my problems with the game itself, Star Wars Outlaws had tons of accessibility options, whereas the Star Wars Jedi games allow you to tweak the difficulty of certain grouped aspects of the games). 

[Ashley]

12 hours ago, Julius said:

Eh, personally, I think I'd rather it be taken on a game-by-game basis. To me, it's much more important that games are made in a way that they are physically accessible to more people, or in a way which is more physically comfortable to be experienced (motion blur, depth of field, controller feedback, repetitive puzzle skipping, all that), rather than necessarily facilitating that every game can be tweaked endlessly. 

I think it's really suitable for a game like this, for instance, or some games which try to cast much, much wider nets when it comes to their audience (for all of my problems with the game itself, Star Wars Outlaws had tons of accessibility options, whereas the Star Wars Jedi games allow you to tweak the difficulty of certain grouped aspects of the games). 

All things being equal (so let's pretend budget/time isn't an issue) I think it's fine to have a game that intends to be a challenge, such as Dark Souls, but with options to tweak it so you can play it in a way you can find it enjoyable and doable. It doesn't have to be a load of different options but things like invincibility, easier jumps etc. Just the small things that can open it up to a wider audience. 

[Julius]

20 minutes ago, Ashley said:

All things being equal (so let's pretend budget/time isn't an issue) I think it's fine to have a game that intends to be a challenge, such as Dark Souls, but with options to tweak it so you can play it in a way you can find it enjoyable and doable. It doesn't have to be a load of different options but things like invincibility, easier jumps etc. Just the small things that can open it up to a wider audience. 

Yeah, that's fair, I think when I typed it up I was thinking more about the traditional Easy/Normal/Hard difficulty split than I was that level of customisability and tweaking the more intricate aspects, mainly because I've had that Easy difficulty discussion with friends and I've posed to them that I don't really get how it would work in a game like that. Is it a flat decreasing of enemy health bars? Slowing down enemy attack animations? Is it potentially adding a "Sun's Out Mode" so that you can actually see where you're going more of the time? I don't think that a flat Easy difficulty would work in any of those games without somehow weakening the quality of the work put into it. 

Weirdly, if it ever did happen, I'd almost expect it to be a separate SKU, like a Prepare Not To Die Edition, if nothing else to not draw the ire from the diehards. 

It's interesting to me though that, generally speaking (not a blanket statement), Japan seems to be seriously lagging behind when it comes to accessibility options, which is really funny to consider for a company like Nintendo who I feel tries to position themselves as being inclusive of all. I remember going into the settings when I played the remake of Link's Awakening earlier this year wanting to lower the depth of field effect because it was a bit too strong and at times just a bit off-putting, and there was...nothing. Not just that you couldn't adjust the strength of the depth of field effect, there was nothing at all which I would consider to be an accessibility option. I know on the system level there's being able to customise your controller layout, but besides that, it's not great, is it? 

Which, to bring it back around to the topic at hand, makes it incredibly funny to me that a game like The Plucky Squire, which is clearly drawing on so many Nintendo games as inspiration, goes well above and beyond Nintendo's own offerings on the accessibility front 

Edited yesterday at 10:53 AM by Julius

[Ashley]

2 hours ago, Julius said:

It's interesting to me though that, generally speaking (not a blanket statement), Japan seems to be seriously lagging behind when it comes to accessibility options

I think Microsoft doesn't get enough credit for being the frontrunners in improving accessibility in gaming and Sony is now catching up. 

I would hazard a guess part of it is cultural. There's certainly an arguement to be made that games should be accessible to all. Part of that is physical and Microsoft as a company (not just Xbox) is taking that seriously, but also the actual gameplay as we're discussing here. 

At the end of the day even the most hardcore gamer may injure their hand at some point so may benefit from not having to have such precise button presses or what have you. 

I know it's not "it's just a switch behind the scenes, the developers are being lazy" but I'm hoping going forward more studios will think about it as part of the initial planning of a game so it is easier to account for that. You may not easily be able to retrospectively add invincibility, but if you plan for it at the start the developers should then find it easier to have a flag which is checked and prevents damage from being added (or whatever). 

And I do think part of it has been a cultural change. I think developers want more people to enjoy games. And publishers want more money...

[Julius]

35 minutes ago, Ashley said:

I think Microsoft doesn't get enough credit for being the frontrunners in improving accessibility in gaming and Sony is now catching up. 

I would hazard a guess part of it is cultural. There's certainly an arguement to be made that games should be accessible to all. Part of that is physical and Microsoft as a company (not just Xbox) is taking that seriously, but also the actual gameplay as we're discussing here. 

I'll admit that I'm not really sure what Microsoft's contributions are to the conversation around accessibility in gaming today vs a few years ago, not owning an Xbox, but is that really still the case that don't are playing catch-up? 

I know Microsoft are very consistently looking into these things, and while they were definitely there first with things like the adaptive controller, Sony now have one of their own (which took far too long to come around considering how long ago Xbox brought their own out, mind you), and The Last of Us Part II was at the forefront of and changed the conversation around what accessibility options can look like on the software front back in 2020; most of the big first-party PlayStation offerings since have been best-in-class and leading the charge on accessibility, and I'd argue that it's a case of many third parties in the AAA space following suit from that when it comes to physical accessibility.

Maybe there's something big Xbox has brought to the table that I'm overlooking here but nothing I can think of springs to mind as coming remotely close to what the likes of Naughty Dog, Sony Santa Monica and Insomniac are bringing to the table; and that's not just an Xbox vs PlayStation comparison, I genuinely don't think anyone else in the industry is doing as much as what those developers have done over the last 5 years in the accessibility space. 

47 minutes ago, Ashley said:

At the end of the day even the most hardcore gamer may injure their hand at some point so may benefit from not having to have such precise button presses or what have you.

Sure, I see that. I'm definitely in the mindset sometimes of "well, my motor skills and reaction speeds are only going to lessen in the long-term, so anything which depends on reaction times I should look to get to now" – I wonder if on a game level (but also potentially a system level in the future?) they could look to introduce something capable of gauging reaction times and adjusting the game accordingly? I mean, why shouldn't I be able to play Bloodborne in a retirement home a few decades from now? 

50 minutes ago, Ashley said:

And I do think part of it has been a cultural change. I think developers want more people to enjoy games. And publishers want more money...

Yeah, those last two sentences are both sides of the coin here I think, and I think a lot of the time when we see these options right now it is definitely a case of both going hand in hand.

The Plucky Squire, like a lot of the individual games I've mentioned, is looking for mass appeal. Heck, beyond some of the other games I've mentioned which are more aimed at teens and adults, this is actually clearly aimed at kids with its look and vibe, and I could see this being something a parent picks up their kid as one of their first games, so having options where a small child can comfortably play and enjoy the game as one of their first is great. 

On the flip side of that, obviously that means a wider net set for a potentially much bigger audience, and in the long-term of course publishers want more people buying the game, they want repeat customers, they want to widen the industry's audience because it also benefits them. 

Which is to say, while I think we see a lot of these options in these AAA+ games like The Last of Us, Spider-Man, God of War, Star Wars games, etc., while it is FANTASTIC, those games also have the budget for these options to be incorporated. It makes the fact that a much smaller scale and budget game like The Plucky Squire is trying to push for more options in its own market that much more commendable, because in many other cases, I could see that time and money going towards more marketing, bigger scale, offsetting future free DLC, etc., and it's clear here to me that they understood the scope of their game, seem to have matched that, and then pumped everything else they could get into finding the game's audience (with their great and numerous trailers) and meeting them halfway where possible (the accessibility options that they're including). 

[Glen-i]

6 hours ago, Ashley said:

I think Microsoft doesn't get enough credit for being the frontrunners in improving accessibility in gaming and Sony is now catching up.

I agree, Microsoft were defo the first of the big three to start taking strides towards making accessibility options more mainstream, the other two definitely lagged behind there, and still do.

Although Nintendo have dabbled with the idea, back in the Wii era. New Super Mario Bros. Wii was the earliest example of that, as far as I remember, with the "Super Guide".
Mario games still do this. MK8DX has smart steering and auto-acceleration, and Yoshi and Nabbit in Mario Wonder. Nintendo love to do things with their own spin, but in this case? I don't think it's enough. They're steadily falling behind here, and could do with implementing some more contemporary options.

Indies are amazing for this, there aren't many games done by small indy devs these days that don't impress me with the bevy of options available. I've been dabbling with this strange point-and-click adventure game recently, and the accessibility options there are absolutely staggering. Text-to-speech for item descriptions and selectable objects, font size options, palette swaps to account for colourblindness, as well as more gameplay focused options, such as easier puzzles, or making more action-y segments skippable (Manually or automatically). It kinda runs rings around a lot of bigger releases!

Anyway, Masahiro Sakurai has taken notice of this, so whenever the next Smash Bros game comes out, we might actually see some steps taken to implement accessibility options.

 

Edited yesterday at 07:11 PM by Glen-i

[Ashley]

On 9/15/2024 at 2:58 PM, Julius said:

I'll admit that I'm not really sure what Microsoft's contributions are to the conversation around accessibility in gaming today vs a few years ago, not owning an Xbox, but is that really still the case that don't are playing catch-up? 

Yeah in fairness I was thinking both a) historically and b) hardware but you're right. A lot of Sony's first party titles did more for software. 

On 9/15/2024 at 2:58 PM, Julius said:

I mean, why shouldn't I be able to play Bloodborne in a retirement home a few decades from now? 

Inevitably leading to this: