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[remember_spinal]

https://www.wired.com/story/god-of-war-santa-monica-accessibility-game-design/

"One of the earliest steps we had when developing our feature set for God of War Ragnarök was to facilitate a deep dive with accessibility consultants into the concerns and blockers that emerged after the release of God of War," Pavlin says. "We also reached out to numerous community members to gather qualitative feedback around key areas of accessibility to develop an initial strategy for time and scope. Our team committed to regular play tests with members of the accessibility community and consultants during development to ensure we were meeting our objectives. We also have internal representative staff members from the accessibility community in multiple departments."

These interactions with the disabled community were crucial to discover what worked, and more importantly, what was lacking. Accessibility reviews and impressions, as well as discussions on social media platforms like Twitter, provided insight for the team to properly understand how they could make future games accessible and enjoyable.

"In response, the team did an internal postmortem on the feature set we had at launch and realized that there were many areas for us to do better in the future. Following the postmortem, we brought in accessibility consultants to do a deep dive and recommend feature improvements. We also felt it was important to meet with other Sony Interactive Entertainment teams that were in the process of developing accessible content at the time to get their perspectives."

The 2018 release of God of War did provide some accessibility features such as customizable controls, speaker indicators for subtitles, and the option to skip quick-time events. However, it lacked other crucial options. As a result, the team set out to focus on what Pavlin describes as four major areas of accessibility—motor, vision, auditory, and onboarding. Shortly after God of War's 2018 launch, the team began work on developing an extensive set of accessibility tools for disabled players. Still, the console version was not the only time Pavlin and others received feedback.

"Since the tech needed to address some of those points hadn't been developed at the time of launch for God of War, we were able to build it while working on the PC port," Pavlin says. "The infrastructure for the new accessibility features we added to the game for the PC release was used in tandem by our team to develop features for God of War Ragnarök. With the release of new accessibility features in God of War on PC, we were able to get direct feedback from our players. Features like Block Toggle and Aim Toggle were ones that we especially wanted to get feedback on to ensure they were ultimately benefiting players, as well as how we could improve them in the future. We were better able to understand the complexities of key binding and controller mapping, which opened us up for a lot more customization options in God of War Ragnarök. Hearing what the community found useful and how they like to use these features was extremely helpful in keeping us on track."

Despite Part II's overall success, Pavlin notes that it's not a competition to create the most accessible game, but rather a collaborative effort between internal teams to consistently create products that can be played and enjoyed by disabled people.


"We are incredibly thankful that in the game development accessibility community there is a desire to share knowledge and encourage each other to improve," she says. "The Last of Us Part II released when we were already well into development on our accessibility feature set, so many were already functional in-game at that time. That being said, we definitely were able to look to them for inspiration on areas where we could expand our feature set and use existing systems to further push accessibility. For example, audio cues for button prompts were a direct inspiration from The Last of Us Part II and we even have similar sounds for key actions. We were fortunate to have a member of their accessibility team join our team halfway through God of War Ragnarök development to help introduce new features that would align us with the core accessibility goals of the project."

 

[Tripolygon]

Good shit, we need more games with TLOU breadth of accessibility features.

 

[Hawking Radiation]

Good shit, we need more games with TLOU breadth of accessibility features.

Just seen a youtube video on those features. Its legit crazy the amount of options you have.

 

[remember_spinal]

I’ve been playing the original trilogy of god of war and man do I wish i had some of those options. My poor dualsense has been taken a beating and my my hands are swore from trying to lift doors.

I assume theres large segments of people that will never be able to play the trilogy unless it gets a remake