In fact, earlier this year, Sony confirmed that the highly anticipated God of War: Ragnarok will have a variety of accessibility options, even showing off a number of settings. The blog post from May showed a good portion of the 60 available settings, including basic options like captions and subtitle tweaks, to Auto Sprint, aiming and blocking styles, options to reduce motion sickness, and even a High Contrast Mode. In a recent interview, God of War Ragnarok Lead UX Designer Mila Pavlin provided even more details to this side of the game.
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Pavlin revealed that a wide variety of consultants and testers, some of which included blind players, helped her team hone in on four key fields: Vision, hearing, motor skills, and cognitive understanding. High Contrast Mode, which allows players to apply specific colors to items, characters, backdrops, and more to help increase visibility while reducing screen clutter, was created out of this. Other key accessibility features to help reduce what the team defines as progression “blockers” were audio cues coupled with captions to help indicate general area button prompts and puzzle timing.
The UX team aims to ensure players get a variety of sensory information through different forms combined using audio, visual, and even haptic feedback from the DualSense controller. Pavlin’s team hopes that these accessibility features move God of War: Ragnarok forward, allowing all players to customize the experience to make it more comfortable for everyone to play.
Part of that mantra includes controls, allowing players to trigger abilities like Spartan Rage or moves like quick-turns by using the touchpad instead of specific button presses. Platforming segments as well as picking up items can also be automated and there’s even an option for Streamers to enable controller visualization where the moment-to-moment button presses can be shared with their audience.
With a release date set for November, fans have been itching for new information regarding God of War Ragnarok, with many assuming a dedicated State of Play is right around the corner. For now, the news remains a slow drip with the most recent reveal being a small segment of gameplay from one of the new explorable realms of Svartalfheim. After Odin barred access to some of the Nine Realms of the World Tree in the first game, it seems Kratos and Atreus are finally able to venture forth into areas like the ancient Dwarven territory.
God of War Ragnarok releases November 9 for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5.
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Source: Game Informer
