Santa Monica Studio has revealed God of War Ragnarok’s extensive accessibility featureset. One featureset is of particular interest, especially if you’re anticipating Sony Studios to release this game eventually to PC.
Lost under the sea of controller, difficulty, and motion aids, is the visual aids featureset. As you will see very shortly, these features certainly sound like they would be most useful for someone who plays video games on PC.
UI icons have variable sizes, from small to extra large. These include button icons, health bars, map icons, and lock-on aim indicators. The UI text can also be resized, and subsequently, subtitles and captions can be resized as well. UI, subtitle, and caption text do not have a small option, but if that was necessary for a PC port it wouldn’t be that hard for Santa Monica Studio to add them in later.
The HUD also has a host of accessibility options, with multiple elements that can be simply be turned off. These include the compass, enemy and boss health bars, indicators for when enemies are nearby, gameplay notifications, and the aim reticle. To be clear, these aren’t unusual to see in a console game, but they are notable for being things that would be useful if the game was brought over to PC.
As for the host of other accessibility presets, Santa Monica Studio have done an incredible job of squeezing in every possible modifier that players could think of, and enabling them in such a way that you can easily access and modify them simply using the PlayStation 5’s default DualSense controller. These are actually the kinds of changes you would be able to apply on the level of a PC mod, but made significantly easier to get to and change with just a controller.
It may surprise you to learn that Santa Monica Studio have actually been hyping up these accessibility features for quite some time now. Last May they had cited features that they brought over from 2018’s God of War over to God of War Ragnarok. Just last September they had stated that they already had 60 accessibility features created for the new game. Today the final tally of these accessibility features stands at 70 features.
It’s testament to Santa Monica Studio’s commitment to bringing as much to their fans as they possibly could, to meet their expectations as best they can. Santa Monica Studio director Cory Barlog has also gone on record that “adding accessibility has never and will never be a compromise to his vision”.
If God of War Ragnarok is currently not planned for a PC port, Santa Monica Studio definitely already has everything they need to make it happen down the line. If one would argue that accessibility means being able to play the game in a platform that is available to them, maybe Sony should just go ahead and commit to that change too.
Source: PlayStation Blog via VideoGamesChronicle
