Ghost Recon Wildlands Deaf Accessibility
If you play shooters for the story, this one is not for you unless you want to squint at the subtitle text. If you want a good open-world shooter and don't care about the story? The visual cues make this game very Deaf accessible.
Score
8 out of 10We want to love this game. We really do. It’s set in an incredibly detailed and beautiful world, it’s fun, and it’s a great shooter with a completely open world. It could be the perfect game. But…
There’s my character hiding in cover in the above image. She was in cover for a long damn time. It seemed like every time she stood up to shoot she got shot instead. So she stayed in cover until enough enemies were drawn out and killed that it was safe for her to move further in. All of this could have been avoided if there were subtitles for teammate chatter during gunfights. Turns out they spot them and tell you where they are so you know where to not go.
Some dialogue is captioned. The story info you get from Karen Bowman and the idle chatter while running missions (including bad jokes which we will admit, made us laugh). But not all of it. You can read what your teammates say en-route to a mission but once you’re there, nope. Good luck to ya, you’re on your own!
The visual assists are great. Mission markers are very clear and plentiful and
Enemies are marked (once spotted) and also color coded according to their faction.
There’s a visual indicator (albeit very brief) when an enemy has spotted you, and the minimap changes color depending on whether you’re in the clear, being hunted, or currently engaged in fighting. Enemies also show up with a solid dot once you’ve spotted them and a larger general vicinity marker when you’re nearby (This is exactly where the teammate enemy spotting would be incredibly helpful. They tell you exactly where they are). Collectible resources glow and are clearly labeled on the minimap when you are close to them as well.
The opening cutscenes, and all
Ghost Recon Wildlands is a really fun game. The way the world around you reacts to you makes it feel very realistic and the bad jokes and chatter from your team made it much more fun for us than The Division was. You can go wherever you want, drive whatever you want, basically do whatever you want, in lovely and scenic Bolivia. Honestly, our only gripe is the bad captioning. That said, if you like shooters or Tom Clancy games, even with the caption problem, it’s worth it (who plays shooters like this for the engrossing story, after all?)
