During the Halo Infinite technical preview stream, the settings and accessibility information has been teased.
Halo Infinite saw a live stream yesterday from 343 Industries that saw the developers go through a number of settings. Twitter user @tamelucas (Thanks, Ian Hamilton) shared some screenshots from the stream and noted that what was shown is from a 2-months old build, so that’s worth keeping in mind when looking at the following.
Starting at around the 24:25 mark, Brian Jarrard, community director, and Sam Hanshaw, producer and live operations at 343 Industries run through the Halo Infinite settings menus, including the dedicated accessibility area.
Controls
On the controls screen, we can see a preset controller configuration with the option to use custom layouts to modify inputs and an option to enable vibration. Players can invert their X and Y axis and also their flight controls and can assign deadzones and sensitivity sliders. A “Switcher control” is also available to change from a hold input. There are also toggles to enable hold inputs for crouching, zooming, and sprinting, Movement assisted steering is also on the list as are auto-clamber, step jump, and maintain sprint features.
The same features as above are also available in the keyboard and mouse area, along with an extensive list of remapping available. During this section, a “Mark” feature is revealed, allowing the player to mark anyone they see and with points being attributed to those that use the feature and take out a marked enemy.
Video
In the video portion of the stream, we see the usual graphical adjustments, but there’s also a field of view slider as well as a motion blur slider, and a screen shake intensity slider. Speed Lines is a visual effect that appears when the player sprints or travels at a fast speed, and in this section players can choose to toggle these on or off.
Audio
For audio, a range of sliders can be adjusted: Master, voice, music, menu music, sound effects, environmental, and hit detection. Subtitles are available to enable with a filter to allow players to choose what type of subtitles to have, with one being to allow subtitles for only major characters. Text size can be adjusted, so can their color, and a background opacity slider is available.
Voice chat options are also available, and it’s also revealed that in the build invited-users get to play this weekend, open mic voice chat is the default. Players can also choose to have spartan chatter enabled or disabled, this is basically automatic audio cues called out by the player characters.
UI
Players will be able to adjust the opacity of the HUD and allow tips and tutorials to pop up on the screen and text chat. The HUD also has margins that can be adjusted and colors can be assigned to outlines. This can be an enemy or friendly colors and also fireteam colors and other player markers can also be adjusted. UI visual effects include being able to enable or disable bloom, parallax effects, or chromatic abbreviation.
There are also offset settings for weapons. In the stream, we’re shown melee weapons as an example, with options to adjust the X and Y, and Z-axis.
Accessibility
In the accessibility section of the Halo Infinite settings menu, a linear navigation mode is available to enable. This adds a visual highlight, making it easier for players with a limited subset of controls to move between all controls on the screen. There’s also UI narration available with the rate and volume available to adjust. UI text can be increased in this area.
Text to speech and speech to text is also available from this menu as are the other settings listed above, just tucked away into a dedicated accessibility menu.
Halo Infinite is set to launch at some point in 2021 for PC and Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S, and starting July 29, 2021, those who have been successfully invited into the private beta can get hands-on with the game until August 1, 2021. From what I understand, CIPT does not have access to the Halo Infinite private beta, but we’ll be sure to have thoughts on how the accessibility in the game feels to play closer to launch.
