The upcoming zombie-killing gore-fest Back 4 Blood will be going live with an open beta this month and accessibility information has been detailed to be available.
In a new FAQ about Back 4 Blood’s open beta from Turtle Rock Studios, accessibility information was confirmed in a section dedicated to accessibility. For those interested, if the user has pre-ordered the game, they’ll get early access to the beta on August 5 – August 9. The open beta will go live August 12 – August 16 and will be open for all players.
A while back, a playable build of the game included subtitles, which I showcased on Twitter and then wrote about the accessibility that was available at DualShockers. Now, the list of features has been officially revealed, and with this being an open beta, there’s still the chance there may be more unannounced features in the works.
Text-to-speech and speech to text will be available in the open beta, with the former allowing users to choose from a male or female speaking voice. Text language can be changed, and a profanity filter will be available to censor banned words. There’s also a matchmaking preference for those that want to be partied with others using or not using voice chat, with a toggle to lower game audio for voice chat. Additionally, it’s said that background audio is lowered when dialogue takes place.
Captions are available with options to caption just dialogue, just gameplay, or full captions to caption everything. The font size can be adjusted and a background opacity is available. There are also “different color gameplay captions” for protanopia, deuteranopia, tritanopia, and waypoints are able to have their opacities changed.
Camera motion can be changed and so can the field of view with the HUD margins being able to be adjusted. Reticle options are available but not detailed in the Back 4 Blood FAQ and there will be 7 different colors for them for use in the open beta. Back 4 Blood also has an option to reset the Game Coach, a tutorial system that seems to learn how you play and decides whether you’ve mastered things. It appears that setting this will reset tutorial prompts for those that need it.
For remapping, it’s said that keyboard, mouse, and controls can all be remapped, although the extent of these is not known yet. There’s also going to be a toggle for all weapons to be set to full auto, and players can choose to enable or disable cross-play.
The Back 4 Blood open beta will take place on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S, and Xbox Series X. It will support cross-gen and cross-play so you can play with others on different platforms and generations.
